Friends in Radioland

Amateur radio operators are called hams, and it is easy to see why: talk, talk, talk--that's all they seem to do. There are 250,000 of them in the U.S., and another estimated 100,000 elsewhere in the world, all of them chiefly bent on short-wave conversation about capacitors, resistors, transmitters, antennas, and occasionally, the weather and what is playing at the local movie house.

Some of them operate with elementary do-it-yourself kits and low-power equipment that costs less than $100; others go in for more elaborate commercial rigs, build their stations up to the maximum legal power limit (one kilowatt) and spend as much as $4,000. Currently, some 15,000 hams are participating in the annual field test of the American Radio Relay League. Encouraged by the test rules to use noncommercial power sources, they set up battery-powered transmitters or emergency generators a few weeks ago, and, sitting by their sets for a grueling 24 hours, they tried to see who could establish the largest number of contacts with other stations. (Results are now being tabulated.) This time there was no idle chatter between the competitors; the hams merely exchanged their call letters, location, time of the contact, and then signed off to look for another station.

Venusian Romance. As far as a layman is concerned, the conversation during the field trials, as well as during everyday dial twirling, is pure Venusian. but the hams call it "Q" signals. Examples: QXR for "stand by for a minute"; QTH for "where do you live?" Curiously enough, this kind of talk can bring romance. Typical is the case of Florence Majerus of Lewistown, Mont., who set up the first QSO (direct communication) between a YL (young lady) friend. Jean Bustard, and Max Stout, a radio officer in the merchant marine. Transmission was FB (fine business), and each was soon signing off with 88 (love and kisses). Eventually he proposed, and Jean became his XYL (wife). Now they have His and Hers telegraph keys.

Hams boast of far more historic achievements than playing cuddly over the air waves. They have made notable contributions to the radio arts; their experimentation and enthusiasm, for example, has led to widespread use of single sideband radio. In 1957, ham operators helped track Russia's Sputnik when U.S. scientists were caught without an effective radio tracking setup. In the Congo crisis last summer, a Leopoldville ham picked up a message from a remote part of the Congo that said: "We need help; five women, eight children, four men cut off for days. Two women raped." Within hours, Belgian paratroopers were at the isolated farmhouse.

Phone Pafchers. Some hams have been close friends for decades without ever laying eyes on one another--and these include amateurs who are notables in professional or business life (see box). Many spend long hours "reading the mail" (eavesdropping on other hams' conversations); others are dedicated "phone patchers" who use their rigs to set up a telephone-and-radio circuit between servicemen overseas and their families in the U.S. Three times a week, Hollywood Television Actress Lenore Conn, W6NAZ, swings her antenna toward Greenland to let airmen stationed at both Sondestrom and Thule Air Force bases get in touch with the U.S. For three years Mrs. Conn has kept regular contact with another ham crew on T3, a drifting ice island in the Arctic. Occasionally, she even contacts a ham in Russia. "It has a tremendous air of mystery about it," she says. "The operator's name is always Ivan or Gregor. They talk about the weather or their equipment, but they don't say much."

The "DX (distance) hounds" make it their main interest to establish contact with other ham stations in the far reaches of the globe. Though some DXers have contacted more than 300 foreign countries, the excitement of meeting new people with strange jobs in exotic lands never diminishes. "The most fascinating thing about this," says one Hollywood ham. "is that it takes you into a world of disembodied voices. You can speak with them, know them, become friends with them; yet your mind gives them no image, no color, nothing solid at all. It's a strange concept of human associations without controversy, without social divisions, without status symbols and without aggressors."

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