April 1932 QST
Table
of Contents
Wax nostalgic about and learn from the history of early electronics. See articles
from
QST, published December 1915 - present (visit ARRL
for info). All copyrights hereby acknowledged.
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We
take wireless communications for granted. Just as people my age
thought pocket-size transistor radios that ran on 9V batteries were
always available, today's kids give no thought to whether there
was a time when everyone did not carry a cellphone around. FM radio,
if listened to at all nowadays, is likely either via an Internet
connection or via an embedded FM radio IC in his/her phone, with
ear bud wires acting as an antenna. It is obviously no big deal,
since it always was so.In the early part of the last century
most people did not own any sort of radio - even a commercial AM
broadcast receiver. Having something as mysterious as a shortwave
'rig' was an indication of technical prowess since many operators
built their own equipment from kits or schematics. Participation
in amateur worldwide was huge at the time, which is amazing given
the amount of work required to set up even a relatively simple CW
(Morse code) setup. The American Amateur Radio League (ARRL) published
extensive lists of reported contacts (QSLs in Ham-ese) every couple
months. Purely for illustrative purposes, I have posted all 15 pages
of very tiny print as submitted by operators for the April 1932
edition of QST. The effort required to assimilate and type
in all the names, locations, call signs, etc., was enormous, especially
since the information arrived in an envelope via postal mail - no
e-mail or phone calls. No doubt a lot of errors crept in, but who
would ever know?!If you had a father or grandfather (or occasionally
mother or grandmother) who dabbled in the wireless craft, why not
scan the pages to see if you can find him (or sometimes her)?
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Posted 4/30/2013
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