Radio: CQ Conn

From 6 p. m. till sunrise one night last week the air waves below the commercial broadcast band crackled busily with the call “CQ Conn.” For most of the 22,000 amateur radio operators enrolled in the American Radio Relay League were devoting the night to sentiment, reverting to old-time amateur relay methods for the dedi cation of the League’s Maxim Memorial Station WIAW (Newington, Conn.). Al though most league members now have power enough to reach WIAW direct, they relayed their dedicatory messages through the stations of fellow members to recall early days before the development of the vacuum tube gave amateurs their present range.

Organized in memory of Inventor Hiram Percy Maxim,* founder of the A.R.R.L. and until his death in 1936 its president, the relay spree celebrated the inauguration of service over the league’s new head quarters station. At Brainard Field, Hartford’s municipal airport, A.R.R.L. had had its station WIMK to cover the world until the 1936 Connecticut River Valley flood covered the station deep in mud and oil, wrecked it. Founder Maxim had died a month before the flood, was succeeded in the league’s presidency by Dr. Eugene C. Woodruff, head of Pennsylvania State College’s departments of Electrical and Radio Engineering. Under President Woodruff’s leadership, $18,000 was appropriated by the League for the new station, WIAW (Founder Maxim’s old private call letters, recently assigned to it by FCC).

The new station has 1,000 watts, will use most U. S. amateur wave lengths (5 m., 10 m., 20 m., 40 m., 80 m., 160 rn.). Two operators will keep it on the air twelve hours a day, handle League messages, broadcast amateur news to radio “hams.” There are 49,000 licensed U. S. amateur operators, an enormous reserve on which the army and navy communications people depend for personnel in case of war. Some 4,000 amateurs are in Chicago this week for the first national A.R.R.L. convention to be held in 14 years. Amateur operators range in age from 8 to So, include radio repairmen, engineers, corporation executives, bellhops, coal miners, women, small girls, professional men. Their stations are worth anywhere from $25 to $35,000. They are called in by the army, navy and the Red Cross to assist in times of disaster, set up emergency communication systems for relaying messages from isolated communities in storm, flood and earthquake.

Across the continent they talk, call each other “Old Man,” but seldom meet. Their relative freedom in the use of U. S. air waves they credit to The Old Man (pseudonym under which Founder Maxim wrote for QST—see p. 67). When in 1914 Inventor Maxim was unable to reach with his Hartford transmitter a fellow amateur 30 miles away in Springfield, he arranged to have his message relayed by a third amateur operator, conceived and organized the A.R.R.L. to put such relays on a nationwide basis. In 1919, when the U. S. Government was reluctant to give up its Wartime control of radio, and later whenever commercial services tried to grab amateur wave lengths. A.R.R.L. President Maxim carried the fight to Washington, brought the amateurs back to the air, kept them there.

*Son of the Maxim gun’s inventor, Hiram Percy invented gun and engine silencers, but never anything important for the radio he loved to play with.