The Dawn of Amateur Radio in the U.K. and Greece Part 2

About 25 U.S. amateur stations partic.i.p.ated in the tests, which took place early in the morning on the 2nd, 4th and 6th of February 1921. Although about 200 European stations had indicated their intention to listen only 30 actually submitted logs. And not a single one of them was able to report hearing anything that could be attributed to the American transmissions.

The then Editor of QST wrote: "We have tested most of the circuits used by the Britishers and find them one and all decidedly inferior to our standard American regenerative circuit using variometer tuning in secondary and tertiary circuits. We would bet our new Spring hat that if a good U.S. amateur with such a set and an Armstrong superheterodyne could be sent to England, reception of the U.S.

transmissions would straightaway become commonplace." Strong language.

In September of the same year it was announced that a prominent U.S. amateur Paul G.o.dley 2ZE would be going to Europe to take part in the second series of tests planned for December. His expenses were being paid by the A.R.R.L. which already boasted having 15,000 transmitting members. In the U.S.A. distances of over 2,000 miles had already been achieved.

During his brief stay of a few hours in London Paul G.o.dley was introduced to Senator Marconi, to Admiral of the Fleet Sir Henry Jackson, to Alan A. Campbell Swinton and many other distinguished members of the Wireless Society of London, as the R.S.G.B. was then called.

Paul G.o.dley first set up his receiving equipment at Wembley Park, Middles.e.x but soon decided that the electrical noises in the area would not permit reception of the weak transatlantic signals. He therefore obtained permission to set up the European receiving station at Ardrossan a coast town near Glasgow, Scotland. The actual site was a large field heavily covered with seaweed. He was a.s.sisted in the erection of his receiving antenna by a member of the Marconi International Marine Communications Company. 1,300 feet of phosphor-bronze wire was stretched 12 feet above the ground on ten poles s.p.a.ced equally along the full length of the wire which was earthed at the far end through a non-inductive resistor. This was the first Beverage type receiving array ever erected in the United Kingdom. Before the actual tests took place the length of the wire was reduced to 850 feet.

At 00.50 GMT on December 9th 1921 G.o.dley identified signals from 1BCG located at Greenwich, Connecticut. The station there was manned by six members of the Radio Club of America. One of the operators was E. Howard Armstrong inventor of the regenerative detector, super-regeneration and the supersonic heterodyne receiver, though the French claim that the superhet was first designed by Lucien Levy of Paris.

Two days later the historic first complete message transmitted by U.S. amateurs and received in Europe on the "short waves" (actually 230 metres) heralded a new era. The message read:

No.1 de 1BCG. WORDS 12. NEW YORK DECEMBER 11 1921. TO PAUL G.o.dLEY ARDROSSAN SCOTLAND. HEARTY CONGRATULATIONS. SIGNED BURGHARD INMAN GRINAN ARMSTRONG AMY CRONKHITE.

Eight British amateurs had also copied the message correctly. One of them was W.E. "Bill" Corsham 2UV of Willesden, London who was later credited by the R.S.G.B. and the A.R.R.L. as being the inventor of the QSL card. Bill had used a simple three valve receiver and an inverted-L wire 100 feet long compared to G.o.dley's huge Beverage array.

In the summer of 1922 amateurs in France began to get licences and Leon Deloy 8AB President of the Radio Club of Nice in southern France started hearing British stations. After a visit to the U.S.A. Deloy was able to improve his equipment and on November 27th 1923 he contacted Fred Schnell 1MO of West Hartford, Connecticut for the first ever 2-way QSO across the Atlantic. They used the "useless"

wavelengths around 100 metres.

INTERNATIONAL DX had come to stay.

CHAPTER FIVE

THE FIRST GREEK RADIO AMATEURS

As no licences were issued for many years there are no official records to be consulted. Early activity was mainly in and around Athens but there may have been one or two stations in other parts of the country which we never heard in the capital. At the time of writing (1987) four of the original pioneers in the Athens area are alive and three of them are currently active on the H.F. bands.

Athana.s.sis 'Takis' Coumbias has QSL cards addressed to him dated 1929 when he was a short wave listener in Odessa, Russia with the SWL callsign RK-1136. In 1931 his family, like many other Greek families in Russia, moved to Athens where Takis built a 4-valve transmitter with which he was very active on 40 and 20 metre CW using the callsign SV1AAA.

I frequently operated his station myself and when I asked him why he had chosen that particular callsign he gave me what proved to be a truly prophetic answer. "It will be ages," he said, "before the Greek State officially recognizes the very existence of radio amateurs and begins to issue transmitting licences to them. After that it might take another 50 years for them to get to the three-letter series beginning with SV1AAA."

In actual fact this is what happened: legislation was enacted 40 years later and the callsign SV1AAA was officially allocated to Nikita Venizelos after 54 years had elapsed!

Although at the time there was no official recognition of amateur radio in Greece, the existence and ident.i.ty of the handful of 'under cover' operators was known to the Head of the W/T section at the Ministry of Posts & Telegraphs (Greek initials T.T.T.) Stefanos Eleftheriou who did more than anyone else to encourage and promote the development of our hobby. In fact, following a minor brush with the police in 1937 (described by N2DOE later in this book) Eleftheriou issued three licences 'for experimental research in connection with the propagation of short waves' on the basis of earlier legislation governing the use of wireless telegraphy which really had nothing to do with amateur radio. The recipients of these three licences were Costas 'Bill' Tavaniotis SV1KE, Aghis Cazazis SV1CA and Nikos Katselis SV1NK. As there were no relevant regulations the choice of callsign was left to the individual operators. For instance, Tavaniotis ran his own electrical and electronic business called KONSTAV ELECTRIC so he decided to use "KE" as his callsign.

As far as I know the following ten amateurs were active in the Athens area in 1937:

1. Takis Coumbias.....................SV1AAA 2. 'Bill' Tavaniotis..................SV1KE (silent key) 3. Polycarpos Psomiadis..............SV1AZ (now N2DOE) 4. Aghis Cazazis......................SV1CA (silent key) 5. Nikos Katselis.....................SV1NK (silent key) 6. George Zarifis...............SV1SP/SV6SP (now SV1AA) 7. Nasos Coucoulis....................SV1SM (silent key) 8. George Yiapapas....................SV1GY (now QRT) 9. Menelaos Paidousis.................SV1MP 10. Norman Joly........................SV1RX (now G3FNJ)

In 1952 Costas Karayiannis who ran a big business called RADIO KARAYIANNI published an amazingly comprehensive book ent.i.tled ELLINIKI RADIOFONIA which means 'Greek Broadcasting'. It contained a vast treasure of information on many subjects allied to broadcasting, and there was a page ent.i.tled DAWN (1930-1940) which dealt with amateur radio activity in Greece before World War II. It confirmed most of the names listed above as can be seen in the photo-copy of the original Greek text, and it mentioned three others: George Gerardos SV1AG, (silent key), S. Stefanou and Mikes Psalidas who was allocated the callsign SV1AF 20 years later, though he, like many others had come on the air after the end of the war with an unofficial callsign.

Were all these operators who functioned strictly in accordance with international regulations pirates? In my view they were certainly not pirates. If the State was officially unaware of the existence of amateur radio how could they apply for licences and be issued with official callsigns?

Later in this book N2DOE describes how a handful of amateurs had prepared draft legislation in 1937 at the request of Stefanos Eleftheriou of the Ministry but the outbreak of World War II in September 1939 had prevented him from taking any action in this connection.

The island of Crete in southern Greece was first heard on the air in 1938 when George Zarifis came on 40 metre CW using the callsign SV6SP. His transmitter consisted of a single metal 6L6 crystal oscillator with an input of about 7 watts. For reception he used an American CASE broadcast receiver in which he had fitted a BFO. In a very short period he had about 500 QSOs.

Forty four years later some of the younger generation of operators who had not heard of this early activity from Crete allocated the prefix SV9 to the island. Rather illogically they allocated SV8 to all the other islands irrespective of their geographical position and with yet another exception--SV5 for the twelve Dodecanese islands.

General George Zarifis (retired) SV1AA as he is now, had started playing with 'wireless' a long long time before he went to Crete. In 1921 when he was in the 4th form at school he had bought two kits of parts from France and put them together with the help of his fellow-student George Grabinger. The kit consisted of a bright emitter triode in an oscillating circuit. The heater supply was a 4 volt acc.u.mulator, and a dozen or so dry cells, with an earphone in series, supplied the anode voltage. The tuned circuit consisted of a coil with a small pressure operated capacitor across it. A carbon microphone with a dry cell in series was connected to two or three turns of wire wound over the coil. The a.s.sembled kits were tested close to each other and they worked. Later, when they had connected random length wire antennas to the circuits the two schoolboys were able to talk to each other across the 400 metres which separated their homes. These contacts quite definitely heralded the dawn of amateur radio in Greece at about the same time as the 1921 Transatlantic tests were taking place.

On the 1st of September 1939 Hitler's armies invaded Poland.

Great Britain which had a treaty with Poland was compelled to declare war on Germany two days later on the 3rd, followed by France. Canada and Australia declared war on Germany the next day. All the radio amateurs in Athens immediately dismantled their transmitters and dispersed the components.

So ended the first phase of amateur radio activity in Greece.

CHAPTER SIX

WORLD WAR II AND AFTER IN GREECE

Socrates Coutroubis SV1AE described to me how his interest in radio was aroused in 1935 when he was 13 years old. His father had decided to buy a domestic radio receiver.

"Of course in 1935 Athens had no broadcasting service," Socrates said, "so the receiver had to be able to tune in to the short wave broadcasting bands. As we already had a Westinghouse refrigerator my father decided we should try one of their receivers. When I say 'try'

I must explain that it was the usual thing to ask a number of agents to submit their latest models for comparison at one's home. I remember that together with the Westinghouse, we had an At.w.a.ter Kent, Philco, RCA, Stromberg-Carlson and several sets of European manufacture such as Philips, Blaupunkt, Saba etc. We finally settled for the German Saba because it was the prettiest and blended better with our living room furniture!

"There were very few stations to be found on the short waves. But I remember the Dutch station PCJ run by the Philips company in Eindhoven. The announcer was Edward Startz who spoke perfect English and about a dozen other languages. "This is the Happy Station, broadcasting from the Netherlands" he would say cheerfully.

"A couple of years after we had bought the radio we were returning from an open air movie round about midnight when I noticed a book on sale at a road-side kiosk. It was ent.i.tled THE RADIO AMATEUR'S HANDBOOK published by the A.R.R.L. I had no idea what the initials stood for. The price was astronomical for my pocket but after a little coercion I got my father to buy it for me. When I began to read it I discovered the existence of radio amateurs. It was the 1939 edition and I found a circuit for a receiver which looked simple enough for me to try. It was described as a regenerative detector and audio amplifier.

"At that time the best place to buy components in Athens was at a store called Radio Karayianni, but three others shops also stocked valves (tubes) and components. One was the Electron run by George Spanos, who was the agent for the Dutch Philips company. Then there was a shop in a bas.e.m.e.nt next door, Konstav Electric, owned by 'Bill'

Tavaniotis SV1KE. A wide range of components were also stocked by the Raytheon agent, Nick Katselis SV1NK.

"I obtained some plug-in forms and wound the coils carefully according to the instructions but unfortunately the receiver didn't work very well, if at all. When I asked a few friends they suggested I should shorten the very long wires I had used between the components, and sure enough I had the greatest thrill of my life when for the first time I heard Rome on short waves on my very own home-made receiver. Outstanding stations in the broadcast band in those days were Trieste in northern Italy, Katowice in Poland, Breslau in Germany and Toulouse in south-west France.

"Although I had read about the activities of radio amateurs in the Handbook I had not yet heard any of the half dozen or so stations that were already operating on CW and AM telephony in the Athens area.

"My father used to buy the periodical LONDON CALLING which contained the overseas programmes of the B.B.C. as well as the programmes of the princ.i.p.al European broadcasting stations. This publication also carried advertis.e.m.e.nts and it was there that I first saw an ill.u.s.tration of the Hammarlund Super Pro and realised that there were receivers specially designed for the reception of short waves.

"But during the German/Italian occupation of Greece between 1941 and 1944 my little home-made receiver played a vital role in enabling us to listen (secretly) to the B.B.C. broadcasts because the authorities had sealed all radios to the broadcast (medium wave) band and to the frequency of Radio Athens. Most people devised ingenuous methods of listening to stations other than Athens.

"After the end of the war a friend of mine who returned to Athens from Cairo brought me the 1945 edition of the A.R.R.L.Handbook, which is still on the shelf as you can see."

Socrates explained that in 1945 there was complete political upheaval in Greece, owing to the events that had taken place during the foreign occupation, so the General Election of that year was carried out under the supervision of foreign observers from the U.S.A., the United Kingdom & France. The Russians did not send a mission.

"Owing to my knowledge of English I was employed by the American mission to act as interpreter. One day when I was off duty I was taken by a friend to a signals unit where there were many pieces of equipment which had been 'liberated', and I was able to buy a BC 342 receiver. Later when Harry Barnett SV1WE who was in the Press Department of the British Emba.s.sy returned to England I bought his Hallicrafter SX28.

"It was at Harry's house in Kolonaki that I had my first taste of amateur radio in action. He had a National HRO for reception and he had constructed a 50-watt transmitter using surplus components which were in plentiful supply at that time.

"Another friend of mine, Jim Liverios, was employed at the Civil Aviation transmitter site on a hill south of Nea Smyrni. The American Mission had set up their short wave transmitters on the same site and later Interpol installed their own equipment as well. Liverios was always on night shift because he attended the University during the day. I still don't know how he ever managed to get any sleep. When things were quiet he would 'borrow' a 5 Kw transmitter and tune it in the 20 metre band. Using a callsign of his own choice (probably a different one every night) he would have contacts with the whole world. On his invitation I went there at midnight one night and stayed until the morning. I remember we had QSOs with Cuba, Chile, New Zealand and Australia."