The Dawn of Amateur Radio in the U.K. and Greece Part 7

W.A.C. was achieved by February 1948 with about 50 watts of R.F.

into a simple dipole antenna. During the ten months that SV1WE was active 750 QSL cards were sent out. Of the 61 countries worked only 49 were confirmed.

Today (1989) Harry is still regularly on the air under his original callsign G2AIQ which was first issued to him on the 1st of January 1938, 51 years ago.

5. George Yiapapas (formerly SV1GY).

George Yiapapas is a Greek amateur who was very active for over 25 years yet n.o.body seems to have heard of him. In 1935 George and his father Costas built a one-valve transmitter using a type 59 pentode with suppressor grid modulation, and succeeded in contacting most of the world with this QRP rig. The electron coupled oscillator could not have put more than 4 or 5 watts into the antenna.

After the war George went to Jordan in 1956 to work for Cable & Wireless the English company which operated the old Eastern Telegraph cable network. He used the callsign JY1GY for about a year and was then transferred to Tripoli in the Kingdom of Lybia, during the reign of King Idris, where he obtained an official licence with the call 5A3TA.

In 1960 he was again transferred, this time to Kuwait, where he operated the equipment of Mohamet Behbehani 9K2AM for over six years.

George now has a small shop in Piraeus, the port of Athens and is no longer active on the amateur bands.

6. Stefanos Eleftheriou (1895-1979).

Stefanos Eleftheriou, Head of the Telecommmunications section of the Ministry of Posts & Telegraphs (Greek initials T.T.T.) played a vital role in the early development of amateur radio in Greece.

When he returned from Switzerland, where he had studied Electrical Engineering, he had to do his compulsory military service which had been deferred while he was completing his education. A friend of his told him "Don't go into the Army, join the Navy; they have an amazing wireless station at Votanikos with which they can contact the Fleet anywhere in the world". As it happened there was a vacancy for an officer and Stefanos together with another young man called Nikolis faced a Selection Board of naval officers who really didn't know what qualifications they were looking for. He was successful whereas Nikolis went to the Ministry of Posts & Telegraphs where he ended up as Director-General many years later.

The MARCONI COMPANY of England had built an impressive wireless station for the Greek Royal Navy at Votanikos, a suburb of Athens.

There was a transmitter which operated on 600 metres and a larger one on long waves above 2,000 metres which used the callsign SXA.

Stefanos told me how he was summoned by the Director of the Naval Station Admiral Mezeviris who asked him "Tell me, young man, what do you know about wireless?"

"Well sir," replied Eleftheriou, "I studied Electrical Engineering in Switzerland--I really don't anything about wireless."

"Neither do I," replied the Admiral candidly. "Nor do most of my officers. We must set up a school to train technicians and wireless operators. I entrust you with the task of getting all the necessary books and other materials. Write to England, the U.S.A., France and Germany and get whatever you need. When you are ready I will appoint staff to a.s.sist you." That was how Eleftheriou became the head of the first school for training wireless officers for the Greek Royal Navy.

A couple of years later Eleftheriou joined the staff of the Ministry of Post & Telegraphs. A newspaper of 1930 had a photograph of him with one of his triplet sons.

In his capacity of Head of the Telecommunications Section at the Ministry he worked hard to get official recognition of amateur radio.

A handful of us who were active 'under cover' so to speak, frequently visited him in his office. He was a very likeable person and had a talent for anecdotes. One day he told us that he had attended a Joint Services Committee which had been set up to study the requirements for building a broadcasting station in Athens. A station had been in regular operation in the northern city of Thessaloniki (Salonica) since 1928, built by the pioneer of Broadcasting in the Balkans Christos Tsingeridis.

When the question of wavelength for the proposed station was considered somebody said a wavelength of 2,000 metres might be appropriate. One of the military officers, who shall be nameless, remarked angrily "What! 2,000 metres. We are spending all this money only to be received up to Koukouvaounes? This is outrageous!"

(Koukouvaounes was then a small village with a funny name about 3 miles south-west of Athens.

Eleftheriou lived to the ripe old age of 84. When I last saw him he promised to give me his collection of old photographs and a large number of books and doc.u.ments relating to the development of radio communications in Greece. Unfortunately, shortly after his death his wife and three sons moved house temporarily and a packing case containing all these priceless papers was lost in

7. Norman F. Joly G3FNJ. (Formerly SV1RX).

I was born in Izmir (then known as Smyrna), on the west coast of Turkey in Asia Minor, in 1911, of British parents. My British nationality was established through the Treaty of Capitulation which was then in force between Turkey and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. I remember there was a British Post Office in Smyrna and we posted our letters with British postage stamps (of King Edward VII) overprinted with the word LEVANT.

My grandmother on my father's side had come from Russia. It is a strange coincidence that Takis Coumbias (ex SV1AAA), Bill Tavaniotis (ex SV1KE) and I all had roots in southern Russia. My grandmother on my mother's side was the daughter of the Dutch consul in Smyrna. Quite a mixed bag.

In 1922, at the end of the war between Turkey and Greece, the town of Smyrna was destroyed by fire when the Greek army was routed. My widowed mother with four young children, was advised to take us on board a British merchant vessel while the town changed hands. We were told to take a little food with us just for a day or two. We carried a large string bag with some bread, cheese and fruit, and one knife, one fork and one spoon between the five of us. I remember it was night and my mother put all her jewelry in a small leather bag. As I pulled the cord to close it the pin of a large broach stuck out through the top. My mother grabbed it and said I would hurt myself--I was only 11 years old at the time. She looked around the bedroom, lifted up a corner of the mattress of her bed and hid the pouch 'safely' underneath it. We hurried out of the house--and never went back.

We and many other families spent one night on the merchant vessel where there was no sleeping accommodation. Next morning we were transferred to a large hospital ship called MAINE. All day we watched small groups of the Turkish and Greek armies skirmishing on the sea-front and in the evening many fires broke out in the town. In the middle of the night while we were sleeping the hospital ship sailed away to an unknown destination. After two or three days we arrived in Malta, where most of us stayed for the next four years.

It was in Malta that my interest in wireless telegraphy was first aroused. We were housed in some military 'married quarters'. Close by there was a wireless station which produced bright greenish-blue sparks and crackling noises. Its antennas were supported on three very tall wooden masts painted bright yellow. I soon discovered that it was GYZ belonging to the Admiralty. Malta was then (1922) a very big base of the British Navy, in the good old days when England had an Empire.

I bought a kit of parts and a.s.sembled a small receiver and being so close to the powerful spark transmitter that was all I ever heard.

In 1926 when I left school my family moved to Greece and my brother who was 7 years older than me, opened up a shipping office on the island of Mitylene, in the Aegean sea. My father and grandfather had been in this business in Turkey.

It was in Mitylene in 1927 that I constructed my first short wave receiver. It had 3 valves with 4 volt filaments, heated by an acc.u.mulator (storage battery). H.T of 130 volts was obtained from a bank of small acc.u.mulators in series. As I had not learned how to make a charger I had to carry these two units to a local garage regularly for re-charging.

Apart from commercial telegraph stations there was little else to hear. I had still not heard about 'amateur' radio. The B.B.C. was carrying out test transmissions from Chelmsford for what became the Empire Service (now the World Service) using the callsign G5SW. There was also G6RX which stood for Rugby Experimental, operated by the British Post Office. They were experimenting with ship-to-sh.o.r.e telephony, and after setting up a circuit the operator used to say "over to condition A" (and sometimes B) which was very frustrating for me because the voices then became scrambled and quite unintelligible.

When I first began transmitting six years later, having 'discovered'

the amateurs, I chose the callsign RX as I had been a listener so long, and also remembering the excitement of listening to G6RX.

In 1930 I moved to Athens and became a salesman for RCA radios. It was there that I met Bill Tavaniotis, SV1KE, and his mechanic Pol SV1AZ (now N2DOE). None of us had official licences because the Greek State did not recognise the existence of amateur radio, and in fact Athens did not even have a broadcasting station until 1938, although a station had been operating since 1928 in Salonica (Thessaloniki) the second largest city of Greece. But the Head of the W/T section at the Ministry of Posts & Telegraphs (Greek initials T.T.T) Mr Stefanos Eleftheriou knew all about us and gave us his unofficial blessing.

My first transmitter was just an electron coupled oscillator using a type 59 output pentode from a radio. With an input of around 5 watts I was able to achieve W.A.C. on 14 MHz in 25 minutes one very exciting afternoon. There were very few stations around and single frequency working had not been heard of yet. It was the middle of the sunspot cycle (which I knew nothing of) and propagation must have been exceptionally good.

Another thing we had never heard of in those innocent days was SWR. I had a Hot Wire ammeter and always tuned for maximum deflection, completely oblivious of the fact that a large proportion of the indicated value was 'reflected power'. I moved to 'high power'

when I added a 210 P.A. to my rig.

Obviously the prefix SV was quite a rare one and SV stations were much sought after, particularly the handful who used CW. But as I described in a short article in the October 1948 issue of the SHORT WAVE MAGAZINE published in London, it was not all fun being a rare DX station. A photo copy appears below:

To return to pre-World War II operating: Most operators used crystal oscillators in order to have a clean '9x' note. It was quite normal procedure to call CQ on one's crystal frequency, say 14,076 KHz and then go over and start combing the band from 14,000 for replies.

At that time 20 metres covered 14,000 to 14,400 KHz., and the 15 metre band had not been allocated to the amateur service.

In September 1939 Hitler invaded Poland and all of us hastily and voluntarily dismantled our transmitters and scattered the components, as there was n.o.body to order us to close down.

In the latter part of April 1941 the German army marched into the northern suburbs of Athens at 11 o'clock in the morning. At 3 o'clock in the afternoon of the same day, a strong unit of the Gestapo arrived in the southern suburb of Kallithea and surrounded the block in which my house was situated and broke into it, looking for me and my transmitter. Of course I had dismantled everything 19 months previously and even taken down the antenna. So after this long period of QRT how did they know where to find me? Well, FOUR YEARS EARLIER I had won the first prize for Greece in the D.A.S.D. DX Contest for 1937 and the German society had sent me a nice certificate. You can draw your own conclusions. I heard later (because I had left a few days earlier for Egypt with the staff of the British Emba.s.sy) that the Gestapo had visited all the active amateurs and had managed to arrest only one of them, Nasos Coucoulis SV1SM (later SV1AC) and put him in a concentration camp in Italy for nearly a year.

I would like to sketch briefly the turbulent events of the following three years with some extracts from my diaries.

One year earlier, in 1940, following the invasion of Greece by the Italian army operating from Albania, the broadcasting authority in Athens (ETHNIKON IDRIMA RADIOFONIAS) began a news service in English which was beamed to England and the U.S.A. on the short waves. In my capacity as a member of the Press Department staff of the British Emba.s.sy I took part in the first programme, and in fact read the first news bulletin, which went out at 3 a.m. Athens time. As I said above, early in April I was transferred to the British Emba.s.sy in Cairo, Egypt.

1941: Very small contingents of the British army landed in Greece to help the Greek army. But they proved totally incapable of standing up to the onslaught of the German army which followed soon after. The Greek army laid down its arms in Epirus (north-western Greece).

General Tsolakoglou became the first 'Quisling' Prime Minister of Greece. King George and his government, under Premier Emmanouil Tsouderos had left for Cairo.

1942: In North Africa General Rommel had advanced to within 100 miles of Cairo, but his supply lines had become very long. One of the most important was the railway link through Greece, so the British strategists decided that attempts must be made to disrupt it. The Special Operations Executive (S.O.E.) in London, despatched two small groups of saboteurs (about a dozen men altogether) under the command of Brigadier Eddie Myers and Major Chris Woodhouse who had the task of linking up with the various bands of 'Andartes' (Resistance movement fighters) which had started forming in the mountains.

Unfortunately, the British officers were told nothing at all about the bitter rivalries between the various groups, most probably because H.Q. in Cairo were themselves ignorant about the real situation. It didn't take Meyers and Woodhouse long to discover that by far the largest group was E.L.A.S. (the Popular Liberation Army) under Aris Velouhiotis, about 120 ill-equipped men operating in the Pindus mountains. Another smaller group of about 60 men had rallied round a regular officer of the Greek army, Colonel Napoleon Zervas. They called themselves the National Republican Greek League (Greek initials E.D.E.S.)

I met Zervas personally years later when he was Minister of the Interior (and therefore responsible for the Police). I was then acting as interpreter for the a.s.sistant-Head of the British Police Mission to Greece. I remember vividly with what relish he described to Colonel Prosser his method of torturing E.L.A.S. prisoners, which left no physical marks on any part of the body.

It was in the course of a secret visit to Athens that young Chris Woodhouse found out the real chain of command, when he was introduced to George Siantos, the Secretary of the Greek Communist Party (Greek initials K.K.E.). The K.K.E. controlled E.A.M., the National Liberation Front which, in turn, ran E.L.A.S. But with a t.i.tle like that (National Liberation Front) it was easy to see why E.A.M.

enjoyed such widespread support, not only in the countryside, but also among the intelligentsia in Athens.

But the task of the S.O.E. officers was made very difficult for various reasons: Winston Churchill had given orders that they were to support, as far as possible, only those guerrilla leaders who favoured the King--but there were none, or very few. The S.O.E. units had orders to cause the maximum disruption to the German occupation of the country. And that was impossible without the support of E.L.A.S., which was controlled by the Communists. At the outset, it became obvious to the S.O.E. officers that military and political priorities were already in conflict.

E.L.A.S. forces were getting stronger every day and very soon they began attacking fellow Greeks in non-communist Andarte units. The successful attack on the railway bridge over the Gorgopotamos river on the 26th of November was the first and last time that ELAS and EDES co-operated against the common enemy under the coercion and technical guidance of the British.

1943: Friction between EDES and ELAS continued to increase. When Eddie Myers told them that he had been instructed to destroy the bridge over the Asopos river, ELAS said it was too dangerous a target and refused to help, so this became an all-British operation. A 24-year-old demolition expert of the Royal Engineers Captain Ken Scott, was sent from Cairo. He was dropped by parachute, and planned the successful attack on the bridge. It took the Germans four months to rebuild it.

On the 11th of September 14,000 Italian troops in the north-west surrendered to the Andartes with all their arms. A month later ELAS seized the weapons and attacked EDES. The civil war had begun.