Radio age (Jan 1927-Jan 1928)

RADIO AGE for July-August, 1927 Do You Know What You Are Missing? YOU may think that you are getting a lot out of radio, but sit in with a bunch of radio amateurs some time and you will discover that you have been getting only about one-half of one per cent of the kick there is in it. Attend a meeting of the American Radio Relay League, a national organization of radio amateurs organized thirteen years ago when about the only broadcasts heard were weather reports and SOS calls in Morse code. I sat near the registration desk at one of its conventions, studying the types among the arriving delegates. They were all boys, from fifteen to seventy years old. One was a gangling youth of about seventeen. He put his hand around to his hip pocket for a handkerchief or some legitimate object and revealed patches on the seat of his trousers. Now there is a good deal of significance in patches. If a farmer has patches on the seat of his overalls it is a pretty sure sign that the mortgage on his place will be foreclosed soon. A successful farmer never finds time to sit around and wear holes in that location. But on this fellow I was sure those patches meant nights of DX work. They meant too that he had the nerve to spend his money to attend the convention, where he would find fellowship, instruction and spiritual uplift, instead of buying a new suit. I asked him how he was getting on. He said he was not doing anything worth mentioning, just working a few ham stations in England and now and then one in South America. After all the fuss that has been made over the opening of radio telephone service between America and England, it seemed strange that he and other boys should talk so nonchalantly of sending message across the oceans, but then the amateurs have been doing it for years. The first was a fifteen-year-old boy named Harold Robinson, who bought a radiophone transmitter guaranteed to By ARMSTRONG PERRY tranmit twenty-five miles. He studied it, improved it, and increased his transmitting range until he received reports from persons who heard him 1,500 miles away. The telephone service from America to England is a marvellous achievement. It is a far more difficult matter to establish reliable daily service than it is to make an occasional amateur record. But, when a boy who has to wear patches on his pants in order to attend a radio convention builds his own apparatus and exchanges messages across oceans, he is pointing the way for broadcast listeners to do something that is more fun than imitating a sponge and soaking up whatever happens to be in the air. Amateurs who attend these gatherings wear tags on which their call letters are stamped. An eager youth comes hurrying through the door, glances at the letters on some other fellow's tag and they join hands. Few of the members have ever seen each other before but one glance at those call letters and they are closer than brother Masons, for they have chatted many a time with their hands on their keys and phones on their heads. Those telegraph keys of theirs unlock doors and let them into more things than any latch key ever revealed. Nobody cares what anyone's name is. When 1BIG was in the chair at one of the sessions, every delegate who addressed the chair began just as he would if he were calling a station: "1BIG!" If anyone said "Mr. Chairman" he classified himself as a novice. One of the delegates was a Chinaman. He looked just like any wellregular celestial in American clothes until he started in the trouble-shooting contest, then he took on the atmosphere of a busy sector in the Chinese war. The trouble-shooting contest consisted of finding out what was wrong in a lot of radio diagrams. There were even more things wrong with them than can be found in the worst set that a broadcast listener ever threw together. What Whoop La did to those diagrams made the common or garden variety of amateur gasp with amazement. He won the prize. There was one YL (young lady) present at the last gathering that I attended. Every girl "ham" is a YL, just as every man "ham" is "OM", meaning "old man". This one led a dog, but it seemed like an unnecessary precaution. She possessed plenty of charm, but the "hams" were too crazy over radio to be susceptible to girlitis. Once in a while a local ham organization goes to a convention in force. The Providence Radio Association distinguished itself recently by