Most interesting story. I suspect that this may have been the
precursor to CIA's Foreign Broadcast Information Service
(FIBS...pronounced by those in the trade as Fibbis). CIA has these
overt monitoring posts to pick up broadcasts from a whole host of
stations. These are transcribed and translated into English and put in
a daily summary. They are unclassified and freely disseminated at
least within government. They are quite distinct from monitoring for
intelligence purposes and totally different personnel participate. The
FBIS folks are often foreign nationals hired as contract workers and
as such do not participate in intelligence analysis or see
intelligence product (except for CIA's cleared managers.)

On a humorous note, early in my ham career about 50 years ago, there
was another kind of beverage antenna. CQ magazine published a story on
building a 40 meter vertical antenna by soldering end to end
sufficient numbers of beer cans to reach the required 32 feet. Beer
cans I guess were made of ferrous products back then (I was too young
to drink at the time.) Several letters to the editor pointed out that
the same thing could have been accomplished by 32 feet of aluminum
tubing which of course was true. I think the same article also had an
accompanying matching coil made out of semi-flexible copper tubing
which the author said he straightened out prior to coiling in the
appropriate size in what he described at "the time honored method."
What he did was secure one end of the tubing to a vise on a workbench
in his garage, secured the other end somehow (don't remember exactly
how he did this) to his automobile and then straightening the tubing
by slowly driving forward.

Several follow-on stories appeared following publication, most dealing
with the process of acquireing the requisite number of beer cans. One
author did what today we would call a blog as he tried to acquire the
cans all at once by drinking the contents. As the story progressed,
his written words became more and more unintelligible.

I am far too young to know about these WW II stories first hand (I was
born in 1942), but I did have a long career in Signals Intelligence
and I had heard some similar stories from my earliest supervisors,
most of whom were WW II veterans.

Thanks for sharing this with us.

Jon W3JT


On Thu, 22 Sep 2005 13:51:56 -0400, Walter Maxwell
wrote:

As a monitoring officer with the Radio Intelligence Division (RID) of the
FCC in Hawaii during WW2 I was privy to some interesting situations. Our State
Department was of course aware of the operations occurring in the Pacific
Theater. The people there were also aware of the propaganda being spewed by the
Japanese short-wave broadcasters. But State was curious concerning what the
Japanese living on the homeland were being told-were they being told the truth,
or the same propaganda as told on the short-wave broadcasts, or a totally
different story. State asked the RID to determine whether we could obtain such
information.
We cruised the AM broadcast band and found several nighttime signals from
Japanese mainland stations, but most were too weak to copy. However, JOAK,
Tokyo, on 650 KHz was S9, but there was a problem in copying it. KFI, Los
Angeles, was also on 650 KHz with an S9 signal-copying intelligence from JOAK
was impossible. How can we eliminate, or reduce KFI's signal level. A Beverage
Wave antenna, perhaps?
We then proceeded to the northern portion of Oahu and constructed a
Beverage one-half mile long, five feet above ground, aimed at Tokyo, and
terminated with a 1000-ohm pot resistor to ground at the Tokyo end. We
discovered that by varying the pot resistance we could null the KFI signal to
almost zero. The resistance terminating the Beverage that produced the null was
around 600 ohms. Because the matching resistive termination rendered the
Beverage a traveling-wave antenna with no standing wave, the signal from JOAK
was terminated by the input of our receiver, while the signal from KFI was
dissipated in the matched resistance at the Tokyo end of the Beverage-no KFI
signal reflected toward the receiver. Voila-JOAK was perfectly readable for
recording!
We sent the first recording to Washington, and State was
delighted-requesting that we continue recording JOAK continuously. Consequently,
our recordings were flown daily to Washington from Hickam Field in Honolulu. We
were left in the dark concerning the information on the recordings, and how it
affected the War effort, because State didn't share it with us. But it must have
been pretty good, because State was on our case every day to make sure we sent
them the recordings.

Walt, W2DU