On Tue, 07 Apr 2009 12:00:44 -0500, Tim Wescott
wrote:

On Tue, 07 Apr 2009 15:47:04 +0000, Geoffrey S. Mendelson wrote:

Roger Basford wrote:
I did try to ID the W9WZE operator in the clip - it's not Bill Halligan
- any ideas? One suggestion I had was that he was one of the senior
engineers working for the company. I didn't notice any date on the
captions, so if that is a post-1941 film then the operating session
would have surely been staged, as Ham Radio had shut down, so maybe it
was done by using recordings of the other stations?

Although the ham at the other end called him Bill, if you say it was not
Halligan, I'll take your word for it. A little later in the film he and
another man are identified as Bill Halligan and someone else, whose name
I did not catch.

I assume if you actualy know what Halligan looked like (I don't) you can
tell them apart and if you are careful at listening for names, you can
figure it out.

I'm going a vague memory here, but one of the fellows did look like
Bill Halligan who 10 years later was often pictured in Hallicrafter's
ads. I remember he had a two letter suffix in his call and for some
reason I thought it was W9AN. Someone with a 1950's QST might be able
to see the ads. I believe that Bill Halligan is the fellow who appears
at minute 5:30 or so of part one of the film and I think he is the
fellow on the left with the rimless glasses. Notice how spartan his
executive office is. Two letter suffixes were extremely rare in those
days. You had to be licensed before WW I to get one. There was no
country prefix at the start. I had two mentors in the mid 50's when I
was a young teen with my first license. They told me that right after
WW 1 their calls were 9GI and 9AOF. The guy with the two lettter
suffix got his before the war, the guy with the three letter suffix
got his immediatiately after WW I and always thought he should have
had a two letter suffix. W9GI was the only two letter suffix in our
town. He was an old marine telegrapher on the Great Lakes ore carriers
and car ferries. The "W" was added later to US calls (and the "K's"
came in the 50's ...I was first K9CAH in 1956 and callsigns were done
in alphabetic order at that time. "N" and "A" suffixes came later.

Of course, the scene with the ham operating at the beginning had to
have been a simulation as there was no ham radio during WW II, the
hams were forced off the air. The same thing happened in WW I.

I doubt anyone with an original two letter suffix is alive anymore.
The few I knew then were very old men in the 50's/60's. Those with
two letter suffixes who have them now started to get them in the
mid-late 1970s. At first you could get one if you held an Amateur
Extra and had been licensed for 20 years. The first group to get the
two letter option at that time were those who held the Extra before
incentive licensing came to be in the late 60's (they were very few in
number) Then it got phased in by according to when you got your Extra
and had the 20 years in. I was in that 2nd batch. Later the whole
thing became a part of a "vanity" callsign program. I got my two
letter suffix in 1977 right after I crossed the 20 year mark (I was
licensed at age 13.) To the extent they were available you could
request a callsign. I got my own initials though that call was
actually my third choice.

My first radio was a Hallicrafters S-38D which my folks bought for me
(rather cluelessly) while I was awaiting my license (It took about 3-4
months for a license to come through after one took an exam back
then,) The S-38 family was really just a consumer shortwave listening
radio and I'd be hard pressed to think of a radio less suitable for
two way communcations. Nevertheless, I did muddle through for one year
with that radio for a year and probably developed great skill in
selective listening to sort out signals on the novice bands which were
very crowded then. I worked quite a bit of stateside stations,
probably 20 states with that receiver and a heath AT-1 trasmitter,
rated at 25 watts INPUT, but actually putting out only about 7 watts.
We were QRP before there was QRP. By the next Christmas I had my
General Class which was actually quite a feat for a 13 year old as the
test required hand manipulation of algebraic formulae and I was a year
shy of having any Algebra class. My high school shop teacher (W9ZKB
-SK) tutored me through all this and I passed the first attempt. For a
short while I was the youngest ham in Wisconsin. I got a Hammarlund
HQ-100, one of the very first of those and had to wait about two
months beyond Christmas for it to come in. I had by then a Viking
Adventurer which was 50 watts in and about 25 out. It was all CW, I
couldn't afford a phone rig at home. I operated a lot from my Junior
High School where W9ZKB set up a spare rig of his in his drafting
classroom. He let me operate there during his class when I had a study
hall but I had to operate CW since I couldn't disturb his class. With
that lack of phone access, I became a pretty dedicated CW op. I still
am.

Jon Teske W3JT