The signal faded in slowly, dying away into the background roar, returning.
    Jim's heart was pounding so hard it shook him.
    "Calling DX."
    Thousands of miles of black, tumbling ocean intervened. Outside, the two great towers, outlined irregularly in white, rose up and up into the swirling snow; downstairs, the input reactors sang monotonously in the ghastly glow of the rectifiers. The filaments of the push-pull stage in the 7-mc. amplifier imparted a dull radiance to the polished edges of the neutralizing condenser discs. All were ready, waiting to hurl the dynamite.—from John C. Flippin, W4VT, "Jim," 1935

    You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: You send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat.—Albert Einstein

By the mid 1880s CE, humankind had discovered and could rudimentarily produce and detect the electromagnetic waves we now call radio. By World War I, the importance to human society of radio for commerce and defense had enlivened popular culture such that organizations of private, nonprofessional radio experimenters—radio amateurs, later nicknamed hams—had come into being worldwide. In the 1920s, the advent of broadcasting, first via radio wavelengths of hundreds of meters, later on shorter wavelengths found by hams to be more easily capable of spanning intercontinental distances, and later still at the much shorter wavelengths used by FM and television, spawned the hobby of distance listening—DXing, a sport even more energetically enjoyed by hams in two-way form. Even though my father and uncle had been licensed radio amateurs since the 1930s, my boyhood encounter with the how and why of the medium behind radio's message began with my own discovery that each nightfall brought to even the lowliest kitchen AM/mediumwave radio a flood of signals from cities hundreds to thousands of miles away. For me, radio works magic that cannot fail to enthrall.

Essays and Explorations

The First W9VES
Amateur Radio W9VES Today
Reducing Subharmonic Energy with an f/2-Trap Tank
The Ecology of the Oscillator-Only Transmitter
Cathode Keying and B-Minus Keying: What's the Difference?
Primary Keying, Simulated and Actual
Trials and Tribulations of the Tri-Tet Oscillator
The Harmonic Pierce: Understanding Jones's "Sure-Fire" Crystal Oscillator
Intrinsic Negative Resistance as a Cause of Parasitic Oscillations in Beam Power Tubes
Seventy Years of the Boosted Pierce
Rediscovering the Mix-Goodman Band-Imaging Receiver
In Praise of the Three-Stage Transmitter
It's Been a Great Winter (K. B. Warner, W1EH, 1931)
Hams We Are (K. B. Warner, W1EH, 1931)
"I Can't Be Bothered" (R. B. Bourne, W1ANA, 1932)
Jim (John C. Flippin, W4VT, 1935)
Farewell to Monrovia

    Well, there you were, except for the gadgets such as blocking condensers, 'phones, kick-back preventer, change-over switch and a key with contacts as big as dimes to carry the heavy current. What could you do with it? You couldn't do much in the summer, particularly at night, because of the static. You couldn't hear anything when anybody else was sending in the same town, because a nearby signal occupied the whole tuner. But given a break, you could talk for miles, many miles. And given a really good break, a crisp clear winter night in the wee hours after the young squirts with the spark-coils had gone to bed, you could have the time of your life and actually work for hundreds of miles . . . if the signals didn't fade out, if interference didn't start up, if you didn't blow a condenser, or if you didn't lose that critical adjustment. Or if the cops didn't run you in for maintaining a nuisance, or a wind blow down your masts. And you could investigate the phenomenon known as kickbacks-in-the-power-wiring and, as we twice did, set the house on fire. Or the phenomenon known as corona losses, watching the great fuzzy caterpillars on the high-voltage parts of your antenna system. Or involve yourself in endless arguments over high note versus low, what the power factor is in a freely oscillating circuit, or how loose the coupling ought to be to obtain a "pure" wave.
    Those, our friends, were the days from which amateur radio has come.—from K. B. Warner, W1EH, "Silver Anniversary," 1940