mateur Radio by Bill Leonard, CBS News President W2SKE. Amateur radio, as the airplane,
is no longer a crude Kitty Hawk baby. Once it did take a garage full of fairly frightening
equipment to say almost nothing to almost nobody almost no distance away and it took an odd breedof nose-in-the-formula duck to master the intricacies of the spark gaps, tickler coils and reflex
audions, to say nothing of the dots and dashes. Today, a transmitter receiver combination no bigger
than a portable typewriter is on the market, easily capable of regular communication with all partsof the world. It is about as difficult to operate as a home hair-rinse kit.

AA great deal has been written about the work of hams in national and local emergencies, foods,wrecks and hurricanes. Hams are proud of their public service record. Perhaps just as important andfrequently overlooked, is the fact that hams are among the nations best ambassadors abroad. An
estimated 10 thousand conversations between US and foreign hams take place every day. The Voiceof America considers ham radio of such vital international interest that one of its few programs in
English, beamed to Europe and Asia, is a weekly ham show.
There are hams who are housewives (girls allowed) and bandleaders I.G. Gene Krupa, politician(Herbert Hoover Jr.) and entertainers(Authur Godfrey) kings (Prince Abdullah
Feisal of Saudi Arabia) and writers (Ernest
Sweet Smell of Success Lehman) ship
captains (Kurt Carlsen of the ill fated
Flying Enterprise) and captains of industry(Hazzard Reeves K2GL, president ofCinerama) guardians of the air (Air Force
Chief of Staff, General Curtis LeMay andthe seedy New York Prison Warden EdDros. There are hams who are doctors,
lawyers and a sprinkling of Indian chiefs.
There is too little room on highways of ether for the great number of ham stations traveling on them.
So the ham at his own station has to contend with the problem of interference from other hams, aswell as the never ending job of keeping his gear in workable shape. In the early TV days neither ham
equipment nor television sets were designed to keep the ham signals from interfering. Now, ham
techniques and equipment and television sets were designed to keep the ham signals from interfering.
Now, ham techniques and equipment and TV receivers have improved to the point where televisioninterference from amateurs is a steadily diminishing problem.
Actually ham radio is not simply one activity but many. For the competitive, the rigorous contests
are available. But just as all motorists aren’t race drivers, so most hams pursue quieter aspects of thehobby. For the tinkerer and do it yourself addict there is equipment to put together, tear apart and put
together again, equipment handsome enough and complicated enough to satisfy any sci-fi bug.
The gabber gets a chance to talk endlessly on the airwaves and the listener can eavesdrop to hisheart’s content. It is not unusual for round table Kaffeeklatsch QSO’s to embrace a dozen hams all
on one wave length, but located on all six continents. English is the international ham language.
Some hams concentrate on message handling (two N.J. high school students have handled over 15
hundred telephone patches - relays - for our Antarctica base personnel, others love Civil Defense
work and yet others use their sets only to keep in touch with one or two friends. It is a great hobby,
may it always be so. (Wm A. Leonard 1916-1994) age 78 leaves wife Norma and 6 sons.
W8SU 2006