Takis: "And foot capacity effect as well! When I approached my
knee to the metal leg of the work-bench I would lose the station I had
been listening to." He said the tuning capacitor he had made was
obviously too small and he had to alter the taps on the coil
continuously. About three o'clock in the morning during a cold winter
night he heard a new sound--the breathing (carrier) noise and a sort
of regular ticking. He later found out that it was the new
broadcasting station in Vienna, Austria, which transmitted the sound
of a metronome throughout the night. This would have been about 1926.
I asked Takis about school. "In spite of the late nights
listening I never missed a day at school. My father was the Chairman
of the School Committee and I couldn't let him down. But I had to earn
some pocket money to pay for the bits a pieces I needed. Particularly
a decent pair of headphones; I had to hold the army headphone to me
ear with one hand which gave me pins and needles. For some years I
had kept goldfish and pigeons, so I sold them. A friend of mine had
gone to sea as a cadet and his ship went abroad, so I asked him to get
me a pair of headphones.
"I must explain to you that it was no easy matter for a Russian
seaman to serve on a vessel which visited foreign ports. First one
had to go through the Communist Party sieve and then he was told that
if he jumped ship his family would suffer for it.
"Anyway, he bought me a lovely pair of Telefunken headphones when
the ship berthed at Constantinople (Istanbul) which I have to this
day. But not on his first trip, when he was not allowed to go ashore.
And it was not the captain who decided who could go ashore. A trusted
member of the Party would pick out a group of seamen who could land
but they had to stay together the whole time.
"I never managed to go abroad. At the Club I had obtained a morse
test certificate for 40 letters a minute (8 wpm) in Latin characters
and 90 letters (18 wpm) in the Cyrillic alphabet (Russian). To go
abroad one had to up-grade to 80 Latin and 120 Cyrillic letters. (16
& 24 wpm). I was put on a small coastal ice-breaker which cleared the
river estuaries in the Black Sea.
"The Black Sea is one of the most treacherous inland seas in the
world. During the winter its northern shores are frozen whereas the
coast of Asia Minor keeps the southern shores relatively warm by
comparison. This results in gale force winds and rough seas. Waves
follow each other very closely as opposed to the long swell one gets
in the Pacific. Ships have to leave port to avoid crashing into each
other.
"I was about 18 when I first went to sea as a cadet W/T operator.
One day when we came out of an estuary the sea was so rough that the
captain decided to turn back. As we turned to starboard we noticed an
American freighter behind us heavily laden with wheat and very low
down in the water. To our horror it was caught between the crests of
two enormous waves and broke in two roughly amidships. Although we
were only about half a mile away the freighter sank before we could
get to it. We saw a few survivors in the water, but it would have
been impossible to put a boat into that treacherous sea. Apart from
which a man cannot survive many minutes in a water temperature just
above freezing. It was all over in a flash and we returned to Odessa
in deep shock.
"Odessa used to have four harbours. The callsign of the W/T
station was EU5KAO. I remember it very well because it was my job to
take the weather forecasts for shipping which it transmitted
regularly."
Takis spoke about some amusing misconceptions of that period.
When he first completed his receiver and was getting poor results with
it he asked a more experienced amateur to look at it. The 'expert'
immediately found the first fault: the downlead from the antenna had a
bend in it of more than 45 degrees which was quite unacceptable.
Secondly, the ground connection to the central heating radiator was no
good because it was winter and the radiator was hot so it presented a
very high resistance! It must be soldered, he said, to a cold water
tap.
"I tried everything I could think of to solder the wire to the
tap, but to no avail. Then one day I had a brain-wave and I made a
stupendous invention! I wrapped a copper strip round the tap and
bolted it tightly, together with the ground wire. I was really very
proud of myself and wondered if anybody else had ever thought of doing
it that way."
I asked Takis if he had done any transmitting from home. "We
amateurs of foreign origin were not allowed to own transmitters but we
could operate the club station under close supervision by the Party
member who was always present. My own SWL callsign was RK-1136 as you
can see from the QSL card I received from EU5DN in 1929.
"I remember our excitement when we first contacted a station
outside Russia. It was a station in Saarbrueken and we were on a
wavelength of 42 metres. All the members of the Club sent him our SWL
reports and he sent us back his cards and a photograph of his
equipment which was published in the Moscow amateur journal and so
Odessa became famous. On 42 metres most of our QSOs were with German
stations. As a result of this success many young lads joined our club
and we 'experts' would explain to them about bends in the aerial
down-lead and the high resistance of a ground connection to a central
heating radiator when the water in it was hot!!
The club transmitter consisted of 4 valves in a Hartley parallel
push-pull oscillator circuit which we considered to be of relative
'high power'--perhaps all of 10 watts."
Takis continued: "In 1930, my family, like many other families of
Greek origin, moved to Athens. I built a cw transmitter using four
Philips valves. I went and saw Mr Eleftheriou at the Ministry and he
informed me that there was no way that he could issue me with a
transmitting licence, but he thanked me all the same for telling him I
had built a transmitter."
Takis continued: "I would like you to notice these two QSL cards I
received in 1933. I1IP wrote on his card 'I am on the air since 1924
but you are the first SV station I have heard'. And the British
listener BRS1183 wrote 'Dear old man, very pleased to report your
signals. Are you the only active station in SV?' I think those
comments speak for themselves."
Norman: "Had you not heard about Tavaniotis, who had also
emigrated from Russia?"
Takis: "No. It was you who took me to the basement shack and
introduced me. I remember how I gaped when I saw the 150 watt
transmitter Bill had built."
Takis then described how he had heard a distress signal on his
home-made receiver. It was in a language he could not understand so
he called his father, who was quite a linguist, to listen. It
appeared that the vessel had caught fire as it was approaching the
port of Piraeus, south of Athens. The captain of the ship said their
predicament was complicated by the fact that they were transporting a
large circus, with many wild animals. Takis ran to the nearest Police
station and told his story, but was greeted practically with derision.
How could a young lad like him know there had been a fire on a ship
which was not even in sight of the shore? Anyway, somebody was
brought to the station and the officer said "Go with this man." Takis
was taken to the coast at Palaio Faliro where he boarded a salvage
tug, and they set out to sea. He said the vessel in distress had been
bound for Piraeus, and sure enough the salvage tug located it, but
when they approached it there was no sign of fire as it had been put
out, before any of the animals could be harmed. But the engine room
had been damaged, so the tug towed the vessel into harbour. What
Coumbias didn't know was that by law he was entitled to a proportion
of the salvage money, and he never got anything.
Another incident involving a small yacht which belonged to a
friend of Takis' led to an interesting assignment. The yacht was
considered to be not seaworthy any more, and a W/T transmitter it
carried was dismantled completely by an electrician who knew nothing
about wireless.
"I was asked to put it together again by the owner who wanted to
sell it to the ship to shore W/T station where they did not have a
short wave capability yet. When I was shown the parts I was horrified
to see that there was no circuit diagram or instructions of any sort.
It took me more than a month to figure it all out. The transmitter
was of French manufacture and consisted of two enormous triodes in a
Hartley oscillator circuit. When I got it to work it was installed at
the Naval Wireless station at Votanikos, where the Director, Captain
Kyriakos Pezopoulos used it for experimental transmissions. There were
already two other transmitters there, one on Long Waves and one on 600
metres. The callsign of the station was SXA. As this was the third
transmitter they used the callsign SXA3. The operator, Lt. George
Bassiacos, had discovered some telegraphy stations which replied when
he called them--he had accidentally stumbled upon the amateur 20
metre band! With a transmitter supplied with unrectified A.C. at 400
Hz. and a power output of several kilowatts, no wonder contacts with
any part of the world were easy. When Captain Pezopoulos met Bill
Tavaniotis the latter suggested that if the 'experimental'
transmissions were to continue in the amateurs bands, the callsign
should be altered to SX3A. Thousands of successful contacts were made
as it was the beginning of sunspot cycle 16, a very good one as old
timers will know. If anyone reading this has a QSL card from SX3A it
would be appreciated if he would donate it to the Technical Museum in
Greece."
(Takis Coumbias died suddenly of a heart attack in September 1987.)