The text which follows was written by Pol N2DOE of Bergenfield NJ.
Norman Joly and I first met in 1935 when I started working with
Bill SV1KE as his radio mechanic. Norman was then working for the
local agents of RCA selling broadcast receivers. The last time I saw
him before the war, was in September 1939. I was still working with
Bill and I went to the British School of Archaeology in Athens to
deliver a National NC 100 with a Spiderweb all-band antenna. Norman
had been recruited to set up a monitoring station for the Press
Department of the British Embassy, which had been moved to a building
in the grounds of the school. After the end of the war I saw him again
in 1948 in the uniform of a Superintendent of Police working in the
British Police Mission to Greece. He told me he had obtained a
special licence and was back on the air with his pre-war callsign
SV1RX.
In 1951 I emigrated to Brazil where I stayed for 17 years and then
came to the U.S.A. in 1968, where I have been ever since. We had lost
contact with each other and it was five years later that I found
Norman's address in the American callbook. I wrote to him and in his
reply he begged me to come on the air again. Owing to a prolonged
family illness which culminated in the loss of my beloved wife it was
1980 before I was in the mood to take up amateur radio once again,
with my present callsign N2DOE.
When I went to London in 1984 to spend a few weeks with Norman he
told me he had started recording some reminiscences on a tape recorder
about the first radio amateurs in Greece, and he asked me if I would
like to help. As I was one of them myself I agreed. When I left to
return to the U.S.A. he gave me a number of cassettes to transcribe.
Although he speaks fluent Greek without any accent at all, he never
attended a Greek school and couldn't write the memories. He told me
to add anything else I could remember about those pioneering days long
gone by.
So, to start from the beginning, let me say that I was born in
Constantinople (now Istanbul) in Turkey, in October 1910, of Greek
parents. Although we spoke Greek at home I did not go to a Greek
school until I was nine. But I soon moved to the French College where
all the lessons were in French and Greek was only taught as a foreign
language for two hours every afternoon.
My elder brother had subscribed to a French magazine called 'La
Science et La Vie' (Science & Life) and I had become fascinated by a
subject called 'Telegrafie sans fil' (Telegraphy without wire). The
broadcasting of speech and music had not started yet in that part of
the world, though in 1923, a broadcasting station was built in Ankara
the capital of Turkey. Broadcast receivers began to appear in the
shops, either with headphones or large horn loudspeakers, but we never
had one at home.
In 1926 we moved to Athens, Greece, where I went to school.
Strangely enough, as I found out later, that was the year when Norman
also came to Athens for the first time. At school I met Nasos
Coucoulis (later SV1SM and SV1AC) who was also very interested in
wireless. I made a crystal receiver and was able to hear the Greek
Royal Navy station at Votanikos SXA and the old station at Thiseon in
Athens itself, which was still a spark station. There just was
nothing else to hear. I acquired a Philips 'E' type valve and built a
grid-leak detector circuit, but all I got was silence. The four volt
heater drew one amp and I had been trying to get it going with a small
torch battery. As I became more experienced I began repairing simple
broadcast receivers for my friends and putting up wire antennas for
reception for people who had bought broadcast receivers.
In 1929 Nasos and I were in our final year at the Megareos School.
We built a very simple AM transmitter tuned to about 500 metres and we
broadcast the performance of a play acted by the final year students.
I have no idea if anybody heard our transmission, but it was certainly
the first amateur broadcast in Greece.
Nasos and I spoke to each other with very simple AM transmitters
across the 60 metres or so separating our homes, again without knowing
whether anybody else ever accidentally tuned in to our very low power
transmissions.
In 1932 I was called up for my compulsory Military service and
ended up attending the Reserve Officers Cadet School. After my
military training I started work at the Lambropoulos Brothers shop in
the Metohikon Tameion building. It was there that I made the
acquaintance of Takis Coumbias, who had come to Greece from Russia
with his family. Takis had had eight years experience of amateur
radio in Russia, and he told us how the radio clubs operated under the
strict supervision of the Communist Party.
Three years later, in 1935, I moved to Tavaniotis' workshop as his
mechanic. 'Bill' had built an AM and CW transmitter with an output of
150 watts. He used the callsign SV1KE. We had regular contacts with
George Moens SU1RO in Cairo, Egypt. George is still active in his
native land of Belgium with the callsign ON5RO in Brussels. He should
be well into his 80s by now. In 1938 George came to Athens with his
wife Beba and their little boy Robert to visit her parents who were
Greek, and of course they came to our shack and we had the pleasure of
meeting them in person after many years of chatting over the air.
In Greece we are 7 hours ahead of Eastern Standard Time and so
our contacts with the U.S.A. took place well after midnight, our time.
One of the stations we contacted very regularly was Charles Mellen
W1FH in Boston. Chas was born in Boston of Greek parents. His father
came to Greece in 1936 or 1937 with Charles' younger sister, a pretty
little girl of about 14. They came to Bill's shack and were able to
speak to Boston with the equipment shown in this photograph taken by
Norman. After the end of World War II W1FH together with W6AM of
California were the two leading stations in the U.S.A. topping all
the achievement tables. But W6AM had a slight advantage; he had
bought a site previously belonging to Press Wireless which had 36
rhombics whereas W1FH always operated with his simple Yagi at 60 feet.
Another station with which we had frequent contacts on 20 metres
was W2IXY owned by Dorothy Hall. One night Dorothy gave us a big
surprise. In the course of a QSO she told us to listen carefully.
Suddenly the three or four of us in SV1KE's shack heard our voices
coming back from New York. Dorothy had recorded our previous
transmission on a disc. A few days later we turned the tables on her.
We had hastily put together some recording equipment and played back
her transmission. Dorothy said that was the first time she had heard
her voice coming from 5,000 miles away. I must explain that at that
time (about 1933) home recording was a novelty even in the U.S.A.
Recording on vinyl tape was invented by Telefunken towards the end of
the war in 1945. Today even little children play with cassette
recorders, and the latest revolutionary home recording system invented
by Japan DAT (Digital Audio Tape) provides high fidelity studio
quality with no background noise; really a 'super' version of the mini
cassette recorder.
In Athens we continued to operate even through the Dictatorship of
General Metaxas which began with a coup in August 1936, but not
without some problems. The main target of the infamous Maniadakis,
Minister of the Interior under Metaxas, were of course the Communists,
but the handful of radio amateurs also came under suspicion of being
subversive elements. Things got worse, in fact, when the newspaper
ESTIA owned by K. Kyrou, published an article blaming 'amateurs' for
being responsible for interference to short wave reception. I must
explain that the writer was referring to the dozens of pirate low
power broadcasting stations operating in the medium wave (broadcast)
band. Regretably, I have to place on record that owing to the late
development of broadcasting and official recognition of amateur radio
in Greece, the word 'amateur' in the minds of the general public
embraces CBers, pirates of all kinds operating on medium waves and
recently in the FM band, and genuine licensed amateurs as well. So,
as I was working in the basement workshop at SV1KE's one afternoon,
three of Maniadakis' plain-clothes men turned up and said they had
come to seize 'the broadcasting equipment'. Fortunately Bill was not
in the shop when they came. I asked them if they had a search warrant
and they said no. I replied that I was only an employee and could
they call back a little later when Mr Tavaniotis himself would be
there to answer their questions, and thus managed to get rid of them.
When Bill returned I told him about the incident and he left straight
away and went to the Ministry of Posts & Telegraphs to see Mr.
Stefanos Eleftheriou. And so it came about that Eleftheriou who knew
all about our activity in the amateur bands issued the first three
licences to SV1KE, SV1CA and SV1NK 'to carry out experimental
transmissions relating to the study of propagation on the short
waves'. He knew that he had every right to do this as Greece was a
signatory to the international telecommunication treaties.
I would like to record at this point that Aghis Cazazis SV1CA now
a silent key, has left his own 'monument' in Athens. After the end of
World War II, in his capacity as Head of Lighting Development with the
Electricity authority, he designed the magnificent floodlighting of
the Acropolis which is admired by tourists to the present day.
To return to 1937: Mr Eleftheriou entrusted us with the task of
preparing draft legislation for legalising amateur radio activity. We
wrote to the U.S.A., to England, France and Germany and obtained
copies of the laws governing the issue of licences in all these
countries, and we began the long task of drafting a text which would
be appropriate to the political situation then prevailing in our
country (military dictatorship). Norman Joly, then SV1RX, had written
a text in English, but before we could translate it into Greek or do
anything about it, all our hopes were dashed to the ground by the
outbreak of war in September 1939.
In 1944 while serving as a reserve officer in the Greek army, I
was seconded to the British Military Mission to Greece (B.M.M.)
because of my knowledge of English and French. There I met several
amateurs serving with the British forces, and one of them gave me a
small military transmitter, so I was able to come on the air again
with my old callsign of SV1AZ.