Hams had a bigger place in the communications years ago, and I thank those old time guys that did important volunteer work/play, for a hobby.
A belated Merry Christmas to all the Hams that do volunteer communications!
Christmas, 1957 in Northern Italy, the 124th Signal Company set up two stations, and did calls home.
I was UHF, the rigs used were HF, and I have no memory of the frequencies used. If you stayed up past midnight the connection to stateside telephones was fairly good. Some nights, the connections never came up at all, but the volunteers stayed at it for hours, trying. The volunteers were Hams with suitable licenses. The stateside Hams were just ordinary good guys. Some had "deals" with their phone companies, others just "ate" any long distance charges to reach your home. I was not one who got through.......
That week, we did not have bed check, and the volunteers were released from normal duties till lunch. They were expected to sleep, undisturbed.
One of the officers set up a code class, but repeated events canceling the class resulted in abandonment. The goal was FCC licenses, and the repairmen would be qualified for advanced levels from our 6 months of training. After I came home, the technical cert from the Army disappeared, so I let that hobby go. The First Missile Command spent a week every month in the field, and my team another week out in the mountains doing comm tests, so it was hard to find time that fit every bodies schedule.
Before I was drafted, I attended Bliss Electric School, working toward an EE degree. We had a radio club, and when we had a football game with Capitol Radio Engineering Institute, we cheered "Three Dit, Four Dit, Two Dit, Dah, CREI, CREI, RAH RAH RAH". Nobody but the students at CREI got it, unless there was a ham present.
