What changed
Amateurs at war — edited Aug 31, 2026 by Unknown editor
This is the first recorded version, so every line is shown as added. Note: Imported from content/wiki
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Twice in the twentieth century the United States ordered every amateur station off the air. Both
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times the service came back larger, better equipped and more deeply tied to public service than
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before.
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## The First World War
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In **April 1917** Congress ordered US amateur stations closed; operators were required to dismantle
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antennas and receiving equipment as well as transmitters. Thousands of amateurs went into the Army
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and Navy as radio operators and instructors — in many cases they *were* the available pool of skilled
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operators.
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Transmitting resumed on **1 October 1919** after a long fight against proposals to keep the spectrum
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in government or commercial hands. The operators who came home had far better equipment knowledge,
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and within four years amateurs had crossed the Atlantic on short waves.
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## The Second World War
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Amateur operation was suspended again days after Pearl Harbor and stayed shut for the duration.
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- The **War Emergency Radio Service (WERS)** let licensed amateurs operate on VHF for civil defense
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work — air raid warning nets, damage reporting, and drills — under municipal authority rather than
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as individual amateurs.
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- Amateurs again supplied operators, instructors and technicians in enormous numbers to the armed
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services, and amateur-trained engineers worked on radar and communications development.
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- After the war, **surplus military equipment** — the ARC-5 "command sets", BC-348 receivers,
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handie-talkies — flooded the market cheaply and equipped a generation of postwar stations.
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## What the wars left behind
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- **MARS** — the Military Auxiliary Radio System (originally Military Affiliate Radio System) grew
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out of wartime cooperation and still links licensed amateurs with Department of Defense
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communications, historically carrying morale traffic (phone patches home) and today focused on
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contingency communication.
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- **A public-service expectation.** The idea that amateurs are a trained reserve who show up when
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infrastructure fails is not marketing; it is the argument that got the bands back twice. It runs
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straight through to today's [emergency communications](/wiki/emergency) work.
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- **Radiotelephone technique.** Wartime and postwar single-sideband development moved HF voice off AM
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and onto SSB during the 1950s.
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## A note on the phone patch era
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For decades, amateur stations relayed voice traffic from deployed service members to their families
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through **phone patches** — an HF contact bridged onto the telephone network. Cheap satellite phones
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and the internet ended the practice, but for many families in the 1960s through the 1990s an
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anonymous ham in another state was the only voice link to a spouse or child overseas.
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Continue with [from spark to software](/wiki/radio-history/technology-timeline).