Amateur radio is older than broadcasting. Within a few years of Marconi turning Hertz's laboratory curiosity into a communication system in the 1890s, self-taught experimenters were building spark-gap stations at home from magazine plans, and by 1910 the airwaves over the United States were an unregulated free-for-all.
Beginnings, 1900–1912
- Instructions for building simple wireless sets appeared in general-interest magazines from about
- The press reported boys building working stations from scratch: two Boston eighth-graders with an
- Commercially made transmitter/receiver sets reached American experimenters in 1905.
- Columbia University students formed the Wireless Telegraph Club of Columbia University in 1908 —
1901 — Amateur Work published a Hertz-based system that November.
eight-mile link in 1904, two Rhode Island teenagers operating from a chicken coop in 1906.
the earliest recorded amateur radio club. The Wireless Institute of Australia followed in 1910.
By 1910 there were thousands of amateur transmitters, most of them broad, crude spark sets that smeared energy across the spectrum and interfered with commercial and naval stations.
The regulation that created the hobby
The Radio Act of 1912, passed in the aftermath of the Titanic sinking, was the turning point. It began federal licensing of American operators and stations, and confined private stations to wavelengths of 200 meters and shorter — frequencies the commercial services of the day considered worthless. Estimates suggest the number of US hobbyists fell by as much as 88%.
Those who stayed discovered that short waves refract off the ionosphere and travel around the world. Amateurs, not industry, opened the shortwave spectrum.
Where "ham" comes from
The best-supported explanation is the least flattering: in wired telegraphy a "ham" was a heavy-handed, clumsy operator, and professional telegraphers applied the taunt to the amateurs crowding the spectrum. The amateurs kept the word.
You will also hear a much-repeated story about a 1911 Harvard club station "HYMAN-ALMY-MURRAY" shortened to HAM; there is no contemporary evidence for it. And "ham" is not an acronym for anything, which is why it is properly written lower-case.
Organizing, and the transatlantic tests
- 1914 — Hiram Percy Maxim and Clarence Tuska founded the American Radio Relay League to link
- 1917 — about 6,000 US amateurs were licensed, and the code test had risen to 10 wpm, when
- 1920 — Eunice Randall was announcing and engineering at 1XE near Boston at nineteen, built her
- 1921 — American amateurs challenged British counterparts to hear them across the Atlantic.
- 27 November 1923 — the first two-way transatlantic amateur contact, between Fred Schnell in
- 1923 — WWV began broadcasting the time and frequency standards amateurs calibrated against,
- 1925 — national societies founded the International Amateur Radio Union in Paris, which still
- 1927–28 — the Radio Act created the Federal Radio Commission and 10 meters opened to amateurs,
- 1933 — Robert Moore, W6DEI, began single-sideband voice experiments on 75 meters.
- 1934 — the Communications Act created the FCC, and amateur licenses were reorganized into
- 1941 — amateurs donated scarce components to the military by the crateful, joined a Civilian
- 1941–45 — amateur operation was suspended again for the Second World War, with some 15,000 US
amateur relay routes into a national network; QST began publishing in December 1915. See how amateurs organized themselves.
Congress ordered them all off the air for the First World War and required equipment to be dismantled — the Navy banned even receiving. Amateurs were back on the air in the fall of 1919, helped by Marconi and Ambrose Fleming arguing publicly that the service was worth keeping.
own amateur station, and became one of the first women in New England to hold a first-class license — 1CDP, later W1MPP. See women in amateur radio.
US signals were copied in the UK, and in December 1922 a British amateur was heard in the US.
the US and Léon Deloy in France. Within a year, contacts spanned the Americas, New Zealand and Britain.
and the following year US amateurs received bands at 80, 40, 20 and 5 meters.
represents the service at the International Telecommunication Union. In 1926 Brandon Wentworth, 6OI, confirmed contacts with every continent.
while the International Radiotelegraph Conference in Washington set the call-sign prefix system still in use.
Class A, B and C. By 1936 there were about 46,000 licensed amateurs. See a history of US licensing.
Technical Corps maintaining British radar, and received phone privileges on 40 meters for the first time when the Army needed 80.
amateurs in uniform by 1942; the War Emergency Radio Service used amateur skills at home, and afterwards surplus military sets such as the ARC-5 filled thousands of shacks.
The modern service
- 1945 — CQ began publishing, giving the service a second national magazine alongside QST.
- 1950s — the US amateur population neared 90,000; amateurs pioneered single-sideband for HF
- 1961 — OSCAR 1, the first amateur satellite, launched four years after Sputnik and started a
- 1979 — the World Administrative Radio Conference added 30, 17 and 12 meters, still called the
- 1970s–80s — repeaters and FM handhelds made local operating routine, and packet radio put
- 1977 — 327,000 US amateurs were licensed. In 1984 the ten-year license replaced the five-year
- 1990s — PCs and sound cards brought PSK31, DSP and software-defined radio into ordinary
- 2003–07 — the WRC allowed member countries to drop Morse testing; the FCC removed it for all
- 2017 onward — FT8 made worldwide contacts practical from
voice, kept US personnel in Antarctica in touch with home during the International Geophysical Year, and in 1952 the Radio Amateur Civil Emergency Service (RACES) was created for amateurs serving civil-defense authorities.
worldwide series. See satellites.
WARC bands. Nine years later amateurs lost 220–222 MHz to land mobile — see amateurs and the spectrum.
automated digital messaging on the air before most people had internet.
term and the FCC began handing examining to Volunteer Examiners.
stations. The FCC created the no-code Technician in 1991, with Technician Plus for those who had passed the 5 wpm test; in 1999 the last North American coast stations working Morse closed down.
US license classes effective 23 February 2007. Morse remains popular by choice — see CW and Morse.
apartments and through solar minima.
Through it all, amateurs have carried traffic when other systems failed: the September 11 attacks, Hurricane Katrina, the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, and Hurricane Maria, where the Red Cross requested 50 amateur operators for Puerto Rico. That habit has been organized since the Amateur Radio Emergency Corps of 1935 — see a history of amateur emergency service.
The bargain
The through-line is the same in every era: amateurs get spectrum in exchange for advancing the radio art, training operators, and providing communication when nothing else works. See why get licensed for how that bargain looks today.
Sources and further reading
- AC6V's amateur radio history — Rod Dinkins, AC6V (SK): a
- History of amateur radio — Wikipedia;
- Ham Radio History (W2PA) — Chris Codella, W2PA: a century of amateur
- United States Early Radio History — Thomas H. White's
year-by-year chronology of the service, and the source for several license counts here.
the general overview this page draws its chronology from.
radio told from the original QST and contemporary sources, article by article.
archive of articles and primary extracts covering 1897–1927, including Pioneering Amateurs (1900–1917) and Amateur Radio After World War One (1919–1925).