Twice in the twentieth century the United States ordered every amateur station off the air. Both times the service came back larger, better equipped and more deeply tied to public service than before.
The First World War
In April 1917 Congress ordered the roughly 6,000 licensed US amateur stations closed; operators were required to dismantle antennas and receiving equipment as well as transmitters — the Navy's orders covered receiving, not just transmitting. Thousands of amateurs went into the Army and Navy as radio operators and instructors — in many cases they were the available pool of skilled operators.
Transmitting resumed on 1 October 1919 after a long fight against proposals to keep the spectrum in government or commercial hands. The operators who came home had far better equipment knowledge, and within four years amateurs had crossed the Atlantic on short waves.
That reopening was not only an American argument. Marconi and Sir Ambrose Fleming, inventor of the thermionic valve, both spoke publicly in 1919 in favor of leaving room for amateur experimenters — the two most authoritative voices in wireless taking the hobbyists' side at exactly the moment governments were deciding whether to give the spectrum back.
The Second World War
The service was drawn in before the shutdown. Through 1941, with tubes and components scarce, the military asked amateurs to donate parts and was buried in them. US amateurs were recruited into a Civilian Technical Corps to operate and maintain British radar. And when the Army needed the 80 meter band, the FCC compensated amateurs with phone privileges on 40 meters for the first time — until then 40 was CW only.
Amateur operation was suspended entirely days after Pearl Harbor and stayed shut for the duration. By 1942 some 15,000 US amateurs were in uniform.
- At the ARRL's suggestion the Office of Civil Defense built its civil-defense communication
- The War Emergency Radio Service (WERS) let licensed amateurs operate on VHF for civil defense
- Amateurs again supplied operators, instructors and technicians in enormous numbers to the armed
- After the war, surplus military equipment — the ARC-5 "command sets", BC-348 receivers,
system around amateur radio — the start of a working relationship between civil defense and the amateur service that continues today through ARES and RACES.
work — air raid warning nets, damage reporting, and drills — under municipal authority rather than as individual amateurs.
services, and amateur-trained engineers worked on radar and communications development.
handie-talkies — flooded the market cheaply and equipped a generation of postwar stations.
What the wars left behind
- MARS — the Military Auxiliary Radio System (originally Military Affiliate Radio System) grew
- A public-service expectation. The idea that amateurs are a trained reserve who show up when
- Radiotelephone technique. Wartime and postwar single-sideband development moved HF voice off AM
out of wartime cooperation and still links licensed amateurs with Department of Defense communications, historically carrying morale traffic (phone patches home) and today focused on contingency communication.
infrastructure fails is not marketing; it is the argument that got the bands back twice. It runs straight through to today's emergency communications work.
and onto SSB during the 1950s.
A note on the phone patch era
For decades, amateur stations relayed voice traffic from deployed service members to their families through phone patches — an HF contact bridged onto the telephone network. Cheap satellite phones and the internet ended the practice, but for many families in the 1960s through the 1990s an anonymous ham in another state was the only voice link to a spouse or child overseas.
Sources and further reading
- AC6V's amateur radio history — Rod Dinkins, AC6V (SK): the
- ARRL public service — the civil-defense relationship as it
- United States Early Radio History — primary documents
year-by-year chronology this page draws its wartime figures and details from.
stands now.
on the fight to reopen the bands after 1919.
Continue with from spark to software, or read a history of amateur emergency service.