AmateurRadio.com

This is s great video that demonstrates timely coordination of radio communications resulting in a tradition in the modern military era.

Waving flags has become more a pride-filled tradition instead of attempting to communicate. Radio does not care if there is adequate visibility. We only care today that there is adequate propagation and efficient use of material and technology.

This film should give a warm sense of patriotism that helped lead us successfully through one of the most important, life-changing times in recent history. It was at a time where there are yet many who have first-hand experience of what actually too place. To ignore this is not paying due attention to the history of at least one element of what made this country great in the world. However, let’s not forget that our allies also benefited from this adventure in communication and many proudly share in its success.

The ham community tends to praise the outcome of ham radio’s introduction into military communications as technicians, engineers and operators. Add to the communications the necessary areas of safety and security. It is not merely a matter of technology consisting of the design and use of available material, it was invention of new uses for the people and equipment, much of it in new territory never before experienced. It became an opportunity to demonstrate the skill and experience of the amateur radio community.

Keep in mind that an amateur radio enthusiast in the early part of the 1900’s was nearly equivalent to being considered an engineer by many people. Ham radio communications and technology was all new territory and not merely consisting of a certifiable document. Later, many of those same hams became “television engineers” and their respect further enhanced. It was proof of someones ability to do unimaginable things in the existing world of new technology, the majority of it being staged outside the laboratory and thus more visible by the public.

This film establishes in great part the historical importance of our hobby and the degree of technology that was taken from what some might think at first is a mere plaything, a new adventure, to an area of expertise that few other technologies have attained. In the process, there have been many other areas of expertise that benefited and were enhanced by electronic communication such as, for example, the chemical/physical arena where new requirements in materials that were required to make radio eventually come together with such a high degree of success. Arguably, without the breaking of new ground by pioneering radio, there would be no TV, cell phones, etc.

The fact that this took place some 75 years ago, within a couple of years of my birth, and people are still talking about tends to lend this technology some degree of perpetuity.

Correlation between what made those “old” ideas work with new materials and technology may well show up some day in new and amazing surprises.

Many inventions actually come from adaptation, in large part, of old ideas into new ventures and not giving up on them when a problem developed.

We have new materials and technology today. Not having some of them in decades past may well have been why some experimentation stopped regardless of the idea’s merit. Those old ideas must be reviewed periodically to see if some of them can possibly come to fruition today because of later discoveries and inventions.