Category Archives: Radio History

The Vietnam Wars – Connecting the Pieces Through Radio: A Personal Journey Part 1

The Vietnam Wars

Connecting the Pieces Through Radio: A Personal Journey

by Don Moore

Part One

Don’s traveling DX stories can be found in his book Tales of a Vagabond DXer [SWLing Post affiliate link]. If you’ve already read his book and enjoyed it, do Don a favor and leave a review on Amazon.

Except where noted otherwise, all photos are from the Vietnamese Military History Museum in Hanoi.

Last winter, I spent several months traveling through Southeast Asia. When I arrived in Hanoi I had the usual plans on my agenda. I wanted to learn more about Vietnamese culture and history. I wanted to sample authentic local food. I wanted to spend a few days outside the city to see some natural sites. And there was one more thing. I wanted to understand the Vietnam War better.

Understanding history is always at the top of my agenda when I travel. But this time was different, as it was also very personal. I was too young to have been in the Vietnam War, but the war was a constant presence throughout my childhood. It was on the front page of the daily newspaper. It was in the radio news reports. And it was on television. The Vietnam War is often called the first television war, as television brought the reality of the war directly into our living rooms. My family regularly watched the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite and his calm, controlled manner in reporting the news. I remember videos of soldiers hacking their way through dense jungle foliage. I remember bombed-out buildings, helicopters crashing, and wounded soldiers being carried in stretchers. It wasn’t like the war stories in my history books.

Early in the war, around 1966, one of my mother’s cousins was drafted and sent to Vietnam. A few months later, he suffered a severe head wound and was sent home. I was nine years old, and I remember him watching me play with my toy soldiers in a corner at a family gathering. What did he think of my childish innocence? That was the last time I saw him. He left the area and lived a disturbed, difficult life until passing away several years ago.

Once a week, Walter Cronkite would report the official casualty counts from the Pentagon. Whatever the number of American dead was, our South Vietnamese allies generally had about twice that number. And our Viet Cong and North Vietnamese enemies? They always suffered about ten dead for every American killed. The pattern was very consistent, and the numbers said it all. We were winning. So why did the nightly news also carry reports of massive anti-war protests around the country?

The war and the protests against it continued. In 1970, I was in junior high school and still several years too young for the draft. That didn’t stop my mother from worrying that the war would last long enough to drag me into it. It certainly seemed possible. My parents and many of the adults around me didn’t think highly of the hippies doing the protesting. But those same adults were also questioning whether the war was worth the cost. I didn’t understand that. Shouldn’t we want to win the war, whatever the cost?

American history was my passion when I was a child. I read a steady stream of history books that always put my country and its great leaders in the best possible light. My heroes were people like Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone, perfect and admirable in every way. And John Wayne. I loved his western and World War II movies. I was becoming a flag-waving my-country-does-no-wrong super patriot. I believed that the Vietnam War was a good thing and that we were on the side of right. I saw the war as just one more chapter in our glorious history. My parents did not teach me to think that way. That wasn’t who they were. I had gotten that way by taking the books I chose to read and the movies I chose to watch too seriously.

In 1971, I discovered shortwave radio. I wasn’t surprised by the anti-American sentiment on stations like Radio Moscow and Radio Havana. They were on the side of evil. And some of the language they used was humorous. Imperialist running dogs? Really? What puzzled me was what I heard on stations like the BBC, Radio Canada, Radio Netherlands, and Deutsche Welle. They were good guys on our side. Why were our friends so strongly questioning what we were doing in Vietnam? Something didn’t add up.

Mark Twain famously said that travel is fatal to prejudice and narrow-minded thinking. With me, it started with shortwave radio. I expanded my reading list to include history and recent events from the rest of the world, especially Latin America. In the school library, I began critically reading the news reports from Time, Newsweek, and The New York Times. I began to understand that reality was different from what I had come to believe. Until 1971, the world was black and white. Good versus evil. Bad guys versus good guys. That’s how a child thinks. In 1971, I began to learn that reality has many shades of gray. Understanding the Vietnam War was a key part of that change.

The Vietnam War ended just before I graduated from high school in 1975. Soon other events and wars around the world filled the daily news cycle. The Vietnam War faded from memory. Then about twenty years ago, I came across bound copies of old Time and Newsweek magazines while browsing at the Penn State University library. I pulled out a volume from the late 1960s and began leafing through it. I spent the rest of the afternoon reading about the war as it happened. That rekindled my interest in the era that I grew up in, and since then I’ve read several books on the Vietnam War. But I always knew I was missing part of the story. That is what I was searching for when I landed at Hanoi airport.

Two Sculptures

One of the first places I sought out was the John McCain memorial. A young Navy pilot when his plane was shot down over Hanoi in late 1967, McCain spent over five years in Hanoi’s notorious Hoa Lo Prison. Later, he became a congressman and a senator, and in 2008 he ran for president against Barack Obama. McCain wasn’t perfect; heroes never are. But he was a highly principled, independently thinking man, and even those who disagreed with his politics respected him for that.

A river runs through Hanoi, and there are several small lakes within the central city. American forces launched over a million air sorties against the north during the war. When their planes were hit by enemy fire, American pilots attempted to direct their damaged aircraft towards water for a better chance of survival versus crashing into buildings. That’s what injured John McCain did. This picture from the Ho Loa Prison Museum shows Vietnamese civilians who went into the lake and pulled McCain from the water before he could drown. They did that for dozens of downed American pilots.

As I stood there looking over the now peaceful lake, I tried to picture the scene as a Vietnamese civilian at the time. Enemy planes are flying overhead, dropping bombs to destroy my city and kill my people. Shells are exploding above me as my side tries to shoot them down. And in front of me in the lake is an injured enemy pilot about to drown as his nearby plane sinks below the surface. Amidst all the chaos, would I risk my life by going into the lake to save his? I know that a part of me would want to let the $%#* drown. Would I save him? I don’t know the answer.

A few days later, I visited the Vietnam Military History Museum, the best place in Hanoi to learn about the war. This statue of Ho Chi Minh, flanked by a man with binoculars and another man with a field telephone, is more meaningful than you might think just by giving it a casual glance.

Ho Chi Minh understood that two essential components of winning a war are intelligence gathering and good communication. And that viewpoint carries over into the museum displays. The museum has all kinds of fighting equipment on display. But along the way, there is also an extensive collection of radio equipment with good explanations of how and when it was used. Photos of the radios in the museum would, by themselves, make for an interesting pictorial. But they are meaningless without understanding the context they belong to.

Two Thousand Years of Warfare

The use of radio communication in warfare has only been around for a little over a century, and this story begins long before that. That’s why the title refers to “The Vietnam Wars.” The Vietnam Military History Museum has three sections, and the first is totally focused on China. The story told in that room is long and complex. Two thousand years ago, Vietnam was ruled by China. Then in the year 40 CE, two sisters, Trung Trac and Trung Nhi, began a rebellion. They raised an army of 80,000 men and women (including numerous women generals) and successfully pushed the Chinese out of their region.

Three years later, a much larger Chinese army put the rebellion down and executed the sisters. But it didn’t end there. The Vietnamese people continued to rebel and eventually pushed the Chinese out. In the following centuries, China continued to attempt to rule Vietnam. Sometimes they succeeded, but the Vietnamese never accepted Chinese rule. Men and women, together, would rise up to fight the invaders. The lesson in this room is that the Vietnamese people have been fighting to keep foreign powers from controlling their country for over two thousand years. It’s a sobering thought.

By the 19th century, China was in decline but Southeast Asia was now a target for European colonialism. So the subject of the second section of the museum is France. In 1858, French troops landed in Da Nang, along the central coast. That initial attack was repulsed but the French regrouped and a year later attacked Saigon, in the south of the country. This time they established a foothold and the three years of war that followed resulted in France gaining control of three southern provinces. The next few decades were a series of wars followed by treaties intended to be broken until eventually France gained control of all of Vietnam as well as neighboring Cambodia and Laos.

Taking control of Vietnam wasn’t easy and neither was ruling it afterwards. The Vietnamese never stopped resisting French rule and major rebellions broke out every few years. But the best place to understand the scope of Vietnamese resistance is at the Hoa Lo Prison Museum, where John McCain and other American POWs were kept. The prison had seven cellblocks when the French colonial government opened it in 1901. Two cellblocks were for criminals and five for political prisoners. That’s an incredible ratio. And as bad as American POWs had it later, the Vietnamese political prisoners of the early 1900s had it far worse, as shown in this display in one of the actual rooms at the prison museum.

The Japanese Occupation

In June 1940, the French government surrendered to Hitler’s Germany, resulting in the formation of the puppet Fascist Vichy French government in the south of France. Most of France’s overseas territories, including French Indochina, came under control of the Vichy government. But France was a long way from Indochina, and their control was tenuous. In June 1940, Japan invaded northern Vietnam. Initially, there was some scattered fighting, but the two sides, both allies of Hitler’s regime, soon came to an understanding. The Vichy French would continue to nominally rule French Indochina, but the Japanese were really in charge.

Needless to say, the Vietnamese people did not acquiesce. And as bad as treatment from the French had been, the Japanese were worse. Once again the Vietnamese rebelled and gradually all the resistance forces became united under the leadership of the Viet Minh organization and its founder, Ho Chi Minh. For most of the war they were on their own, but by early 1945 the United States began air-dropping supplies and advisors from the OSS (later CIA).

On 15 August 1945, Japan announced its unconditional surrender, which would lead to the official surrender ceremony a few weeks later. It was understood that Japanese troops would remain in control of the various territories they had occupied until the European colonial powers could send in forces to replace them. The Viet Minh, however, did not agree. The very next day, Ho Chi Minh convened a meeting of the Viet Minh leadership. Also present were several American advisors.

The result of the meeting was what became known as the General Uprising. American-made radio equipment made it very easy to coordinate plans throughout the country. Over the next two weeks, Viet Minh forces marched in and took over cities and towns all across Vietnam. In one or two places the Japanese soldiers briefly resisted but mostly it was a peaceful takeover. The Japanese soldiers understood that the war was over and saw no reason to fight and die for French rule in Vietnam.

The Wireless Set No. 19 was developed in 1940 by the British War Office and saw heavy use in the North African desert campaigns. The Mark II models were primarily made by several manufacturers in Canada in 1942. Most of those had Cyrillic labels and were sent to the Soviet Union. A small number of Mark II models, including this one, were made in Chicago by the Zenith Corporation.

There were no markings to indicate who made this next set, which appears to be homebrew.

The next piece is truly a spy radio. The first photo shows the SSR-1-G unit, which was the receiver in the SSTR-1 set. The second photo, from Wikimedia Commons, shows the complete set.

The name stands for Strategic Services Transmitter Receiver Number 1. Developed by the U.S. Office of Strategic Services in 1942, it consisted of a receiver, a transmitter, a power supply, and a box of spare parts. It could run off either AC or DC, and everything could fit in a small suitcase. The versatility and portability of the set made it perfect for use by resistance fighters in Europe during World War II and later by spies in the early days of the Cold War. And some units found their way to the Vietnam theater.

A New Beginning

On 30 August 1945, the Viet Minh under Ho Chi Minh controlled all of Vietnam. Over the next few days, the Viet Minh leadership, with assistance from their American advisors, drafted a Declaration of Independence. It was heavily modeled on the American Declaration of Independence and even directly lifted some phrases in a few places. On 2 September 1945, Ho Chi Minh read the declaration in public and over the radio airwaves. Vietnam was now a single united independent country, totally free of foreign rule.

Next: Part Two

Shortwave Memories — Richard E. Wood

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by Karl D. Forth

Richard E. Wood may have been the best-known DXer ever.

I first met him briefly at a radio convention in the mid-1970s; it may have been Columbus or Atlanta. A friend, Robert Kramer, had met him earlier and hadn’t enjoyed his first encounter. Rob had asked Richard to autograph his copy of the book “How to Listen to the World,” and apparently Richard, the closest thing to a celebrity in the hobby, had for some reason refused.

A few years later, Richard was teaching languages at Southeast Missouri State University. With fellow DXers Rob Kramer (who had forgiven the earlier snub) and Jeff Roberts, we traveled from our college, Southern Illinois University, to visit Richard.

We were recruited to erect a television antenna on the roof of his house in Cape Girardeau so he could TV DX. There was moderate, persistent rain, and the roof was a bit slippery. Richard supervised our efforts but didn’t join us on the roof. Our own 1970s interest in television DX led us to understand the urgency of the antenna raising. (We also bought Coors beer that was then unavailable east of the Mississippi River.)

That day, I asked Dr. Wood which languages he was studying, and he said he was brushing up on his Albanian, producing a German-Albanian dictionary to support this claim.

Richard, originally from Newcastle, England, was a regular contributor to all of the DX clubs, providing important updates and useful information. He had taught in Indiana, Baton Rouge, Saudi Arabia, Norway, Hawaii, and other locations. Hawaii was his favorite location, and he showed that you could receive most of the world on mediumwave from those islands.

He was very intelligent and rubbed some people the wrong way.

He was also a prolific writer, authoring Shortwave Voices of the World (the Finnish version outsold the English), How to Listen to the World, and the Communications Handbook magazine in the 1970s.

Richard also developed a language recognition course, and studied and wrote about propagation and other subjects.

My last visit with Richard was in early 2007, when my wife and I were vacationing on the Big Island, and we rented a house for a week not far from Richard’s base in the Hawaiian Paradise Park development, southeast of Hilo. We visited Richard several times in Hilo, where he sold local coffee at a space in the market, and we went to his source of Kona coffee farther south on Hawaii Island. For the rest of the trip, the rental car had the rich aroma of the Kona coffee cargo. Richard and I talked about DXing, especially mediumwave DXing from Hawaii, which was his current focus. With my portable radio on that trip I had received two California local channel stations at a distance of 2300 miles. My wife observed that our conversation about DXing was like listening to two people speak another language.

Richard died of a heart attack in Hawaii at the age of 67 in September 2007.

Karl D. Forth has been interested in radio and DXing for more than 50 years. This story was included in the book Radio Nights and Distant Signals.

Please note: all Amazon links are affiliate links that support the SWLing Post at no cost to you.

Bob’s Radio Corner: Focusing on Hardware

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Figure contributed by Copilot

By Bob Colegrove

I have a friend who has collected antique cars for many years. So far, his collection is no immediate challenge to that of Jay Leno. However, it is his collection, and he is very proud of it. The cars festoon the inside of a large barn on his rural property. You will rarely see one of his vehicles out on the interstate. He has gone beyond the primary function of using these cars to get from Point A to Point B. Instead, he has chosen to focus on the means of transport – the cars themselves – the hardware.

By way of that analogy my point is that whatever your interest, the primary objective of the endeavor may become incidental, and the focus transforms to hardware. Take radio for example. I have spoken a couple of times about the many facets of radio. The primary interest is simply listening to program content, with perhaps a concentration in DXing. Others among us have gone beyond this function and attend seriously to the container the sound comes from – the radio – the hardware. This interest might be subdivided into collecting, restoring or modifying radios.

As proof, I have observed that the most interest in this blog is generated by radio reviews. There is a noticeable increase in the pulse rate whenever a new model comes to market. We seem easily infected with curiosity, and comments soon append the original posting. What are the possibilities? Does it have SSB? What are the bandwidths, etc.? Appearance is important; features are important; ergonomics is important. How well does it perform?

What Attracts Us to Hardware

Appearances

Our reaction is sometimes irrational. Techno-appeal might very well be the first grabber. Certain radios are captivating, irresistible. Examples are the Transoceanic, the old German manufacturers like Grundig, Blaupunkt, Telefunken, and then that RCA dial that shows up here on SWLing Post occasionally. You get the idea. In each of these examples, the beauty of the beast draws us into a closer look. There is a feeling that this radio will carry us off on an exciting adventure.

An attractive setup conjured by Copilot

Appearance gets serious attention from the manufacturers. Raymond Lowey, a noted industrial designer of the last century, was hired by Hallicrafters to bring some of its products out of the pre-WWII functional motif into a more appealing modern appearance. Examples included the SX-42 (1946), S-40A (1947), and S-38/S-38A (1946–47). These models helped shift Hallicrafters from purely technical ham gear to stylish consumer electronics, blending streamlined industrial design with functional engineering.

Raymond Lowey

Features

Of course, features are an important checkbox. We all have our lists. Although there is an ordered list of popular items, features come down to personal preferences. You know what you want. Sometimes it is a compromise based on what is available. Sometimes it is a compromise based on economics.

Ergonomics

The relative ease of operation generally occupies a portion of receiver reviews – the ergonomics. In general, entry and recall of memory locations has become a feature of diminishing returns (see https://swling.com/blog/2023/11/if-memory-serves-me-right/).

Excessive direct entry key presses can be annoying.
Locating controls along the sides.
Poor display arrangements.
Overly complex clock/alarm setup.

I could go on and present some examples, but you get the idea.

Control Curiosity

We have an insatiable curiosity about how things work. Despite the foregoing pitfalls of ergonomics, many of us are fascinated with the operational intricacies of radios – pressing buttons, twirling knobs, throwing switches. I am easily entertained. To amuse myself, I once did a full-page cause-effect flowchart of button presses for the Tecsun PL-660. It was interesting and kept me out of mischief for a while.

Performance

Performance is a gray area – sensitivity, selectivity, tone quality, etc. Lacking laboratory test results or side-by-side comparisons, the review of a new radio may fall short. Additionally, accepting the manufacturer’s specifications can be misleading or confusing. Ideally, variables must be isolated and controlled. We should not rush to judgment. Still, the typical consumer can render an honest appraisal if it is properly qualified.

Accessories

The radio stands as the centerpiece. For today’s all-in-one portables, an external antenna and a pair of earphones may be the only other hardware needed. In earlier times, the radio was likely a fixed unit requiring AC power. Many models were not as capable as even a moderately priced portable today. As a result, accessories such as external speakers, q-multipliers, and crystal calibrators complemented the capabilities of the radio. Knowledgeable operators who knew how to fix things might have servicing gear like signal generators, vacuum-tube voltmeters, and oscilloscopes positioned on nearby shelves. All this hardware was a source of pride and gave one the assurance that the listening experience was the best possible.

Thinking inside the Box

Beware of SWLs with soldering irons. There is a quantum leap in going from a listener to a certified tinker. It’s not for everybody. It’s the result of long mystic contemplation and self-surrender to obtain unity with the radio – Zen and the art of radio maintenance. Ultimately, you gather the tools. You open the case. You’re on the way to either Valhalla or complete annihilation. As you open the cover, you are transported down a long, dark cavern and suddenly arrive at an alien Tron-like world of strangely shaped parts.

An inside view by Copilot

Some folks are prepared for the adventure. They have read a book, taken a course, or earned their ham ticket. Others, like me, have thrown caution to the wind with no assurance of success, just a curiosity impervious to reason and a glimmer of hope that we can touch something and make it better. For us, it’s an embarkation on a long encounter with trial and error. Only by persistence and occasional reference to the previously neglected training materials will we finally earn our stripes.

Before I took up the soldering iron, I tackled alignment. I have heard beginners mistakenly thinking that every one of those slotted screws needed to be completely torqued down. Somehow, I had been cautioned that each one had a sweet spot at which the receiver displayed optimum performance. Each one of these adjustments operated in series with all the others, and near total synchronization was necessary to produce even a whisper of signal. It is a sort of electronic Rubik’s Cube; there are many combinations but only one solution.

To be sure, I made my share of mistakes. Initially I did all this by ear without the benefit of an RF generator, voltmeter, or even an insulated tool. I do remember one occasion getting an intermediate frequency adjusted up into the broadcast band. What a squeal that made. Over a period of a few years, I made progress and gradually came to tackle the dual-conversion Hammarlund SP-600 with great aplomb.

Source: Better Shortwave Reception, William I. Orr, W6SAI,
Radio Publications, Inc., Wilton, CT, 1957.

The purported goal in all of this is to squeeze every microvolt of signal out of the ether and hear more stations. In truth, that is only a cover so we can play with the hardware.

Today’s radios don’t have nearly as many adjustments. Through digital processing and phase-locked loops, most of the resonant circuits of old radios have been eliminated. It might be an improvement in performance and reliability, but it’s not the same.

Even the tinker’s quintessential soldering iron has mostly gone cold. The large-scale integration and surface-mounted, robotically-installed components have rendered radio repair and modification intimidating if not impossible. Only a few isolated Merlins of wizardry can deal with this.

For that reason, tinkers have largely retreated to experimentation with antennas. It does not require post-doctoral work in electronic engineering to produce tangible results. While there is a valid wealth of professional theory and practice which has gone into antenna design, the rest of us can still amuse ourselves by hanging wire, winding coils, and empirically evaluating the results.

Collecting

It only takes one radio to get things started. Where it goes from there depends on your interest. About 10 years ago I bought a Hallicrafters S-38E in virtually unused condition. The Hallicrafters lettering was printed on each of the original tubes. There wasn’t a mark on it. Obviously, someone bought this radio new, circa 1959, decided they weren’t interested in shortwave radio, and stored it in an environmentally ideal closet for more than half a century. (No, I have not felt the slightest need to recap it.)

I also bought my first S-38E in 1959. Unlike the first owner of my current S-38E, I have had a persistent affair with radios over the years. It started with just one radio, but I didn’t start collecting them for many years. Instead, I traded up, first an S-40B, then an SX-43, and ultimately the Hammarlund SP-600. It was at that point I was well into tinkering and wound up with three -600s plus one hulk for parts. The Sony ICF-2010 came along in the ‘80s, and I have just kept collecting from time to time with no thought to downsizing.

Let’s look at the economics of the thing. The S-38E cost $55 in 1959. Adjusted for inflation, this would be roughly $600 today. How many folks would be induced to spend that kind of money today to try out shortwave radio? If you bought a $600 radio today, it would be far superior in quality and features to the humble S-38E. Even an entry-level $55 radio today is better. We just can’t make comparisons other than to say radio has become a cheap hobby, unless, of course, you are a collector.

Hardware Groups

There are at least two healthy user groups in groups.io which deal with radio hardware: https://groups.io/g/HallicraftersRadios/topics and https://groups.io/g/SonyICF20102001Dusergroup/topics. There are others, but I am most familiar with these.

For these folks, listening and reporting station reception is incidental to the acquisition, care, and feeding of the radio – the hardware. What are you hearing on the radio? More specifically, are you hearing anything you hadn’t heard before? These questions often go unasked in these groups.

It amazes me that both groups remain very active long after the hardware production ended. Hallicrafters ceased operation in 1980. The Sony ICF-2010 and 2001D radios were manufactured from 1984/1985 to 2002/2003, depending on your reference. Yet each interest group has a core membership steeped in the history and technology of these radios and is quick to address the inquiries of others.

The Hallicrafters Group

The Hallicrafters Group focuses on both receivers and transmitters from the 1930s through the 1960s – the vacuum tube or “hollow state” era. For most purposes, a soldering tool is essential, schematics are necessary documentation, and diagnostics is a required skill.

It was a hands-on era; repair was down to the component level. Today, parts are becoming an issue. While tubes, capacitors, and resistors are still reasonably common, unique items such as transformers, variable capacitors, and various mechanical items (knobs and dials in particular) are more of a problem. This has resulted in cannibalization or “parting out” units in more extreme states of deterioration for their valued parts. This isn’t always a helpful solution, as a defective part may be a common occurrence among other units. A few enterprising vendors have taken up the challenge and come up with innovative solutions, including the use of 3-D printing to replicate parts such as knobs. Bottom line: Restoration of antique hardware appears to be a primary focus of this group.

The Sony ICF-2010/2001D Group

The Sony ICF-2010/2001D Group represents another generation of radios, which were produced in the closing decades of the 20th century. Even more amazing, their interest focuses essentially on a single model receiver. There were at least 6 different versions tailored to local regulations. The -2010 was the North American version.

The complexity of these radios was orders of magnitude greater than those of the vacuum tube era. Being solid-state, they were relatively compact and reasonably portable. They achieved the pinnacle of excellence in portable shortwave reception. Among aficionados, they are still regarded as such today.

Memory capacity of a digital radio can quickly become a point of diminishing returns. While not the first portable to have digital memory, these radios sported an 8 x 4 matrix of memory buttons. Recall is instantaneous, not only frequency but other tuning parameters.

Today’s group remains quite active. Due to the complexity of these radios, troubleshooting and repair are much less common compared with the Hallicrafters Group. However, from time to time capable repair sources have shown up to provide this service as well as several useful modifications. The ICF-2010 and -2001D occupy a unique spot in the hardware collection arena, commanding high prices on the used market. They are regarded as truly classic radios worthy of preservation. They also remain high-performance shortwave receivers today.

Conclusion

Cars and radios are similar. They do not necessarily have to be driven or tuned to be enjoyed. The proof is in the barns and shacks of true hardware lovers. On the other hand, you may have just one radio, but it’s still a special piece of hardware and a captive testimony of your love of technology.

Good DXing.

Reader Research Request: WBW Burrwood, Louisiana

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SWLing Post reader Nathan Woodruff is researching his late grandfather, a US Navy radio operator in WWII who later worked as a maritime radio operator for the United Fruit Company.

Family photos suggest his grandfather spent roughly six months, around 1947, working at the WBW coastal radio station in Burrwood, Louisiana — the former Tropical Radio Telegraph Company station that, according to most records, ceased operations decades earlier when United Fruit consolidated its coastal network.

Nathan’s key question: how long did WBW actually operate as a relay station? If WBW shut down in the 1920s or ’30s as records suggest, then either the family timeline is off, or a smaller facility carried on under that call sign (or a related one) into the post-war years. If you have any information about WBW, Burrwood, or Gulf Coast coastal stations operating into the 1940s, please leave a comment below. I’ll pass along anything useful to Nathan — and I’ve included the photo of the station from his grandfather’s album above.

Radio Prague: “Microphones against tanks”

Radio Prague International: How Radio Became a Cold War Weapon

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Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor David Iurescia for sharing this article from Radio Prague International, which explores how radio quickly became one of the most powerful tools of influence in the years following World War II, tracing the rise of Cold War broadcasting and the battle for listeners across Europe: https://english.radio.cz/captured-airwaves-how-postwar-broadcasting-became-propaganda-weapon-2-8889747

Visiting the Kon-Tiki Museum: The NC-173 Lives On

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Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor Robert Yowell, who writes:

Hi Tom – some years ago, you posted an article about the famous Kon-Tiki expedition and the use of the National NC-173 on board.

Well, today during my first-ever visit to Oslo, Norway, I stopped by the Kon-Tikki museum – devoted to the r expeditions of Thor Heyerdahl.

And sure enough, right there in the Kon-Tikki raft exhibit you can see the actual radio he used! In fact, the radio operator was a radio operator named Knut Haugland, who was also a radio operator for the Norwegian resistance during World War II. There is a photo in the museum of him operating the NC-173, which I am also including here.