Millbrook Amateur Radio Club W9MRC

Friend — you typed the word. So here's what I want you to hear before you go back to the dial.

I worked a man in Mozambique last Tuesday at three in the morning. He was running fifteen watts into a wire he'd strung between two mango trees. I was running a hundred into a folded dipole over a corn field in Riverside County. Between us: nine thousand miles of ocean, ionosphere, and the spinning Earth holding still long enough for our two signals to meet in the middle.

That is not nothing. That is not a hobby for the basement only. That is a person, a real person with a wife and two kids and a job at the harbor, telling me his name in dits and dahs across the entire planet, and the only thing carrying his voice is a wave he and I both bent into the sky.

The fellas at the club tell me radio is going to be eaten by television. I tell them television goes one way. Radio goes both. Television tells you what someone in New York thinks. Radio lets a kid in Iowa shake hands with a fisherman in Punta Arenas while the rest of the country is asleep. There is no comparison. None.

So solder carefully. Wind your own coils. Trust the gray line. And when the band opens up and a stranger's signal comes in clear at the edge of audibility, remember — you and that stranger just built the longest, thinnest bridge in human history, and you built it for free, out of curiosity, and you did it tonight.

That's the whole thing. That's why we do it.

— Connie
W6OBZ · Riverside, Calif. · March 1953