This here is the keeping-place. Every voice you've heard at two a.m. coming over the dash speaker — every steady hand who talked you through a hot bearing outside Knoxville, every good buddy who said goodnight from a state you've never seen — we write them down. Names. Channels. Who relayed for whom. What antenna they're throwing the signal off of.
We're building something real out here, friends. Real as iron. Four watts and a quarter-wave whip and a clear lane of sky can carry a person clean across the dark. That's not a hobby — that's infrastructure, the kind you can't bill anyone for. Pick a handle below and listen in.
If you copied somebody clean tonight, write it down. Anything you put in here stays in your rig (your browser) and shows up under the right handle's logbook.
— a letter pinned next to the FCC notice, on yellow legal paper, in a careful slanted hand —
To whoever picks this band up after me,
I've been running a base station out of a tar-paper shed in Council Bluffs since 1958. Bought my first Heathkit for $79.50 with money I saved from re-soling shoes. My wife thought I was crazy. The first night I keyed up and got a clean comeback from a farmer outside Hutchinson, Kansas, three hundred and forty miles of cornfield between us, I sat at the table and I cried like a kid. That's the honest truth.
Listen — the telephone company will sell you a long-distance call for two dollars and forty cents the first minute. The government has every wire on the continent on a switchboard somewhere. And here we are, you and me, with a tube radio and a piece of bent aluminum on the roof, talking to each other for free across an entire country. Do you understand what that is? That is a miracle of the common kind. That is people building, with their own two hands and a soldering iron, an honest-to-god communication infrastructure that nobody owns and nobody can switch off.
When you trim your ground-plane radials to a quarter wavelength and watch your SWR drop down to flat — that is craft. When you coin a phrase on a Tuesday and by Friday you're hearing it called back to you from Bakersfield — that is community making its own language right under our feet. When you spend forty minutes on Channel 19 walking a stranger through a stuck choke at three a.m. — that is the kind of solidarity the textbooks don't have a word for yet.
They will probably regulate this someday. They will probably try to charge for it, or quiet it down, or sell it to somebody. Doesn't matter. We were here first, and what we built was real, and the waves we put into the sky are still up there, bouncing back. Keep your antenna up. Keep your voice warm. Answer when somebody calls.
10-4 and 73's forever,
— Walter "Coast-to-Coast" Briggs
KC0-0117 · Council Bluffs, Iowa
February, 1970