CHAPTER FIVE
THE FIRST GREEK RADIO AMATEURS
As no licences were issued for many years there are no official records to be consulted. Early activity was mainly in and around Athens but there may have been one or two stations in other parts of the country which we never heard in the capital. At the time of writing (1987) four of the original pioneers in the Athens area are alive and three of them are currently active on the H.F. bands.
Athanassis 'Takis' Coumbias has QSL cards addressed to him dated 1929 when he was a short wave listener in Odessa, Russia with the SWL callsign RK-1136. In 1931 his family, like many other Greek families in Russia, moved to Athens where Takis built a 4-valve transmitter with which he was very active on 40 and 20 metre CW using the callsign SV1AAA.
I frequently operated his station myself and when I asked him why he had chosen that particular callsign he gave me what proved to be a truly prophetic answer. "It will be ages," he said, "before the Greek State officially recognizes the very existence of radio amateurs and begins to issue transmitting licences to them. After that it might take another 50 years for them to get to the three-letter series beginning with SV1AAA."
In actual fact this is what happened: legislation was enacted 40 years later and the callsign SV1AAA was officially allocated to Nikita Venizelos after 54 years had elapsed!
Although at the time there was no official recognition of amateur radio in Greece, the existence and identity of the handful of 'under cover' operators was known to the Head of the W/T section at the Ministry of Posts & Telegraphs (Greek initials T.T.T.) Stefanos Eleftheriou who did more than anyone else to encourage and promote the development of our hobby. In fact, following a minor brush with the police in 1937 (described by N2DOE later in this book) Eleftheriou issued three licences 'for experimental research in connection with the propagation of short waves' on the basis of earlier legislation governing the use of wireless telegraphy which really had nothing to do with amateur radio. The recipients of these three licences were Costas 'Bill' Tavaniotis SV1KE, Aghis Cazazis SV1CA and Nikos Katselis SV1NK. As there were no relevant regulations the choice of callsign was left to the individual operators. For instance, Tavaniotis ran his own electrical and electronic business called KONSTAV ELECTRIC so he decided to use "KE" as his callsign.
As far as I know the following ten amateurs were active in the
Athens area in 1937:
1. Takis Coumbias…………………SV1AAA
2. 'Bill' Tavaniotis………………SV1KE (silent key)
3. Polycarpos Psomiadis…………..SV1AZ (now N2DOE)
4. Aghis Cazazis………………….SV1CA (silent key)
5. Nikos Katselis…………………SV1NK (silent key)
6. George Zarifis……………SV1SP/SV6SP (now SV1AA)
7. Nasos Coucoulis………………..SV1SM (silent key)
8. George Yiapapas………………..SV1GY (now QRT)
9. Menelaos Paidousis……………..SV1MP
10. Norman Joly……………………SV1RX (now G3FNJ)
In 1952 Costas Karayiannis who ran a big business called RADIO KARAYIANNI published an amazingly comprehensive book entitled ELLINIKI RADIOFONIA which means 'Greek Broadcasting'. It contained a vast treasure of information on many subjects allied to broadcasting, and there was a page entitled DAWN (1930-1940) which dealt with amateur radio activity in Greece before World War II. It confirmed most of the names listed above as can be seen in the photo-copy of the original Greek text, and it mentioned three others: George Gerardos SV1AG, (silent key), S. Stefanou and Mikes Psalidas who was allocated the callsign SV1AF 20 years later, though he, like many others had come on the air after the end of the war with an unofficial callsign.