"Schedules are arranged to last one hour. The first station to start transmitting on the hour must be the one whose QTH lies to the east of the other. The calling frequency for Moonbounce is 144.011 MHz., and the duration of the call is 2 minutes, but for the first minute and a half you call CQ DE SV1OE and during the last half minute you also give the call of the station you are trying to contact, for instance G3FNJ DE SV1OE. You must on no account transmit for more than two minutes because at the beginning of the third minute the other station will begin transmitting the same pattern of signals. But if he has heard you he will alter the pattern. For the first half minute he will send SV1OE DE G3FNJ and for the ensuing minute and a half he will transmit the letter O which signifies that he has heard your callsign completely and without difficulty i.e. Q5 in the Q Code. If I have also heard your callsign completely I will send G3FNJ for half a minute followed by RO for a minute and a half, which means that I have also received your callsign and your O. And you will reply RO 73 which concludes the successful contact.
"There are one or two other letters that can be used. Sending M signifies that I hear you well but can only copy 50% of your transmission, equivalent to Q3. And the letter T signifies I hear you but cannot read you at all—Q1.
"It has been found by experience that the best sending speed is 8 w.p.m. Sending slowly or very fast presents problems at the other end."
CHAPTER EIGHT
PERSONAL REMINISCENCES AND ANECDOTES
The eight items which follow are not strictly part of the story of the development of amateur radio, but they deal with some historical events which are connected with our hobby. Two are of particular interest: the account given to me by Takis Coumbias formerly SV1AAA of the early days of amateur radio in Russia and the story of the Greek broadcasts from Cairo, Egypt during the German/Italian occupation of Greece in World War II.
Nearly all the photographs of the period were taken by the author.
1. Athanasios 'Takis' Coumbias (1909-1987)
When I met Takis in his office in May 1983 I told him I was thinking of writing a small book about the history of amateur radio in Greece before it was too late—so many of the old timers had already passed away. Little did we both suspect at the time that he also would not live to see the finished project. I asked him how far back he could remember.
"Well, I can start from 1924 when I was about 15 and living in Odessa in the Soviet Union. There was a lot of interest in wireless and two magazines were published in Russia which dealt mainly with the construction of receivers. My interest was first aroused when a friend of mine at school proudly showed me something he had just made. It was, he told me, a variable capacitor and he was going to use it to make a radio receiver. The contraption was enormous by today's standards and must have weighed about half a kilo. My friend said it had a capacity of 250 micro-micro farads, which meant absolutely nothing to me at the time.