It was in Malta that my interest in wireless telegraphy was first aroused. We were housed in some military 'married quarters'. Close by there was a wireless station which produced bright greenish-blue sparks and crackling noises. Its antennas were supported on three very tall wooden masts painted bright yellow. I soon discovered that it was GYZ belonging to the Admiralty. Malta was then (1922) a very big base of the British Navy, in the good old days when England had an Empire.
I bought a kit of parts and assembled a small receiver and being so close to the powerful spark transmitter that was all I ever heard.
In 1926 when I left school my family moved to Greece and my brother who was 7 years older than me, opened up a shipping office on the island of Mitylene, in the Aegean sea. My father and grandfather had been in this business in Turkey.
It was in Mitylene in 1927 that I constructed my first short wave receiver. It had 3 valves with 4 volt filaments, heated by an accumulator (storage battery). H.T of 130 volts was obtained from a bank of small accumulators in series. As I had not learned how to make a charger I had to carry these two units to a local garage regularly for re-charging.
Apart from commercial telegraph stations there was little else to hear. I had still not heard about 'amateur' radio. The B.B.C. was carrying out test transmissions from Chelmsford for what became the Empire Service (now the World Service) using the callsign G5SW. There was also G6RX which stood for Rugby Experimental, operated by the British Post Office. They were experimenting with ship-to-shore telephony, and after setting up a circuit the operator used to say "over to condition A" (and sometimes B) which was very frustrating for me because the voices then became scrambled and quite unintelligible. When I first began transmitting six years later, having 'discovered' the amateurs, I chose the callsign RX as I had been a listener so long, and also remembering the excitement of listening to G6RX.
In 1930 I moved to Athens and became a salesman for RCA radios. It was there that I met Bill Tavaniotis, SV1KE, and his mechanic Pol SV1AZ (now N2DOE). None of us had official licences because the Greek State did not recognise the existence of amateur radio, and in fact Athens did not even have a broadcasting station until 1938, although a station had been operating since 1928 in Salonica (Thessaloniki) the second largest city of Greece. But the Head of the W/T section at the Ministry of Posts & Telegraphs (Greek initials T.T.T) Mr Stefanos Eleftheriou knew all about us and gave us his unofficial blessing.
My first transmitter was just an electron coupled oscillator using a type 59 output pentode from a radio. With an input of around 5 watts I was able to achieve W.A.C. on 14 MHz in 25 minutes one very exciting afternoon. There were very few stations around and single frequency working had not been heard of yet. It was the middle of the sunspot cycle (which I knew nothing of) and propagation must have been exceptionally good.
Another thing we had never heard of in those innocent days was SWR. I had a Hot Wire ammeter and always tuned for maximum deflection, completely oblivious of the fact that a large proportion of the indicated value was 'reflected power'. I moved to 'high power' when I added a 210 P.A. to my rig.
Obviously the prefix SV was quite a rare one and SV stations were much sought after, particularly the handful who used CW. But as I described in a short article in the October 1948 issue of the SHORT WAVE MAGAZINE published in London, it was not all fun being a rare DX station. A photo copy appears below:
To return to pre-World War II operating: Most operators used crystal oscillators in order to have a clean '9x' note. It was quite normal procedure to call CQ on one's crystal frequency, say 14,076 KHz and then go over and start combing the band from 14,000 for replies. At that time 20 metres covered 14,000 to 14,400 KHz., and the 15 metre band had not been allocated to the amateur service.