To The Ends Of The Earth
O DATE no radio
amateur has yet adventured on Mars or explored the
craters of the moon--at least not outside the comic
strips and the pseudo-science magazines. But there are
very few spots on this little old earth where some ham
has not yet ventured, from high in the troposphere to the
depths of the Carlsbad Caverns and from the tangled
jungles of Matto Grosso to the ice and snow of the Arctic.
It all began back in 1923 when Commander Donald B. MacMillian, the noted Arctic explorer, was preparing for another of his journeys to the Far North.
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This was to be his ninth expedition. Eight times before he had made the long journey above the Arctic Circle, and there was nothing he feared more than the isolation, the relentless, inescapable realization of being cut off from the civilized world for a year or more at a time.
"It has spelled disaster for many an expedition." he said. In 1922 he had carried a radio receiver along, listening to the general traffic of the air. But this was tantalizing rather than useful. What was needed was two-way communication.
About that time Commander MacMillan met Hiram Percy Maxim, president of the American Radio Relay League. They talked about his problem, and Maxim suggested that radio amateurs would undoubtedly be overjoyed to help. MacMillan was keenly interested, but unfortunately there was no money to provide a radio station aboard the vessel and an operator to run it.
But by this time Maxim, too, was interested in his idea. Perhaps the A.R.R.L. could help. More discussion followed, and then an agreement was worked out. The League offered to help in securing apparatus and to pay the expenses of an amateur operator for the duration of the trip.
And so it happened that when the MacMillan Arctic Expedition sailed from Wiscasset, Me., on June 23, 1923, aboard the tight little auxilary schooner Bowdoin there was aboard an amateur operator from the A.R.R.L. and a complete two-hundred-meter station donated by Commander E.F. MacDonald of the Zenith Radio Corporation.
The operator was Don Mix, known throughout the amateur fraternity as the "sleepless wonder of 1TS," a tall, lanky Connecticut Yankee, redheaded and freckle faced and a superhuman performer behind a radio key.
Besides standing his watch as a member of the seven-man crew through the months that followed Mix transmitted a weekly five-hundred-word message to the North American Newspaper Alliance, stood regular watches for incoming press, handled the expedition's personal message traffic and sent back lists of calls of the other amateurs that he heard.
Two months after the expedition left Wiscasset it reached Cape Sabine above the Arctic Circle, the most northerly point of the trip. There WNP, "Wireless North Pole," established a new world's long-distance record.
The crossing to Cape Sabine was accomplished only after several unsuccessful attempts had been foiled by the ice in Baffin Bay. Once at the Cape, the expedition erected a National Geographic Society bronze memorial to the Greely expedition which there perished of starvation and exposure.
Turning south, the sturdy little Bowdoin pushed its way back at Etah, Greenland, a few miles below the Arctic Circle, before it was frozen in by the winter ice.
Then the radio installation came into its own. Communication through the summer static had been spotty, but autumn brought good conditions. Mix strung a huge antenna from a cable suspended between the cliffs on either side of the ice-locked harbor. The radio installation on the Bowdoin annihilated isolation. It brought entertainment and news of the world. Through the eagerly listening amateur stations back in the U.S. and Canada business messages and news reports to the outside world were generally handled with the speed and reliability of a wire-line connection. When President Coolidge filed a message of Christmas greetings to the party it was delivered like an ordinary telegram.
Despite the static and aurora borealis, despite the two-hundred-meter wavelength (this was before the days of short waves), despite the handicaps of cramped quarters and insufficient fuel supplies the expedition was in contact with home until its return in September 1924.
"No polar expedition will attempt to go north again without radio equipment," predicted MacMillan on his return, and he was right.
The barrier of silence, the greatest single obstacle to all explorations, was broken for all time. Other explorers heard of MacMillan's success and eagerly sought the help of amateurs for their ventures. In 1924 another expedition secured amateur communication; in 1925 there were five; in 1926 this number increased to six, and the following year to seven.
Since 1923 well over a hundred scientific expeditions and other parties wandering the face of the earth have depended on amateur radio for communication. Usually there has been an amateur along as operator, too, for explorers quickly learned that the ham's innate resourcefulness could be depended upon to keep them on the air.
The adventures encountered by these operators would fill hundreds of volumes. Some traveled by airplane, others by boat. Bert Sndham sweated and bounced in a Ford touring car on a motorized expedition breaking the international "highway" from Los Angeles to central Mexico and later to El Slavador. A caterpillar tractor hauled the short-wave stationof the Haardt Trans-Asia Expedition. Ray Meyers traveled in the submarine Nautilus under the polar icecap when he operated the radio equipment of the Wilkins-Ellsworth Transarctic Submarine Expedition which attempted to reach the North Pole by the underwater route.
Other short-wave operators have toured the wilds of darkest Africa in a luxurious motor trailer, climbed the peak of Mount Crillon, floated down the Orinoco in an oil-prospecting houseboat, braved the jungles of Matto Grosso, sailed with sealers in the Antarctic, mushed behind dogsleds in the Arctic and roamed the isolated corners of the world from top to bottom.