History of Naval Radio: Development of Amateur Shortwave

About the Transcript

July 13, 1952
History of Naval Radio
Rear Admiral S.C. Hooper
The amateur develops and the Navy initially applies shortwave radio.
(Continued from Reel 100)
Reel 101

Transcript #101

HOOPER:

In 1922 I began to make a serious study of the amateur shortwave radio experiments. There were about 17,000 amateurs in the United States at that time licensed by the Department of Commerce, mostly using the telegraph code, and they were making such remarkable records that although we in the Navy felt that their results were too freakish for reliability required in naval service, that because of the remarkable ranges at very low power and costs it was advisable that we go into the matter very thoroughly. An article was published in Popular Radio in 1923, August, which I prepared, which describes our study of this at that time. The article is entitled, “The New Voice That is Being Heard Around the World,” by Commander Stanford C. Hooper, USN. “By the amateur radio of our distant territory of Hawaii, the United States may be visualized as a vast honeycomb of amateur stations within a huge beehive of sound. As he listens in on the United States from his vantage point out near the center of the North Pacific he overhears conversations; the dot-dash language of radio, going on through space between brother amateurs whose 17,000 odd-licensed radio stations; transmitting stations, are centered all over the broad land ranging in locations as they do all the way from the state of Washington and our Pacific seaboard to Florida on the Gulf of Mexico, from the Canadian border on the north to the Mexican border on the south, from California to Maine. Not only is the dot and dash language of amateur radiotelegraphy of all sections of the United States thus brought to him with lightning-like speed on those distant islands situated more then 2,000 from the nearest point of our Pacific seaboard, but in some instances he also hears the voices of his brother amateurs conversing with one another through space on the medium of radiotelephony. Moreover, as a full-fledged radio amateur he is not restricted to listening in only. His station is equipped with a transmitting set as well as a receiving set and he can thus talk as well as listen. Although the amateur radio transmitting station, with its antenna suspended from the housetop, may appear diminutive in dimensions as compared with the great high power stations of the Navy and the commercial radio companies, although its juvenile transmitting wave is restricted by law to a length of 200 meters as against the waves ranging from 300 meters to the monster waves of 20,000 meters employed by the government and commercial stations. Although he is also limited by law to an input power of 1,000 watts; one kilowatt, of the consequent current value flowing in his antenna system, rarely in access of 10 amperes, whereas in the high power stations the input power has reached 500 kilowatts with a consequent antenna current of 15 amperes to 700 amperes or more. Yet in spite of all these handicaps he succeeds in covering remarkable distance through his base, actually equaling those of the high power stations. The amateurs have already succeeded in bridging 2,000 odd miles of distance intervening between the Hawaiian Islands and our Pacific seaboard during the seasons of the year most favorable for radio communications; the autumn and the wetter winter months. Communications are now exchanged back and forth during these months with little, if any, difficulty, especially during the hours of darkness. Under exceptionally favorable circumstances communications are actually exchanged with island stations situated as far eastward as Chicago and Detroit. This illustrates on the one hand the vagarities of radio communication, on the other hand the remarkable advances made in the development of the radio arc within their restricted field of operations as regards to wavelength and power input. Their ultimate goal, however, is world-wide communications by amateur radio, and it’s not inconceivable that they will eventually achieve this end.”

Mind you, this is written in 1922 as a result of the preliminary studies by the Radio Division of the Bureau of Steam Engineering, by observing the communications of amateurs generally, reading their literature, and by actually the reports of a project assigned by the Bureau to the Pacific Coast Communication Superintendent and the Hawaiian, Pearl Harbor Radio Officer, to listen in and report on these amateur results. Communications exchanged during the favorable autumn and winter months of the year between amateurs whose stations are located along the Pacific seaboard and the amateurs of the Hawaiian Islands is not of course comparable with the reliable day and night service rendered every day of the year by the high power stations of the Navy and the commercial companies. The high power radiotelegraph service between our California Coast and the Hawaiian Islands is absolutely reliable every day of the year regardless of static conditions, except for unaccountable brief sunrise and sunset fading periods which occur each day.” One might say that those fading periods didn’t seem to occur for amateur radio, although we discovered that for some wavelengths they faded out altogether at certain periods and we had to use other wavelengths on the amateur band. “Of course the amateurs cannot render service of this quality, but that they have succeeded in bridging the intervening distance between our Pacific seaboard and Honolulu with their low power shortwave sets indicated their keeping up not very far behind the high power services in the development of radio for long distance work.

During the autumn and winter months of the year 1921 an American amateur by the name of Dow, whose station is located in the town of Wailuku . . .” W-A-I-L-U-K-U, “. . . on the island of Maui in the Hawaiian Group, established communication by radio, not only with amateur stations situated along our Pacific Coast but also with others situated in our Middle Western states. The juvenile 200 meter waves created by amateur stations, thus not only effectually expanded the broad expanse of waters of the North Pacific Ocean, but also the lofty peaks of the Sierra Nevadas and Rocky Mountain Ranges and the vast plains of our western states as the amateurs talk back and forth to one another. The performance was repeated during the year 1922 and among our ever-widening circle of western amateur stations. In addition, amateur stations located along our Atlantic seaboard were also picked up at Guadeloupe, although communications were not actually exchanged between the Atlantic seaboard stations and the Guadeloupe station as was the case of the West Coast stations. These results were regarded as being so remarkable that experiments were undertaken during the month of October 1922 by radio technicians attached to Navy’s Pearl Harbor Radio Laboratory on Oahu in order to ascertain whether receiving conditions on the island of Oahu were equally good as those on Maui, and to confirm the reports of previous amateur performances. Experiments of the Navy radiomen were made during the leisure time after laboratory working hours between 3 p.m. and 3 a.m. Honolulu local time. This enabled observations to be made during intervals when both daylight and darkness prevailed over the area under observation. The Hawaiian Islands constitute one of the few favorite areas of the world for radio reception, as static is rarely experienced in these islands.” There is less static in Hawaii than in most parts of the United States. A temporary receiving station was established on the shoreline of Oahu with an unobstructed field between the station and the mainland of the United States. This temporary installation was made in the buildings of the Makapuu Lighthouse. Three different types of receiving antennas were temporarily installed for comparison as to their effectiveness. The most effective antenna was a Beverage antenna consisting of single lengths of wires suspended about eight feet above the ground. The free ends of the Beverage antennas were connected directly to ground through resistances of about 540 ohms with the free ends pointing in the general direction of the United States. A simple regenerative circuit; Audion in two stages of audio-radio frequency amplification, were employed and good results obtained.” The Beverage antenna was so much more satisfactory then the others that no further mention will be made of them. “The length of the Beverage antenna was 1,312 feet. A Navy standard CW9332 gave the best results in the first stage of audio frequency application, while the Navy standard 931 five-watt power tubes gave best results in the second stage of amplification. Seven West Coast amateur stations listened in regularly on the tests with the Hawaiian station transmitting. They were Los Angeles, San Rafael, Woodlawn, Walnut Grove, Alameda - all in California - and Vancouver and Aberdeen in Washington. The signals were copied without difficulty during the daylight hours around 3 p.m. Honolulu local time. And during the hours of darkness and up until 3 o’clock in the morning, about 40 different stations situated in the United States, all listening in carefully for the Hawaiian transmitter within the comparatively nearby 6th Radio District, California-Nevada-Utah-Arizona and Territory of Hawaii were logged. Our analysis showed that every naval district in the United States had been able to copy this Hawaiian transmitting station during the hours it was testing. The airline distance between Hawaii and the United States in no case was less then 2,000 miles, in some cases 6,000 miles.

It was interesting to note that by far the greater number of amateur stations whose signals were picked up in the Hawaiian Islands from the United States were located in centers of large urban population rather than in rural districts. As the maximum range of the most efficient of the amateur stations did not exceed 500 miles ten years before; back in 1912 or 13, these results exemplify the rapid progress being made by the American amateur in the development of radio for long distance work. They also furnished food for thought for our sociologists, our statesman, our businessmen, as well as our radio engineers. In order to insure satisfactory service day and night, every day of the year with ships at sea, stations of not less then 5,000 watts power have been established by the Navy along our coasts at intervals of approximately every 200 miles, a distance which is considered as their reliable range. To maintain constant service over the 2,000 mile stretch between San Francisco and Hawaii, both the Navy and commercial companies maintain stations ranging from 100 to 500 kilowatts. A review of the stations heard in the Hawaiian Islands during the observations described shows that signals from a number of stations as low as ten-watts power transmitting were heard. After the test between the amateur land stations by the Navy we took a Navy ship; the Seagull, a tug out in Hawaii, to observe the incoming amateur signals from the States onboard ship and compare them with those received on land, and we found that after the ship got clear of the land that the signals came in just as well or better aboard the Seagull as they did at the land station. Following these observations it was decided by the Navy to make a temporary transmitting installation similar to that commonly employed by amateurs for the purpose of making brief experiments with their own equipment, with a view to ascertaining whether or not contact could be readily made with amateurs on our Pacific seaboard using the government-authorized 200-meter wave. A vacuum tube transmitter of only 250 watts power was hastily improvised, a circuit commonly employed by amateurs. This transmitter was installed on the Seagull and connected to that ship’s antenna, the ordinary antenna. After broadcasting a few CQ’s, which was the commonly used signal by an amateur when he wished to establish communication with contacts, several amateurs situated within the state of California were immediately heard calling the Seagull in turn. The contact was thus established without difficulty with amateurs in the United States and reports of previous amateur performances verified to the complete satisfaction of Navy’s radio experts.”

[BLANK SECTION] . . . band under the most favorable conditions for radio. And through his ingenuity and enthusiasm he has accomplished this noteworthy feat in spite of the limited power on which he must operate in his restricted wavelength. In view of the progress made by the amateurs since their advent in the world of radio about 15 years ago, it is entirely logical to assume that they will eventually achieve world-wide communication by radio.” The foregoing quotations from my article of August 1923 are positive evidence of the Navy’s interest in the shortwave experiments by amateurs from the very beginning and resulted in the same year in the invitation by the Director of Naval Communications to an amateur to take a cruise on the flagship of the Pacific Fleet from San Francisco to Hawaii and Australia, bringing along his 10-watt amateur transmitter for flagship tests in order that comparative service tests in handling actual traffic might be made between the high power 20 and 30 kw low frequency transmitters in the cruisers and battleships, and the small 10-watt set such as used by the amateurs. 

Upon receipt of the report with the data from the Pacific communication officer on the amateur tests observations, it was decided to give the Naval Research Laboratory a job order to design and manufacture one amateur radio transmitter to be taken on the flagship on the Australian cruise in the fall of 1923, also one for its own use for communication between the Naval Research Laboratory, under Commander A.H. Taylor, and the Seattle, and other tests with amateurs direct.

[BLANK SECTION] . . . radio and amateur radio was during disasters where normal means of communication were very often paralyzed and the utmost ingenuity, coupled with a tireless and strong devotion to duty, were required to endeavor to reestablish and maintain communications under the stress of such disasters. In those days; back in the 1920s, the weather report predictions were not very widespread or efficient as compared with now, and disasters; floods and hurricanes, came with unexpected suddenness and there wasn’t too much time to prepare. The value of such a knowledge of how to go about reestablishing communications was demonstrated well during the hurricane of 1926 when Florida was strickened and the whole state, and some cities to the north, were upon the mercy of the country. The Navy, of course, made a special effort to help out both with relief and to keep communications established. The amateurs did very excellent work in this case because the Navy antennas were blown down in Florida, although everything was alright to the north of it. So we had to depend on amateur radio in Miami and Palm Beach and other cities in the vicinity through their ingenuity with gasoline driven transmitters, battery transmitters, to call the naval stations to the north of it, and commercial stations and other amateur stations, until it finally could get communications reestablished. And in each case it wasn’t very long from after the hurricane actually hit until at Arlington and Washington we were able to hear amateurs calling us by tuning around in their band and then to answer them on our own high power transmitters. Also the amateurs connected up with their own buddies in the vicinity of Washington and up in Hartford, Connecticut and other places and relayed the messages in by wire to the Red Cross Headquarters, or to the Navy.

Another thing; they would telegraph ahead and warn their buddies to stand by when a hurricane was rumored to be on the way or expected. It is very valuable to the Red Cross and to the Navy, and other relief organizations, to have this communication reestablished promptly so that information could be gotten through about how much relief was required in the way of supplies and medicines, and anything else that was needed as a result of the disaster.

In 1927 there was another disaster. In that case it was the Mississippi River flood south of St. Louis and it was one of the worst floods we ever had in history. I got word from the Director of Naval Communications about it one morning and he said he thought it would be a good idea to get as many field sets as we could and some operators out in that area and space them apart so that they could communicate with some other radio stations, either broadcast stations or Navy stations or amateur stations. So I moved heaven and earth and I remember I was able to get about 20 field sets from store and from the battleships up in New York, and I sent a dispatch to the Commandant of the Third Naval District in New York and the Commander-in-Chief to detail three or four operators with each one of these field sets, with their necessary bags and other supplies, and sent them down to Washington overnight. The next day we loaded the whole thing in freight cars and had them attached to passenger trains going to the area of the disaster. The Bureau of Aeronautics, at the same time, sent a number of airplanes to the Mississippi River and the planes were able to communicate with our radio stations on the ground and also with other radio stations in areas not affected to help out in communications. And the planes also were able to drop supplies and so on as needed. It took quite a bit of executive ability for the officer-in-charge of that expedition to keep all his stations in touch and to keep moving along ahead of the flood or just after it struck, but he did an excellent job.

Then there was another bad disaster in Santo Domingo in a year or two due to a hurricane and the Navy and the amateurs worked together on that. And of course the main thing then was to keep order and get food and Red Cross assistance into there. The communications weren’t so difficult.

Out of all of this came gradually a national network under the Navy of amateurs to provide assistance and we organized regular drills for use in case of emergency. There were about 2,500 amateurs enrolled in the communication of the U.S. Naval Reserve at that time. They had regular organization and drills, and under the organization plans, in cooperation with radio stations or naval communications, messages were arranged to be flashed from amateurs, or Reservists, in the area concerned to a master control stations to Red Cross branch headquarters or to the nearest 3,500 Red Cross local chapters established in the United States. Well that worked so well that through the cooperation of the Red Cross and the Federal Communications Commission, especially Lieutenant E.K. Jett who had been Traffic Officer in the DNC Office, held a meeting of all the government departments which might help in emergencies and wielded their communications together with the amateurs for emergency use. After that the Navy was only one part of the organization. That organization was designed to meet all predictable obstacles of communications so that emergency messages might reach their destination. The first SOS to be sent out by a station was to report the type and location of a disaster and as much additional information as immediately available. Second and third and subsequent messages reported casualties, relief messages, and other valuable information. The organization for clearing relief messages provided the further coordination of amateur and Naval Reserve communications activities in each of the 11 naval districts within the continental limits of the United States by the naval commandant of each district.

During the period of the disaster in Puerto Rico there were 18,000 words of Red Cross traffic handled between Washington and the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico,==About the Transcript==

July 16, 1952 History of Naval Radio Rear Admiral S.C. Hooper Continued from Reel 101 on the Navy first tests amateur radio at sea in comparison with long-wave radio for long distance communications [Reel #103]

Transcript #103

HOOPER:

In 1922 and ‘23 the Navy observed the amateur’s work on the high frequencies, or very short-waves, between 0 and 200 meters with increasing interest to the point where in the latter part of 1922 I directed that our district representatives in Hawaii, and San Francisco particularly, to observe the amateurs’ work very carefully and make reports on same. And in the previous reel I read extracts from an article prepared by me and published in Popular Radio in the fall of 1923 listing the results reported by the Navy representatives at that time, and hazarded a guess that this new type of communication might become very important in the near future. And during that time the Naval Research Laboratory got in touch with amateurs far and wide, and through the cooperation of the American Radio Relay League in Hartford, Connecticut, arranged many tests between amateurs and the Research Laboratory under Dr. A. Hoyt Taylor, who as time went on analyzed this communication, found out its difficulties, and with his staff was able to design equipment and lay down rules which made this communication possible.

About that time, on the request of Dr. Taylor, the Bureau authorized the construction of several of what you might call “soap-box models” of high frequency radio transmitters and receivers for experimental tests and service use. One was sent to the Canal Zone and installed there, and the regular tests between Washington and the Canal Zone held to see how the high frequency compared with the long-wave on the arch sets for regular traffic with Panama. Another set was used for broadcasting the nightly traffic to our embassy in London and that proved to have remarkable results. The frequencies used were usually between four and six thousand kilocycles.

In 1923, in the fall, I was transferred from the Bureau of Steam Engineering to duty as the Fleet Radio Officer of the United States Fleet on the USS Seattle Flagship, on the staff of Admiral Coontz; C-O-O-N-T-Z, Rear Admiral Cole, Chief of Staff, and served the next two years in that capacity. I relieved Lieutenant Commander T. A. M. Craven, who had been there for about a year, prior to that having been first on the Columbia and then on the Seattle during which time Commander Craven installed the first duplex; distant control receiving rooms, on the Seattle. About that time Admiral Ridley McLean; M-C-L-E-A-N, became Director of Naval Communications and he took a very great interest in the high frequency and was very aggressive in pushing the experiments with it and service trials. He performed a very distinguished service for the Navy due to his interest in this subject. During the period of 1924; the latter part of 1923 and ‘4, the Fleet cruised between the West Coast, the East Coast and Hawaii - the fleet flagship - inspecting the other units of the Fleet and holding major joint exercises between the Army and Navy.

In 1925 we made a cruise from San Francisco to Australia, returning to San Diego in the fall of 1925, and this offered up an excellent opportunity to make a service test of high frequencies compared with long-wave. And Admiral McLean was quick to see the opportunity and on his own initiative arranged that the Research Laboratory send a high frequency transmitter and receiver to the flagship Seattle for installation at San Francisco. He also invited the amateurs to designate an amateur to go onboard the Seattle to conduct short-wave tests with other amateurs during the cruise in order that we might find out just exactly how suitable this new form of communication turned out to be. Mr. Schnell was enrolled as an amateur - as a lieutenant in the Naval Reserve - and reported onboard the Seattle just before our departure from San Francisco. Actually he was a little disappointed that he was not on a separate ship from the Seattle because the Seattle handled so much radio traffic, and he felt that it would be preferable that he be onboard one of the ships of the divisions; a non-flagship which handled less traffic, especially less long distance traffic, in order that they wouldn’t have the constant interference of the sending by the flagship. And Admiral McLean was of that same feeling but I was very strong for having Lieutenant Schnell on the Seattle, the flagship, because I felt that if he did perform these experiments on a ship that I wasn’t on, I wouldn’t keep in touch with him and I would be unable to make responsible recommendations in the name of the Commander-in-Chief as a result of the service tests at the conclusion of the cruise. Also I felt it very important that I know all about high frequency. I knew practically nothing about it before the end of that cruise because I would probably be ordered back to Washington and have administrative duties involving the adoption of this new form of communication in case it was successful. So for those two reasons primarily I insisted that he be on the Seattle.

He reported onboard, and with his small amateur transmitter, not as big as a suitcase - it was perhaps 25 or 50 watts - we installed him up in the upper deck in the Radio Compass Shack, as we called it, so that there wouldn’t be any unnecessary interference due to other metals below deck and he’d be able to get the very best results in that position. Actually we were never able to get the high frequency transmitter, which the Naval Research Laboratory built for us, operating because there was some trouble with it which we were unable to remedy onboard. So we relied entirely on Lieutenant Schnell’s amateur set during the entire cruise, so it was very fortunate he brought it along. Another reason that I wanted this amateur onboard the flagship was so that I could keep control of his communication. It wasn’t a very good idea in a military organization where all of the radio communication was tightly controlled by the Commander-in-Chief, right under the eye of the Fleet Radio Officer, to have a civilian unfamiliar with military regulations and military procedure on some other ship communicating at will with his friends all over the world. And that was a third reason why we wanted him on the Seattle. It turned out to be a very good thing because he and I talked for an hour, or two or three hours every day on this subject and I was able to teach him about the military requirements and he was able to teach me about the high frequency, so that in the end it was to our mutual advantage.

The first leg of our cruise, of course, was from San Francisco to Honolulu, and during that time we had a shakedown of the high frequency and Mr. Schnell was able to establish contact with many amateurs and get them lined up for regular scheduled dates nightly for the rest of the cruise. And also I was able to get a little time with him and get some sort of an idea of what he was able to do and what his problems were. We spent some weeks in Honolulu and during that time together we made up a plan for a comparative test of the long-wave and the short-wave during the cruise from Honolulu to Australia. I had decided that if the short-wave was any good at all and could do what they claimed it might, we’d let the short-wave set operate direct with Washington and San Francisco during the entire voyage. On the other hand, we knew pretty well the range of the long-wave and the medium-wave apparatus as we’d had that for some time, and I knew that, at best, we would have to relay to the Pacific coast via Samoa high-power arc set after the flagship got west of the 180th Meridian in order to carry on communication reliably, that the arc couldn’t possibly work direct with Honolulu from Australia, and our best hope was to use Samoa as a relay. So immediately at arrival at Hawaii we started having day and night drills between Samoa Naval Radio Station and the arc set on one of the cruisers which was to be used as a relay ship during the cruise, the cruiser being with the flagship in Hawaii. These nightly drills gave the operators in Samoa, and on the flagship, practice in intercommunication so that by the time the Fleet passed Samoa they would be well established and used to this communication and the schedules and be able to get the very best results. And now on the other hand, Mr. Schnell practiced nightly direct with Washington and San Francisco and many other points, especially amateur stations in the United States. Also Schnell had many amateur; friends of the air, in Hawaii and was able to contact them personally during our visit in Hawaiian waters and to arrange that they listen in to the Seattle’s high frequency signals also.

This matter of having Lieutenant Schnell located on the flagship, to me, was a very vital thing. And I had still another reason for wanting him on there. We had found in the past, when I was Fleet Radio Officer the first time in 1912 and also when I was in the Bureau, that inventors got up new ideas for applying radio and electronics within the Fleet and in the naval communications system, and although their ideas, and even their apparatus, was suitable, it just wouldn’t fit in on shipboard and in the Fleet with all of the other things that we had to do; the shipboard interferences and the wavelength arrangements and the maneuvering signals going on simultaneously with the point-to-point and various other communications. Those things all had to be fitted together. And if an inventor didn’t try his scheme out under the Fleet Radio Officer’s eye he was very liable to be on the wrong track and the Bureau might buy apparatus that would not fit in at all. One very important example of this was when Mr. John Hayes Hammond Jr., first got up his ideas of radio control of torpedoes. That was back in the early days and will be covered in a separate chapter. But he wanted to have a radio set on every battleship to control torpedoes by radio control. At that time it wasn’t possible to have any more than one radio channel occupied at a time on a ship in close formation, otherwise the interference would be so great using several channels that we couldn’t possibly . . . nobody could communicate. We couldn’t get any signals through whatsoever. Of course we were using spark sets then. And I realized all of that, so I stepped hard on the plan that the departments had of equipping torpedoes with radio control at that time. It would be easy to imagine the bedlam that would have occurred if 16 battleships and some cruisers all firing torpedoes at once, all the radio signals interfering, not only with each other but with the communications during the battle and battle practice. Probably very little communications would have gotten through and the control signals for controlling the various torpedoes would have gotten mixed up with the communication signals and with each other and we would have had torpedoes going in all of the wrong directions at once.

So having Mr. Schnell aboard the Seattle I was able to instruct him in all of that sort of thing and let him see what the problems really were practically, and to observe very carefully, day after day for the whole two or three month’s cruise, exactly how this high frequency could fit into the whole system without being interfered with or causing interference which would be very hampering to other services which came first. As a matter of fact, we would have preferred not to have any long distance communication at all than we would to have had it interfere with the tactical and strategical use of radio. On the other hand, of course the arc sets interfered with the communications very seriously themselves. It turned out that they interfered much more with the radio reception than other communications within the Fleet than the high frequency did, but that had to be established and watched very closely. And long before that it was our custom, because of the interference by these arc sets, not to have the flagship itself do the long distance transmitting on arc sets but to hand that task to one of the cruisers or another battleship in the column which would not cause interference with the flagship’s work. All those things had to be carefully coordinated. And in making my recommendations about the final adoption of any new system, recommendations which would be signed by the Commander-in-Chief and largely approved by Washington, it was very important that I personally know exactly what was going on and what I was doing. And because of the fact that Mr. Schnell was on the flagship, that’s exactly what happened. By the time we reached Australia a month later I knew exactly what Mr. Schnell knew about high frequency and how it would fit into the Fleet program. And when I went back to Washington on duty a few months later I was able to take these recommendations that the Commander-in-Chief himself had signed and proceed with the program without any hesitation whatsoever, knowing full well its ability and its limitations.

Another preparation we made for this cruise for preparing high and medium, and long-wave communication on the Australian cruise was to get permission from the Bureau of Steam Engineering for Mr. Schnell to purchase parts to make another amateur high frequency set for installation on the hospital ship Relief, which would work on a much higher frequency; about 20 meters or 15,000 KC. One of Schnell’s friends was on the Relief, was an operator there, and Relief was not a ship that carried on very much communications during the cruise, very little inter-Fleet work, no long distance work. She had no cage mast or top hamper, and was an ideal ship for radio. So it was decided we’d try out the very high frequency on that ship and see how it compared with the six and seven thousand kilocycle bands used by the Seattle. The purchase of the parts was approved by the Bureau and the apparatus was completed shortly after the ship left Honolulu. It had had some degree of success on the trip but the operator told me that the main difficulty was to get the cooperation of the officers of the ship themselves; such was easy to get on a flagship but difficult to get on a single ship of that nature, in case he needed any help or any repairs made and so on and so forth. But he did show that during the cruise to Australia he was able to communicate by day, especially around the mid-afternoon hours of local time, was able to communicate by day a very long distance with the United States in hours when the Seattle found it absolutely impossible to raise anybody in the 7,000 meter band. So that test was worthwhile, although it wasn’t very well prepared for.

It bothered me a little that Lieutenant Schnell worked so hard, he never would go ashore and get any sunlight or exercise to divert his mind from this work of his, and he was going to have a long hard cruise. So one day I sent him ashore and he had lunch with some pals of his, mostly amateurs over in Honolulu, and after the lunch they went over to the zoo. Well I was worried when I heard his story when he got back because he was almost removed from us for the cruise. When they were over at the zoo they were feeding peanuts to the elephants there and Mr. Schnell made friends with this big elephant and he would throw peanuts over the fence for him. One of the peanuts dropped just inside or outside of the fence and the elephant couldn’t seem to dig it out. So Schnell reached down inside the fence to shove the peanut where the elephant could get it and the elephant thought he was trying to get the peanut himself, and he reached out his long tusks and put it around Mr. Schnell’s waist and picked him up and threw him over his back. So all of amateurs had a big laugh out of that and I did too, but it might have been very serious and might have caused a delay of super-high frequency for the Fleet for I don’t know how long [chuckle].

Frequency on the Seattle; fifty-five, ten, and seventy-five hundred kilocycles and the 15,000 kilocycles on the Relief for long-distance work representing high frequency communication with Washington, Honolulu, San Francisco, and amateurs, and the 76 kilowatt arc set on the cruiser Marblehead to relay long-distance through Samoa; messages which would be repeated to Honolulu on the main arc, and from Samoa, and then from Honolulu to the United States on the Honolulu high power arc station. We also had to make provision for some ship to communicate with Apia, British Samoa, where the cable touched so that any cable messages might be ended on the cable at that point. The California, Lieutenant Commander Ruble; Battle Fleet Radio Officer, was designated to do this on intermediate frequency 315, and they handled a few messages everyday for that purpose without interfering with the 76 or the high frequency. Then the Seattle of course had to handle a great deal of traffic inter-Fleet work and we had a small arc we used for some of our long-distance work and we used our ordinary intermediate frequency transmitter.

From various _______ the flagship transmitters to be in use a great deal of time for inter-Fleet work and also for receiving long-distance intercepts, schedules, press, weather reports and communications with other ships and shore stations. The regular Fleet communications carried on at high speed and without interference by the other work. Also the intercept stations; Honolulu and San Diego, were copied for broadcast messages all the way across the ocean from the United States to the ships of the Fleet. A ten-day test period was carried out before we left Honolulu; a dress rehearsal, and it took about three or four days to begin to shakedown, to get the traffic through, and by the time we left, this great armada of 77 to 100 ships and the entire communications system; high, low, and intermediate frequency, was mobilized and working smoothly.

and other points in the hurricane area.