Amateur radio buffs replay ship history
By Walter Wright
Advertiser Staff Writer
"Radio central," a 30- by 30-foot white metal box on a 1.5-inch-thick steel deck, amidships on the USS Missouri, came alive again last weekend as hams aboard the Mighty Mo joined 82 other museum ships to communicate with amateur radio operators around the world for Museum Ships Weekend.
Bruce Asato • The Honolulu Advertiser
From just outside Birmingham, Ala., Christopher Cote tweaked his computer hookup to his radio set to make contact with the ships that fought when his father, Arthur Cote, now 77, served during World War II.
John Magin, left, makes contact with a ham operator on one of four amateur radio sets in the original "radio central" in the USS Missouri, restored by the Battleship Missouri Amateur Radio Club. Club member Bruce Murray listens in.
"Dad's not in real good health right now, and I know he'd appreciate a QSL from the Missouri," Cote said. QSL is old Morse code for "do you acknowledge my message," and ham operators send one another QSL cards showing that they did, in fact, get a radio message from one another.
"Roger that," said John "Jay" Magin of 'Aiea, one of the members of the Battleship Missouri Amateur Radio Club, making a note to send Cote one of the cards reading KH6BB, the Mighty Mo's call sign.
Cote was looking for the call letters for the USS Tex-as, the battleship on which his father served. Magin obliged by passing on the sign NA5DV, for the museum that has been made of that ship in Houston.
"It was a special honor Dad had, to be aboard the Texas," Cote said in a shortwave interview, "and I have had a greater appreciation of his service in the U.S. Navy because of this connection with ham radio operators. He's given me stories of his life, things he encountered."
Within a few minutes, Magin had fielded other calls, from Howard at VE1FV in Nova Scotia, Canada, and Rob at KB3DHG in Pennsylvania.
They were among the last of about 500 calls received on the Missouri in 48 hours ending at 2 p.m. yesterday (midnight Greenwich Mean Time) in a modern-day version of what has to qualify as the original chat room.
Purchase tickets near the Arizona Memorial and catch a trolley to the battleship. Adults $16, children $7. Open daily, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., except Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's. (Ticket window closes at 4 p.m.)
"There would have been more," said club member Edward "Ned" Conklin of Waikiki, "except we had a solar storm Saturday afternoon that just about wiped out all communication," muffling the ionosphere that hams use to bounce their shortwave signals beyond the curve of the Earth.
To visit the USS Missouri
Amateur radio remains a growing hobby, despite distractions such as e-mail and the Internet, Conklin said. There are about 500,000 hams in the United States, and some 2 million around the world, he said.
Most of the traffic with the museum ships comes from the United States, home to most of those ships. But the network includes ships in London (HMS Belfast); Gydnia, Poland (the destroyer ORP Blyskawica); and Nantes, France (the destroyer Escorteur Maille Breze), as well as several other nations.
The Navy has moved on from the shortwave on which it once relied, but hams remain loyal to the technology, some purists resisting the voice-data combinations or computerized links now available.
"It was amateur radio operators who were there when there were no telephones after Hurricane Iniki," ham Billy Gomban Jr. piped in from Waipahu, expressing the pride the amateurs have had in their system since amateur licenses were first issued by the FCC in the early 1900s.
And there's the thrill of the hunt.
"You have to have the right equipment, and there's some luck, but there's a lot of skill involved," said Conklin (KH7JJ).
"It's like fishing. You have to put the right lure on your line, and you have to cast it to just the right place.
"If you got through every time, where's the challenge?" Conklin said. "And if you couldn't ever get through, people would give up. But if you can make contact some of the time...."
Club members long for the day when visitors to the Missouri, some of whom peek through an outer doorway toward the radio room's formerly top secret territory, will be able to visit on guided tours. Plans for such tours are in the talking phase.
They want others to see and hear what it was like when this crowded space echoed with the news of Japan's surrender on her decks at the end of World War II, the reports of her shelling of Wonsan and Tanchon, Korea, in 1952, or, in 1991, the battlefield bulletins of the Persian Gulf War.
