No, this is not a Ham Station. It's your webmaster   who set up a dummy picture to send home, including the open mouth concentration. Daaah!

The receiver is a Hammarlund Super-Pro, the typewriter, (mill) was a Royal, the sending key a Vibroplex and the ear muffs the operator's own.

There were, however, 2 Amateur Radio stations

for use by the qualified. JA4AG, downtown Kyoto

and JA4CR, at a temporary camp between Fukakusa and Fushimi Momoyama. 

The above is JA4CR with the famous BC-610

transmitter to the left. It would output 500 watts CW and 300 something watts voice, however, in

1951 it would only handle CW which meant code was the means of communication. The picture above was taken in 1952 so there may have been a voice set up. 

Ol sourpuss himself at JA4AG  The equipment downtown was top notch. There was a 90 foot high rotary beam antenna just outside the station for getting the best radio wave propagation at the time. At Christmas time, we relayed greetings to people all over the U.S.   I, Harlan, could not get into Minnesota so we phone patched through New York then back  to Minnesota. All in International Morse code. There were number groups representing  certain standard messages so that was our usual method  for greetings. This was a service for all enlisted, officers and their families. Both stations had a big collection of QSL cards.

 For the uninitiated, QSL cards were post cards with the call signals and info from each station printed on one side, some with extremely fancy graphics. They were and probably still are, traded between stations.

 I had many fun times at the station. My code speed had improved to 35 words per minute both sending and receiving. My semi-automatic sending key, "Bug", got a lot of use, especially with three Brits in Hong Kong. They were faster than I was on the "Bug" and they were really great communicators. One contact was a Prince in India who evidently had his own rhombic antenna field. His QSL card was appreciated as were all the cards.

One day, while searching for new contacts, I ran across a faint signal of very slowly sent code. It was the standard CQ de something. The call signals I don't recall. I answered the CQ and found out that it was a guy in a field near Tokyo with a battery powered 1 tube transmitter with sending key on his knee and a receiver I don't know where. Anyhow, the greetings were short before the signal faded. For those readers who are not familiar with International Morse workings, there are entities called "Z"  and "Q"  signals, all to provide a quick way to exchange information. For instance, QRM means man made interference, QRN is natural interference like static from adverse atmospheric happenings. If an operator says the signal is coming in 5 x 5, that means the signal is strong and very readable.

Another time I had to trim the final coil ( adjust one coil ) in the transmitter to get optimal signal strength. I opened the access door on top of the transmitter and proceeded to move the coil with a pencil in my one hand. My other hand was by my side.  I had turned the power off but forgot to drain the final capacitor which held about 40,000 volts. As soon as the pencil touched the coil, the shock had me somersaulting twice backwards and I ended up sitting against the building entrance, numb and waiting to die.

That was a huge jolt. Now I relate to the modern Tasers. No thanks. I don't know what kind of RF radiation we got inside the building. The vertical transmission antenna was just outside the area of operation.  I was buggy about radio operating so I heard that there was a Super-Pro for sale from a guy in the teletype section at Camp Stafford. It had release papers from the Army and I bought it for $100.00. The Super-Pro had a separate power supply so I had two crates made and shipped both home. 

Camp Stafford had talented Japanese carpenters to make crates for guys wanting to ship all sorts of things.  We listened occasionally to Tarine in Moscow. She was like a Tokyo Rose of the North.

English speaking, she would give weather reports and propaganda. It was a change from listening to code. This year, 2004, I gave my Vibroplex to one of my grandsons who is interested in learning about sending and receiving code.

Amateur Radio has changed along with the changes in technology. The last time I checked, there are a bunch of diehards for using code. Code practice oscillators are still available. Code Practice tapes are also available. The Internet has just about all anyone would want to know about International Morse Code.

For communicating with other amateur stations in the U.S., we spent many after midnight hours in the station due to the difference in time zones.

There were no satellites and point to point communication was in its infancy. We had to rely on skip waves and the ionosphere. While stationed at Camp Stafford I thought I wanted to be a Broadcast Engineer so I took a Cleveland Radio Institute correspondence course. That proved to be a fiasco. A lot of the course dealt with vacuum tubes and different circuits related to that technology. It was a good thing that I never finished the course. Technology was

changing rapidly.