[This Day In History] Amateur radio response during the 1964 Alaskan Earthquake (recording)
ia800202.us.archive.org/27/items/AmateurRadio...Posted Mar 27, 2018, 2:25 PM UTC
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ia800202.us.archive.org
54 years ago and I'm on the edge of my seat listening.
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a great example of passing emergency traffic and what that can sound like, not often you hear MAYDAY MAYDAY MAYDAY
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MAYDAY MAYDAY MAYDAY
That gave me chills.
Lmao when all he wanted was a phone patch.
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Agreed, this was an excellent listen.
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Couldn't have said it better myself.
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so is this isn't side band, i'm thinking AM.
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It sounded like sideband to me. It was pretty well established by 64. People were just using drifty rigs and approximate tuning. No PLL / digital tuning, that’s for sure.
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This is Awesome. Thanks for posting.
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When you're done listening, you can read the account from 73 Magazine [PDF version]. (Story is A Hams Eye View of the Alaskan Earthquake starting on page 84)
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Is there more to the recording?
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That I don't know. I came across it from the History Now podcast, and it links to a file out on Archive.org. I haven't had time to dig through Archive.org's pages to find out where it's curated, and if there's more.
Edit: I should mention I found up there a copy of 73 Magazine with an article regarding the earthquake and the ham involvement. Might be worth a read.
Edit 2: Found it: https://archive.org/details/AmateurRadio. Not much else there, though.
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Best thing I've seen (heard?) in a while. Thanks for the post.
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This is a related post from the '89 earthquake in the Bay Area. http://www.adjunct.diodon349.com/Radio/1989_loma_prieta_earthquake_net_control_recordings_posted.htm
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Fascinating. I lived through the Loma Prieta Quake in a different way. I was the news director for KOMY 1340 am Watsonvile, CA. I lived in Los Gatos and would have to find creative ways to get to work and back. I was home in LG for the World Series when the quake hit.
What a time.
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Very smooth operators. You could tell the one guy was a kid but all the stations were very restrained and orderly. The emergency nets I’ve heard around here are always a clusterfuck of people stepping on each other and freaking out etc. I would expect some of the structure we see here came from prior military experience, given the era. Lots of Korea and WWII vets on the air. Also interesting was the use of non-standard phonetics. I guess the nato phonetics hasn’t really taken off yet in Amateur practice or they fell back to the Army/Navy standards (Able, Baker, Easy, George).
Thanks for posting this.
They WERE standard for the U.S. You make it out like they were making up words. Roger still prevails as in R as in Received. Police in the U.S. continue to use their own phonetic alphabet, too. Nothing "nonstandard" about it. There's an Oboe flight in Tora Tora Tora. They aren't just making words up.
Read it again.