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Dah-di-dah-dit / Dah-dah-di-dah.  Dah-di-dah-dit / Dah-dah-di-dah.  CQ.  CQ. 

Twenty-first Century social media helped the people gathered in Tahrir Square tell people living continents away about their mission for freedom – event by event, tweeting impressions, and writing about the depth of their resolve.  Craving connection to distant places, foreign people and the rest of the world has been part of human nature since long, long before the internet or Twitter.

In Kansas City’s summer weeks when the daytime highs never retreat below the century mark and when air conditioning was a single window unit in the living room (if you lived in a fortunate household), the place to escape the heat was the basement.  Most basements were cool, damp, dim and carried a faint musty smell.  For a kid, it was a place where imagination ran free.  In the center of the basement stood a furnace with its octopus tentacles reaching out to carry warm air to the floors above.  In summer its fire breathing, roaring jets stayed eerily silent as though the monster rested. 

After baseball or swimming on a summer day, I would head to the basement.  Down there it was cool and I had a cranny under the stairs where I kept some treasures in cigar boxes, just like Grandpa had taught me to do.  There were vacuum tubes, wire, a soldering iron, switches, lamps, capacitors, resistors and piles of other things that I had salvaged from taking apart old clocks, toasters, radios and even the occasional TV that couldn’t be repaired.  This was the place where I built that first crystal radio that let me listen alone to stations from as far away as Chicago or El Paso. 

With a little instruction and encouragement from Dad’s friend, Mr. J. P., I learned how to build things or fix things with all those old parts I’d saved.  Most things I tried didn’t work but it was my own space.  I spent hours down there.  As long as I didn’t electrocute myself or burn down the house, it was probably a happy respite for my folks.

After months of taking stuff apart, Mr. J. P. encouraged me to begin a project.  His suggestion was that I should get my Ham Radio license.  Since I didn’t have any idea what a Ham Radio was, the beginning was basic.  Mr. J. P. loaned me some books, some tools and told me to get going.  This was a challenge.  Successfully qualifying for an amateur radio operator’s license involved learning about electronics, radio theory, radio frequencies, wavelengths, and becoming basically proficient in the use of International Morse Code. 

I studied for the Novice exam and completed the required project of building a short wave radio receiver.  Building the receiver and learning the stuff for the test came easy but learning a new language was hard.  I had to be able to transmit and receive twenty-five words a minute in Morse Code.  It was a bunch of short and long tones that you created with a device called a straight key and heard through Bakelite covered earphones.  Finally, at the library I found a Morse Code course on 45rpm records that had practice sessions at different speeds.  Receiving and writing out the messages took me weeks of practice to master.

I got the license.  My call letters were KN0EUJ.  Dah-di-dah / dah-dit / dah-dah-dah-dah-dah / dit / di-di-dah /di-dah-dah-dah .  Or _ . _   _ .   _ _ _ _ _  .  . . _   . _ _ _  I’ll never forget my call sign.  It was my on air name.

CQ was the standard international transmission that every radio operator use to invite anyone who was listening to that frequency to respond.  So I would transmit CQ, CQ, CQ this is KN0EUJ, CQ.  Those evenings in the basement were transformed into a social network of conversations spoken in dots and dashes.  The distance you could transmit was mostly determined by the power of your transmitter and the height of your antenna but on some rare occasions with special weather conditions, your signal could bounce off the atmosphere. 

There were nights when I “talked” or “tweeted” (125 characters, dots and dashes, a minute) with an operator in Germany, India or Tai-Pei.  Sometimes a soldier in Korea would pick up the call and ask about home.  Mostly we talked about radio stuff but sometimes the people you reached wanted to say what was happening.  Some wanted to share their resolve.  I said I was a kid in Kansas City and was mighty happy to put their call sign in my log book.

My radio wasn’t a device you could carry in your pocket but from a quiet spot in the basement of a house in south Kansas City, it linked me to the world.  

--td