The Philip B. Peterson Collection Broadcast October 15, 1988

     The world of amateur radio.  This is Phil Petersen.  My call is W2DME and I live in Middletown, New Jersey.
     It's so commonplace today that it's hard to believe that many years ago having a radio in the car was just unheard of.  To have a two-way radio system in your car, that was really something new.
     In 1934, the first two-way communication system that was ever developed and put into service was designed and built by a fellow by the name of Frank Gunther whose call letters were W2ALS, and he lives on Staten Island, New York to this day.  He did this with the Bayonne, New Jersey police department.  This was in the year 1934.
     Technically, he got the project done quite quickly.  His biggest achievement was getting the Federal Radio Commission at that time to give the authorization to do it because at that time when you called for the police it was a one-way call.  Police had a receiver in the car and the radio went out to a message center to go to Broad and Monmouth and you might find some problem there and take care of it.  But they never knew they got the message.  He came up with the idea to have the police answer back that they have the message and we are proceeding.  He got that system working in Bayonne, New Jersey.  The first time that anybody has put a two-way system into a communications capability.  Now you see them everywhere.
     The radio amateurs are doing it all the time.  Now the public are buying cellular radios and putting them in their vehicles, talking all over the country.  It's very commonplace but it's hard to understand that it all started first with a radio amateur named Frank Gunther in Staten Island, New York.
     Now I want to tell you about some of the different modes of operation we use.  You'd be surprised, most people think that radio amateurs just talk on their transmitters or they use Morse code only but there are other modes of operation as well.  We do use those and they're very universal and it's very important that we do know the Morse code so we can talk to stations that have nothing but Morse code.  It comes in very handy during emergencies.  It's a very accurate form of communications, but voice is more commonly used.
     Here are some other modes of operation.  A lot of radio amateurs are using radio teletype, communicating back and forth with their keyboards and talking all around the world using teletype form of written message communications.  Another type of communication is actually using TV, looking at the fellow you're talking to.  In most cases, this is only communicating a few, maybe a 100 miles or less around some metropolitan area.  But there is another form of TV called slow scan TV where the picture quality isn't very good but you can get an good outline, a visual presentation of communicating, actually seeing the party or whatever is going on over thousands of miles.  Some are doing that too.  Another, later form of communication is using computers with amateur radio and there is a mode called packet radio.  It's little packages of information that go back and forth between stations at a very high rate of speed and very accurate type of communications.  This seemed to have caught on very much lately and if you want accuracy in communications right to the last dot or comma in this form of communications, packet radio is the way to go.

 October 15, 1988

** Broadcasts recordings preserved and presented here by Mr. Robert Buss and Mr. Bernie Ricciardi, Phil's friends and fellow Marconi Chapter 138 QCWA members **

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