fficial blessing.

My first transmitter was just an electron coupled oscillator using
a type 59 output pentode from a radio. With an input of around 5
watts I was able to achieve W.A.C. on 14 MHz in 25 minutes one very
exciting afternoon. There were very few stations around and single
frequency working had not been heard of yet. It was the middle of the
sunspot cycle (which I knew nothing of) and propagation must have been
exceptionally good.

Another thing we had never heard of in those innocent days was
SWR. I had a Hot Wire ammeter and always tuned for maximum
deflection, completely oblivious of the fact that a large proportion
of the indicated value was 'reflected power'. I moved to 'high power'
when I added a 210 P.A. to my rig.

Obviously the prefix SV was quite a rare one and SV stations were
much sought after, particularly the handful who used CW. But as I
described in a short article in the October 1948 issue of the SHORT
WAVE MAGAZINE published in London, it was not all fun being a rare DX
station. A photo copy appears below:

To return to pre-World War II operating: Most operators used
crystal oscillators in order to have a clean '9x' note. It was quite
normal procedure to call CQ on one's crystal frequency, say 14,076 KHz
and then go over and start combing the band from 14,000 for replies.
At that time 20 metres covered 14,000 to 14,400 KHz., and the 15 metre
band had not been allocated to the amateur service.

In September 1939 Hitler invaded Poland and all of us hastily and
voluntarily dismantled our transmitters and scattered the components,
as there was nobody to order us to close down.

In the latter part of April 1941 the German army marched into the
northern suburbs of Athens at 11 o'clock in the morning. At 3 o'clock
in the afternoon of the same day, a strong unit of the Gestapo arrived
in the southern suburb of Kallithea and surrounded the block in which
my house was situated and broke into it, looking for me and my
transmitter. Of course I had dismantled everything 19 months
previously and even taken down the antenna. So after this long period
of QRT how did they know where to find me? Well, FOUR YEARS EARLIER I
had won the first prize for Greece in the D.A.S.D. DX Contest for
1937 and the German society had sent me a nice certificate. You can
draw your own conclusions. I heard later (because I had left a few
days earlier for Egypt with the staff of the Br