spoke about some amusing misconceptions of that period.
When he first completed his receiver and was getting poor results with
it he asked a more experienced amateur to look at it. The 'expert'
immediately found the first fault: the downlead from the antenna had a
bend in it of more than 45 degrees which was quite unacceptable.
Secondly, the ground connection to the central heating radiator was no
good because it was winter and the radiator was hot so it presented a
very high resistance! It must be soldered, he said, to a cold water
tap.

"I tried everything I could think of to solder the wire to the
tap, but to no avail. Then one day I had a brain-wave and I made a
stupendous invention! I wrapped a copper strip round the tap and
bolted it tightly, together with the ground wire. I was really very
proud of myself and wondered if anybody else had ever thought of doing
it that way."

I asked Takis if he had done any transmitting from home. "We
amateurs of foreign origin were not allowed to own transmitters but we
could operate the club station under close supervision by the Party
member who was always present. My own SWL callsign was RK-1136 as you
can see from the QSL card I received from EU5DN in 1929.

"I remember our excitement when we first contacted a station
outside Russia. It was a station in Saarbrueken and we were on a
wavelength of 42 metres. All the members of the Club sent him our SWL
reports and he sent us back his cards and a photograph of his
equipment which was published in the Moscow amateur journal and so
Odessa became famous. On 42 metres most of our QSOs were with German
stations. As a result of this success many young lads joined our club
and we 'experts' would explain to them about bends in the aerial
down-lead and the high resistance of a ground connection to a central
heating radiator when the water in it was hot!!

The club transmitter consisted of 4 valves in a Hartley parallel
push-pull oscillator circuit which we considered to be of relative
'high power'--perhaps all of 10 watts."

Takis continued: "In 1930, my family, like many other families of
Greek origin, moved to Athens. I built a cw transmitter using four
Philips valves. I went and saw Mr Eleftheriou at the Ministry and he
informed me that there was no way that he could issue me with a
transmitting licence, but he thanked me all the same for telling him I
had built a transmitter."

Takis contin