Sailors Tune in to Harvard Radio Club

In a small room on Dunster St., two Harvard students and a Physics professor are keeping a shipful of cadets in the Caribbean in touch with their families back home in Massachusetts.

The three, Gregory T. Quenell '85, Robert Weinstock, an extension school student, and William T., Vetterling '71, Associate Professor of Physics, are members of the Harvard Wireless Club, and since last summer have been pursuing "Traffic Handling," one of several stations providing informal communications to and from the Massachusetts Maritime Academy cadets training aboard the State of Maine.

In a interview relayed in Morse code yesterday by Quenell, President of the Wireless Club, Brain Churchill, supply officer of the ship, said most of the cadets "are away from their family and girl or boyfriends for the first time, and when the heartache of homesickness gets to the point where it hurts, the message network has been very powerful medicine for all aboard."

"On the other side of the ocean, the parents and friends of cadets are in fear of their safety, and when they receive word that Mary or Tommy is fine they sleep lots better," he added.

The Wireless Club has applied to the Undergraduate Council for a grant of $470 that would enable the Club to purchase a 2-meter, all-mode transceiver to make short-distance communications to the families cadets easier. A decision on the grant will be made tomorrow at the Council meeting.

The Club is the oldest operating amateur radio club in the country, said Vetterling, who serves as faculty advisor to the Club. It was founded in 1909 to "encourage interest in amateur radio communication and experimentation, and establish and maintain an amateur radio station accessible to all members of the Club," according to the Club's constitution.

The Club currently has about 17 members, of whom eight are undergraduates, and the rest graduate students, special students, and faculty.

The third participant in traffic handling, Weinstock, who is a student in the extension school, is deaf, but he can pick up Morse code signals over the wire.

Every day, the station, WIAF, communicates with the ship two or three times, relaying personal messages for the 636 cadets on board, and taking messages for their families. So far it has handled over 1500 messages.

Besides relaying messages to the sea, the Wireless Club has also communicated informally with other amateur radio operators across the globe. Quenell estimated that there are about 1 million such operators in the world.