Diplomatic DX: a foreign service officer's ham radio memoir.

AuthorBullington, J.R.
PositionShort wave radio communications - Essay

Editor's Note: The editor of American Diplomacy recounts some of his experiences coming from his long association with an out-of-the-ordinary means of international exchange of information--amateur, or "ham," radio. A form of cultural and informational exchange available for close to a century to radio enthusiasts around the world, in today's setting of electronic communication device proliferation, one tends to forget the role played by "ham" operators in years gone by. Still less is known about the communications that "ham" operators have carried out down to very recent times. The author thus fills a gap in our knowledge about this fascinating form of communications in a Foreign Service setting.--Henry E. Mattox, Contrib. Ed.

"DX" is a term used by amateur radio operators, "hams," to indicate long-distance, usually trans-oceanic communication. When I first became involved in the hobby, as a teenager in the late 1950s, short-wave radio was still a cutting-edge technology, and the ability to sit in your bedroom or basement "ham shack" and talk to someone on the other side of the world, a DX station, was thrilling.

This early experience helped point me toward a Foreign Service career, as it provided my first awareness that there were such things as embassies and consulates, when I talked to some hams stationed at them. "Some day I'd like to operate as a rare DX station," I thought, as I competed with the thousands of other American hams trying to make contact with the very few hams in remote Asian and African countries. (Hams compete in contests and collect awards for talking to other hams in as many different countries as possible.)

This aspiration stayed with me as I completed college and passed the Foreign Service exam, and I was an active ham throughout most of my career. This enriched my experiences in the exotic places around the world to which that career took me. It provided entertainment and relaxation in posts where both could be hard to find; it connected me to family back home (through "phone patches" provided by hams in the United States) in the pre-Internet days when commercial calls were uncertain and expensive; and on a couple of occasions it helped me get safely through dangerous situations.

To Southeast Asia

My first overseas assignment was to Vietnam in 1965, where I was disappointed to find that ham radio was prohibited by wartime restrictions. Consequently, my plans to operate a DX ham station were delayed until my second post--Chiangmai, Thailand, in 1971. A fellow ham and Foreign Service colleague, Al Laun, had just completed an assignment there, and he left me some of his equipment as well as contacts with Thai hams and tips on how to get the necessary license from the Thai government.

Effective short-wave radio communication requires an external antenna, the bigger and higher in the air the better. So I built a huge one, called a "cubical quad," with a 30-foot-long boom to which were attached 16 bamboo poles forming four big Xs that supported 180 meters of copper wire in the form of large squares. This was mounted on a 40-foot tower together with an electric motor operated from my ham shack inside the house, serving to rotate the antenna in the direction of the station with which I was communicating.

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