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 Previous: FCC Amateur Radio Enforcement Letters for the Period Ending February 22, 2003 | ![Next (later) Story](/images/sty-up.gif "Amateurs Respond to Pennsylvania "Big Chill""){kind=small} Next: Amateurs Respond to Pennsylvania "Big Chill" |
By Bob Merriam, W1NTE
March 5, 2003
Several 10,000-mile QRP contacts between Norway and the 1947 Kon-Tiki expedition in the South Pacific drew a young Norwegian ham into history; the passing last year of both that amateur and Kon-Tiki leader Thor Heyerdahl brings a reminiscence from a Rhode Island ham with his own postwar LA connection.
I was saddened to see Chris Amundsen, LA7Y, on the Silent Key list in the July 2002 QST. He must have died about the same time as Norwegian ethnologist and explorer Thor Heyerdahl. There was a Kon-Tiki expedition ham radio connection between Chris and Heyerdahl's expedition, originally chronicled in the December 1947 issue of QST.
 From left, Maj Bill Chalk, Maj Rowley Shears and Bob Merriam on the grounds of a British Intelligence post outside of Hamburg, Germany, in 1947. |
Ham Radio on a Balsa Raft
World War II was a great incubator of radio skills. The resistance workers in Norway developed splendid clandestine rigs, many of which were battery powered, some hand cranked and a few even steam powered with tiny engines burning wood. On board the Kon-Tiki raft when it departed from Callao, Peru on April 28, 1947, were two former Norwegian Resistance radio men, who, like Heyerdahl, had escaped to England early during the Nazi occupation of Norway, trained there and were either smuggled back into Norway or parachuted in at night.
Torstein Raaby was famous for secretly transmitting data about the German battleship Tirpitz, ultimately leading to its sinking by RAF bombers. Knut Haugland, the expedition's chief radio operator, was part of the team that dropped into Rjukan and blew up the Norsk Hydro heavy water plant, effectively stopping the Nazi nuclear bomb experiments. Several years later, it was not too surprising to find Haugland and Raaby on a balsa-wood raft in the Pacific running a set of watertight, 10-W-input, hand-cranked rigs for Heyerdahl's expedition.
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The conditions on the raft were primitive, to say the least. What is remarkable is how well their three simple transmitters--with the 40/20, 10 and 6-meter rigs made up entirely of 2E30 tubes--performed. The expedition, with the amateur call sign of LI2B, maintained regular communication with a number of American, Canadian and South American stations that kept the Norwegian Embassy in Washington, DC, abreast of Kon-Tiki's efforts. The success of these QSOs was due to the skill of the operators. On August 5, Haugland worked Amundsen back in Oslo, Norway, for a circuit of about 10,000 miles. The crew was thrilled to finally have a direct contact with home and several more QSOs were made with Amundsen, who had only a single 807 in his power amplifier.
 A QSL card from Chris Amundsen to Bob Merrian, documenting a local 80-meter AM phone QSO on July 26, 1947. |
Getting There
I met Chris Amundsen at about that time. When the Kon-Tiki expedition was crossing the South Pacific, I happened to be a semester-abroad student at the University of Oslo on the GI Bill, not far from LA7Y's home. During the war I served in the US Army Signal Corps in Europe until 1946. I returned to Europe with a motorcycle in 1947 to go to school and visit friends all across Western Europe, many of them hams and former resistance workers. Harold Jones, G5ZT, had been part of the network of hams that worked with the resistance in Europe during the war. Even though the work of that amateur network was still classified at that time, Jones took care of things after I landed at Plymouth, England, and handed me off to another former member of the network on the Continent. D. Hobben, ON4OB, (who miraculously had wound up with my scrap-heap-rescued HT4/BC610, using my hand-wound 10-meter coils!) and Ray Cornette, ON4EF, passed me along from Belgium to The Netherlands to a Yme L. Feitsma, PA0JA, who still had his miniature wartime "Sweatheart" rig hidden under a loose floorboard in his kitchen in Zwolle. The British Occupied Zone in northwest Germany was still closed to tourists at that time. Feitsma somehow arranged a travel pass for me and sent me on to a radio post of British Intelligence, which had many hams in its ranks.
 At left, Yme Feitsma, PA0JA, stands with Martin Burgerhoff, PA0BU. Both men were players in the Dutch Resistance in WW-II, lending their Amateur Radio skills to the Allied efforts. The eerie lighting of this 1947 photo suggests their clandestine operations of a few years earlier. Feitsma was instrumental in helping Merriam get into the British Occupied Zone during his trip. |
Their digs were a capacious villa located several miles west of destroyed Hamburg, Germany. Rotary beam antennas surrounded the villa and the inside was filled with ham gear and other equipment; there wasn't too much for them to do right after the war and they worked a lot of ham radio. Major Rowley Shears, D2KW (G2KW at home and the founder of KW Electronics, who was recently made a Fellow of the Radio Club of America), and Major Bill Chalk, another ham, were my hosts at the villa. They were able to pass me on to hams in Copenhagen, Gøteborg and finally Oslo, where I was headed to enroll in the university. Without the help of this network of former resistance workers I would not have been able to cross western Europe, the British Occupied Zone, Denmark and, eventually, get to Norway.
In Oslo, part of this network of ex-resistance Amateur Radio operators included a group of hams serving as the Norwegian equivalent of the FCC. I was introduced to the group, which was temporarily meeting in an Oslo restaurant called The Automat while their new building was being prepared. I asked them if I could get on the air and they quickly awarded me LA1EB, telling me that I was the first non-citizen in Norway to have a Norwegian Amateur Radio license. Bjarne Lindeman, LA1J, loaned me some captured German parts from which I made a breadboard 100-W rig with a pair of Telefunken LS50s. A V-beam strung from my third-floor room completed my station.
Chris Amundsen lived nearby my lodgings. I visited his station and was impressed by its neatness and his operating ability. I was sorry to see his name in the list of Silent Keys. He was a part of the great Kon-Tiki story, which, among other things, was a great ham radio adventure.
Bob Merriam, W1NTE, joined ARRL in 1939, two years
before he earned his first ham ticket. In addition to LA1EB, he has also held
the amateur calls W3AJ and F0EYT. After serving in the US Army in Northern
Europe for three years, he came home and took a Masters in Electrical
Engineering at Harvard University and taught for three years at Swarthmore
College. After over 35 years in the marine electronics business, Merriam--a
Fellow of the Radio Club of America--now serves as the president of the New
England Museum of Wireless and Steam in East Greenwich, Rhode Island.
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