The CU Amateur Radio Club is not a broadcasting radio station (what we now know as WKCR). Amateur radio involves two-way communication between radio operators known as “hams.” Hams used to exchange QSL cards to confirm two-way radio contact between stations. In our display case, we feature some of these colorfully illustrated postcards. These include the station’s identification, time, date and frequency information of the contact, from points near and far and with some unique artwork (for examples, see below).
The first records of an amateur radio station at Columbia indicate that in 1906, there was a high-power, spark-gap transmitter in the basement of Chandler or Havemeyer Hall. Under the leadership of telecommunication pioneers Professors Michael Pupin and Edwin Armstrong, the Columbia University Experimental Wireless Station was the first of its kind at an American University. It was granted early recognition by the government as “Experimental Station, Manhattan Island” and was licensed to transmit using the identifier “XM.” Columbians engaged in their first test with the Wireless Association at Princeton University in 1909, and in March of that year, they used the radio frequencies to receive the results of a basketball game against the University of Pennsylvania, the first such use of radio by college students.
The CU Amateur Radio Club was formally organized in 1920 and operated as 2FK and there are a few QSL cards from those days in the CU Amateur Radio Club records. By 1931, the Club had received its FCC operating license for the current call signal W2AEE. The exhibit features QSL cards from the 1950s to the 1970s, from Puerto Rico to Greenland to the USSR.
On October 4, 1957 when the Soviet Union launched the first manmade satellite Sputnik, two “hams” on the seventh floor of the Engineering Building decided to man the Club’s receivers and a tape recorder. The Club became the first amateur station in the East to pick up the signals from the Soviet satellite. They were then the first to rebroadcast the recording of Sputnik’s beeps over the student radio station WKCR: proof of a Soviet satellite flying over the US. The very next morning, FBI agents came to the station to retrieve the recordings.
The CU Amateur Radio Club offered international Morse code and theory classes to help those interested in passing the FCC license exams and also offered hands-on workshops or construction labs. In 1977, the Club even tutored University President William J. McGill to become a licensed radio operator. McGill had built a short-wave receiver from a kit at the President’s House and one of the first signals he heard was from W2AEE.
To learn more about the Club and its history, please visit https://www.w2aee.columbia.edu/
