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Ham Radio From Greece, 1973-74
In 1973 and '74 I used the MARS* station (SV0WY) at the US Air Force base in Athens, Greece, when flying from Rota, Spain to various ships on Navy TAD* (DIRSUP)* trips. I was a Navy Cryptologic Technician, Maintenance (CTM3). The Air Force C-130 cargo planes that we used to transport the NavSecGru QUIC Vans to other ports for installation on Navy destroyers usually flew to Athens from our base at NSGA Rota.
Being Navy (not Air force) they wouldn't give me a key to the station so once in there I had to stay all night with no trips out for food, but a sacrifice worth all the fun!! Lots of paper logs, the Air Force MARS operator (a non-ham) told me I had to answer all the QSL cards that came for my radio contacts myself, ha.. I had to have QSL cards to send back printed, too.
The station had no straight key or any way to send Morse code and get on CW. When I got on 20m SSB (voice) it was always a huge pileup, SSB wasn't the norm from everywhere yet (in 1974) and even Greece was fairly rare on SSB. I've always been a CW op and didn't really enjoy fone operating but what the hell, you have to have fun where you can !! The beautiful Collins S-Line radio and 30S-1 amplifier to a big log-periodic antenna aimed at the US did just fine even at the bottom of the 11 year solar cycle!!
The "pileups" were incredible. I had been a licensed ham since 1968 but had never operated fone, only CW (Morse code). The first time I was there the AF guy showed me how to tune up the radio and the big amp, got things setup on 20m and he went home. I tuned around the band and listened to two loud stations talking on the East Coast, I broke in and said hello from Greece! They were shocked and happy to include me in their conversation, and one of them warned me that I would have LOTS of people calling when we finished and they signed off.
He sure was right, dozens of people called and I started making short contacts and trying to copy callsigns out of the mess of stations calling, all calling at the same time, of course. I worked a few people but it was getting worse and worse, so I called one of the two I had originally talked to. He was still there, listening, so I told him "I'm a CW op, how should I handle this big fone pileup??!!". He said to try going by call districts, work a few from 2 district, then move on to 3, maybe try 1, keep moving around to work a few from each part of the US as the propagation allowed. Whew, that's what I did and I got experience with operating a SSB pileup for the first time...
As it turned out, Greece wasn't as rare as where people THOUGHT I was operating from. Normally the SV0 (zero) radio prefix is assigned to the islands of Crete and Rhodes, which were VERY rare to contact on the radio. For some reason, the US military station in Athens was also assigned the SV0 prefix, and the huge pileups were because people thought I was on one of those islands. So once I figured that out, I changed it so I always said the callsign as "SV0WY Athens", almost as if the Athens was part of the call. It helped a little bit, but as noted before, Greece itself was fairly rare on SSB in 1973 and '74, even for other European hams.
Each time I traveled through Athens in 1973 and '74 I stopped at the MARS station to get on the air for a while.
*MARS - Military Affiliate Radio System, where military radio ops use amateur radio to pass messages from overseas locations to the US, many times making "phone patches" so soldiers, airmen and sailors could talk to their families at home.
*TAD - Temporary Additional Duty, other work away from your regular duty station.
*DIRSUP - Direct Support, where teams of operators with special training in intercepting various kinds of radio signals would be on a Navy ship to give extra intelligence to the Captain of the ship that he couldn't get from the normal equipment on Navy ships.
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