enish-blue
sparks and crackling noises. Its antennas were supported on three
very tall wooden masts painted bright yellow. I soon discovered that
it was GYZ belonging to the Admiralty. Malta was then (1922) a very
big base of the British Navy, in the good old days when England had an
Empire.

I bought a kit of parts and assembled a small receiver and being
so close to the powerful spark transmitter that was all I ever heard.

In 1926 when I left school my family moved to Greece and my
brother who was 7 years older than me, opened up a shipping office on
the island of Mitylene, in the Aegean sea. My father and grandfather
had been in this business in Turkey.

It was in Mitylene in 1927 that I constructed my first short wave
receiver. It had 3 valves with 4 volt filaments, heated by an
accumulator (storage battery). H.T of 130 volts was obtained from a
bank of small accumulators in series. As I had not learned how to make
a charger I had to carry these two units to a local garage regularly
for re-charging.

Apart from commercial telegraph stations there was little else to
hear. I had still not heard about 'amateur' radio. The B.B.C. was
carrying out test transmissions from Chelmsford for what became the
Empire Service (now the World Service) using the callsign G5SW. There
was also G6RX which stood for Rugby Experimental, operated by the
British Post Office. They were experimenting with ship-to-shore
telephony, and after setting up a circuit the operator used to say
"over to condition A" (and sometimes B) which was very frustrating for
me because the voices then became scrambled and quite unintelligible.
When I first began transmitting six years later, having 'discovered'
the amateurs, I chose the callsign RX as I had been a listener so
long, and also remembering the excitement of listening to G6RX.

In 1930 I moved to Athens and became a salesman for RCA radios. It
was there that I met Bill Tavaniotis, SV1KE, and his mechanic Pol
SV1AZ (now N2DOE). None of us had official licences because the Greek
State did not recognise the existence of amateur radio, and in fact
Athens did not even have a broadcasting station until 1938, although a
station had been operating since 1928 in Salonica (Thessaloniki) the
second largest city of Greece. But the Head of the W/T section at the
Ministry of Posts & Telegraphs (Greek initials T.T.T) Mr Stefanos
Eleftheriou knew all about us and gave us his uno