d a simple three valve receiver and an
inverted-L wire 100 feet long compared to Godley's huge Beverage
array.

In the summer of 1922 amateurs in France began to get licences and
Leon Deloy 8AB President of the Radio Club of Nice in southern France
started hearing British stations. After a visit to the U.S.A. Deloy
was able to improve his equipment and on November 27th 1923 he
contacted Fred Schnell 1MO of West Hartford, Connecticut for the first
ever 2-way QSO across the Atlantic. They used the "useless"
wavelengths around 100 metres.

INTERNATIONAL DX had come to stay.

CHAPTER FIVE

THE FIRST GREEK RADIO AMATEURS

As no licences were issued for many years there are no official
records to be consulted. Early activity was mainly in and around
Athens but there may have been one or two stations in other parts of
the country which we never heard in the capital. At the time of
writing (1987) four of the original pioneers in the Athens area are
alive and three of them are currently active on the H.F. bands.

Athanassis 'Takis' Coumbias has QSL cards addressed to him dated
1929 when he was a short wave listener in Odessa, Russia with the SWL
callsign RK-1136. In 1931 his family, like many other Greek families
in Russia, moved to Athens where Takis built a 4-valve transmitter
with which he was very active on 40 and 20 metre CW using the callsign
SV1AAA.

I frequently operated his station myself and when I asked him why
he had chosen that particular callsign he gave me what proved to be a
truly prophetic answer. "It will be ages," he said, "before the Greek
State officially recognizes the very existence of radio amateurs and
begins to issue transmitting licences to them. After that it might
take another 50 years for them to get to the three-letter series
beginning with SV1AAA."

In actual fact this is what happened: legislation was enacted 40
years later and the callsign SV1AAA was officially allocated to Nikita
Venizelos after 54 years had elapsed!

Although at the time there was no official recognition of amateur
radio in Greece, the existence and identity of the handful of 'under
cover' operators was known to the Head of the W/T section at the
Ministry of Posts & Telegraphs (Greek initials T.T.T.) Stefanos
Eleftheriou who did more than anyone else to encourage and promote the
development of our hobby. In fact, following a minor