Yesterday my wife and I both passed the amateur radio Technician level exam on her request after spending two Saturday's attending a training course offered by the local amateur radio club. She wanted as she is very involved in the local CERT group, Civilian Emergency Response Team, and they were finding that the FRS radios they were using for communications weren't doing very well with the local environment so they are upping their game to amateur license radios.
It started me thinking about stamps that have been issued about radio and television communications. The most significant example I can think of is the 1964 issue from the USA.
Can anyone suggest any additional items, especially from other countries?
Might this be of any help?
"Bart Lee wrote an article titled "Radio Stamps" for the Antique Radios Web site. His article covers stamps issued by various nations, as well as "Cinderella" stamps -- that is, stamps issued by commercial entities for various purposes. For example, in the 1920s, the EKKO Company produced what would become known as "EKKO stamps" for commercial broadcast stations to be distributed to listeners as QSL stamps. Now there is the ultimate radio philately connection!"
I was also interested in ham radio, in the 1960s-1970s, but only as a listener. I used an old Allied "knight Kit" shortwave radio, fed by a plain straight long-wire full-wave antenna cut to the length of the 40 meter ham band.
It was fine tuned with a series-parallel antenna impedance matching peaker, that I found in a very old Popular Electronics magazine. It used a variable inductor wound on a 1-1/2" tube and a variable capacitor. It could be switched to place the coil/capacitor, in series or parallel, to yield the best reception, depending on the frequency and atmospheric skip conditions.
I found this on a wikipedia article about King Hussein of Jordan. He was an avid ham radio operator, and I believe he had some stamps issued showing his radio shack.
"Hussein was an enthusiastic ham radio operator and an Honorary Member of The Radio Society of Harrow and a life member of the American Radio Relay League. He was popular in the amateur radio community and insisted that fellow operators refer to him without his title. His call sign was JY1, which inspired the name for Jordan's first cubesat, planned for launch in 2018."
We in Western Europe think of Marconi as the inventor of radio (indeed the city of Chelmsford, near where I live, claims to be the "birthplace of radio").
However, there are other claimants:
There was obviously only one photograph of Alexander Stepanovich Popov (1859-1906) available to the stamp designers, but on the 50k stamp you can see him demonstrating his radio receiver to Admiral Makarov, a great Russian naval innovator. I'm no radio geek myself, and so cannot tell whether Popov and Marconi were developing exactly the same technology, but they were certainly working at the same time without, it seems knowing what the other was doing.
Whatever the case, in Eastern Europe Popov is the man, and, typically, we in the West know nothing about him, except what stamps prompt us to find out.
(There are later Popov stamps from Russia - these are only the ones in my collection.)
jbaxter5256,
If you go to google.com and type in: amateur radio stamp, hit enter, and then click on the images tab on the displayed page, all kinds of amateur radio stuff comes up, including examples of the stamps that Dan C. mentioned, and all kinds of other stamps.
Thanks! That was a big help in finding additional items. Seems like I noticed a topical booklet from the American Topical Association a couple of years ago at a stamp show and I will check out their site as well.
Astrophilatelist- Space Cover Collector 25 Dec 2017 02:09:41pm
re: Amateur Radio and Stamps
Here is a scan of a cover issued by the Radio Amateur Satellite Corporation on the launch of Oscar-7 on November 15, 1974. OSCAR-7 was launched piggyback with the ITOS-H weather satellite.
  4 Members like this post. Login to Like.
Please Note: Postings that were loaded from the old Discussion Board cannot be edited.