First Sputnik Launch

It’s probably just the Soviets testing their transmitters. Ignore them. Stick to what you’re authorised to do

Fifty years ago, on 04 October 1957, I spent several hours alone in the Amateur Radio shack at RAF Luqa, Malta. I was based in Malta as an Air Signaller on No 38 Squadron. I’d started taking an interest in Amateur Radio when I was on the Shackleton Conversion Course at RAF Kinloss in Scotland earlier in the year. I qualified for an official licence from the Radio Society of Great Britain (RSGB) without needing to take a formal examination by virtue of my qualification as an air signaller. The personal call sign issued to me for use within Scotland was GM3MEX but I didn't get more than a few weeks to use it before my posting to Malta.

I was usually alone in the RAF Luqa club room because at the time I was the only licensed amateur on the Island. The call sign I used was ZB1LQ,. I only ever used Morse on the amateur bands because I enjoyed that method of communication and because the simple CW (carrier wave) signals travelled much further than voice transmissions. I always started each session by listening around the various amateur bands to see which were ‘open’ to which countries.

Small bands of frequencies in various parts of the radio spectrum were allocated for the sole use of amateurs. They all had different propagation characteristics at different times of day, at different seasons of the year, and in different years of the Sun Spot Cycle. Most amateurs had a good knowledge of which bands worked over which range to which countries at any particular time. In Autumn 1957 the best amateur band for long range transmission and reception in daylight hours was the 21 megaHertz band. (In those days everyone spoke of megacycles-per-second and not megahertz.) Unless I heard the call sign of someone I already knew or one from a rare country, I would then put out a ‘general call’ on the highest frequency band that was open. This call, in the form of “CQ DX de ZB1LQ”, repeated every few seconds, was an invitation to any amateurs who wished to communicate with Malta to butt in with their call sign. The DX part of the message indicated that I wished to contact long-range stations, which by convention meant those outside the transmitting station’s immediate area.

I rarely had to transmit the general call more than once before I was inundated with replies and I had to pick and choose which ones to answer. Long range radio communications in the 1950s was an art, some described it as a ‘black art’, that would astonish today’s youngsters who have world-wide voice, webcam, or text access at the click of a mouse. When there was a long queue waiting to communicate with me I sometimes exchanged just call sign and a signal strength report with the distant station. This was sufficient for the distant station to claim, for record purposes, that they had achieved two-way communications the Malta. The distant station always included “PSE QSL” in their final transmission; this was a request for me to send them my official postcard, known as a QSL card. There was a vast mail system which enabled amateurs anywhere in the world to send batches of QSL cards to their own country’s clearing office. In Malta I had to send my QSL cards to, and receive incoming ones from, the RSGB in UK. I suppose it wasn’t worthwhile anyone in Malta setting up a clearing system for one amateur. As long as every licensed amateur had registered their official address with their own authorities, QSL card almost always reached their intended recipient. It was a highly efficient system which we simply took for granted - and it cost nothing!

On that particular day 50 years ago, there was an unusual amount of activity from club stations in the Soviet Union. In fact they were virtually monopolising all available frequencies in all of the amateur bands. Soviet amateur call signs were easily recognizable because they started with the letter U followed by another letter, a number and three more letters. Most Soviet amateurs were only permitted to transmit from properly authorised clubs where all activities were easily monitored by the Soviet authorities. Soviet club call signs always had the letter K as the first of the three final letters. Thus UA1KAA would be the call sign of a club in, say, the Moscow area.

Since I was the sole user of the Malta call sign, whenever I went on the air I was always, without fail, swamped with amateurs from around the world who wanted to add Malta to the list of countries they had communicated with. However, I was actually under standing instructions in Malta not to establish two-way communication with any Soviet amateurs and I was also under remit to report any Soviet attempts to communicate with me. This was a ridiculous over-reaction by the RAF security people who feared that somehow such communications might be a security risk.

On 04 October 1957 all the Soviet amateurs were sending out the same message repeatedly on many different frequencies in the 21 MHZ amateur band I was using. The message, as I recall it, was ‘QSX SPUTNIK 20005 KCS QSA IMI', which meant: ‘Please listen out on frequency 20005 kilocycles per second for Sputnik and report its signal strength to me.’ Of course I had no idea what the word Sputnik meant but out of curiosity I retuned my receiver to that frequency and immediately heard clearly, for several minutes, the plaintive bleating signal that I now know was the world’s first artificial satellite passing overhead.

I didn’t reply to any of the messages from the Soviet amateurs but went straightaway to a nearby office and dutifully telephoned the RAF Signals Officer to report this mysterious activity. After the briefest of pauses he told me, ‘It’s probably just the Soviets testing their transmitters. Ignore them. Anyway what are you doing on that frequency, sergeant? It’s outside the amateur band. Stick to what you’re authorised to do.’ And with that he hung up on me.

I went back to the club room and listened again on 20005 kcs but the signals had gone and the frequency was quiet. I didn't know the reason then, of course, but Sputnik had already dropped below the radio horizon and had I waited it would have returned later. I went to the Sergeants’ Mess to tell my colleagues what I had heard. That night on the BBC General Overseas Service News the world learned what Sputnik was, and the non-Soviet world leaders trembled with apprehension .