Ham radio 🐖📻🐷 Amateur radio was the internet of the 1950s… a way to communicate with people instantaneously over great distances. Here we have some equipment that would have been typical for a radio operator in the mid-1950s. There’s a number of stories about this equipment that we could tell here, and maybe we will in future posts, and the receiver at the bottom of the stack is gloriously named “Skyrider Defiant”… but for now let’s ask the question: Why is it called “ham radio”?
The answer dates back to the pre-radio wired telegraph era, when operators with poor Morse code skills were derided as “ham-fisted.” The perjorative slang carried over to early radio, when amateur operators were often less skillful at Morse code than former telegraph professionals. Eventually the term was embraced as a badge of honor by amateur radio operators, and the term lost all perjorative connotations by the mid-20th century.
