Pioneer Alabama amateur radio pivots around the electrical engineering department at what was then called Alabama Polytechnic Institute in Auburn. In 1912 API alumnus, Miller Reese Hutchinson, an electrical engineer who served as assistant to Thomas A. Edison, gave a spark gap transmitter and crystal receiver to API. In that same year Congress approved the Radio Act, and universities throughout the nation applied for licenses.

For their station, API students erected a 150-foot steel pipe on the east end of Broun Hall and strung an antenna to the second floor where the set was located. Hutchinson arrived on June 2, 1913, for the dedication, reading the first message transmitted, a note to Edison at his New Jersey laboratory:

"This wireless formally christens the two-and-a-half

kilowatt apparatus which I have this day presented to

the Alabama Polytechnic Institute in commemoration of

the first homecoming of the alumni. The president, the

faculty, the alumni, and the student body join me in

expressing love and esteem to the father of electrical

development."

Auburn's station was licensed 5YA to operate on 1800 meters and was manned by faculty and students. The engineering department developed a course in wireless telegraphy to teach interested amateurs code and radio science. As operators' skills improved and better equipment located, 5YA's range extended and was heard as far away as Indianapolis, Indiana.

During World War I, 5YA, like all non-military radio stations, was dismantled because the government feared spies and saboteurs would use radio waves to the allies' detriment. However, the army issued two portable sets and buzzer devices to API to train approximately 200 men as wireless telegraphers during the war.

When the radio ban was lifted in 1919, Victor Caryl McIlvaine decided to complete his degree and to build a new station using 5YA's antenna and spare parts from the engineering department and his own equipment. The resulting conglomeration was 5XA, the first experimental station in the 5th radio district.

5XA was located in a small building near the campus's main gate and had a single wire long-wave antennae attached to the water tank behind Wright's Drug Store (Toomer's Corner). Operators continually sought to improve the station's equipment but received no financial aid from the college.

The number of local radio amateurs grew, and these hams were keenly interested in their hobby, managing to keep 5XA almost continuously on the air, including at night. Albert E. Duran remembered that when members sent code that it "made beautiful music and generated a lovely odor of ozone. While someone was sending, you could read the sparks on a power pole at the main gate."

The tradition continues even until today. Visit our website at http://www.qsl.net/k4ry

73 de K4RY