History of Polish coast radio stations (second part)

From a teletype to radio waves

In Poland a teletype has always been the fastest way to deliver a written message to coast station and then to the ship. Shipowners had teletypes and used them all the time. At the begining of the 70s era all the devices were large, clumsy, noisy but they worked fast enough. Telegrams from shipowners were sent by telex network directly to Gdynia Radio station (TLX GDYNIARADIO PL). Women who worked there cut the paper and glued messages to a standard sending form. Telegrams from ordinary persons were delivered from the local post office. You could go to your nearest post office, write your message, address it like: „Jan Kowalski, passenger of m/s Stefan Batory, Gdynia Radio” and it was just that. In this case no call sign was neither written in a telegram nor necessary. Post office delivered the telegrams to Gdynia Radio and the operators did the rest.

Messages were recorded in a logbook with given number, words were counted, additional information were written and cost were accounted to a journal. Messages to be delivered were put to a large, rotating drum. This drum had diameter of over a meter and was full of pigeonholes – each one was marked for one or more vessels. Some holes had to carry more messages than others – good example of this „fat” pidgeonhole could be the one that held messages for Polish ocean liner Stefan Batory/SPYM (picture above). This vessel always had a lot of traffic. The same rule applied to vessels that supported fishermen on distant fisheries – we called them „bases”. Closest example of similar communication need in the Western part of the world would be m/v Miranda during „cod wars” in the 70s. There were many bases spread on different fisheries and many vessels contacted us. Every operator had to know the callsigns because this way work went faster.

Radio Officer Jan KUPSKI

Jan Kupski said: „when all messages arrived to my department from teletypes, we put down the callsign, for example SQEI for m/v Zawrat and then put the forms to the drum, to the correct pigeonhole. During my work there I knew more than 300-400 different call signs for different vessels”.

(attachment – a QTC sent from Szczecin Radio/SPE4 to s/s Kaszuby that allows a radiotelephonist to go back earlier to Poland if captain’s permission is given. One of the former R/Os that had phone-only radio license had to pass the CW exam in Szczecin to become a first class R/O. I’ve done a interview with this R/O before. Some other facts about Szczecin Radio/SPE will be covered later).

Everything started with traffic list. Six times a day, so every four hours, a list of callsigns that had messages waiting for them was combined and sent on all available transmitters. Before sending a traffic list there was a short announcement on 500kHz – it looked like this: CQ CQ DE SPH SPH TFC LIST QSX 447 447 AR. Then a traffic list was sent from an old keyer. When a traffic list ended, all operators were listening on preplanned frequencies – for Gdynia it were channels 5, 6 and 9 on standard international maritime frequency list.

The messages were sent, confirmed and written in a logbook as delivered. In the rush hours during the communication peak we had a lot of messages to be sent and received. As most of the radio officers of Polish merchant navy were very proficient in Morse code, we could speed up the tempo. One of the best telegraphists served on Dalmor vessels. You could send fast, even more than 30WPM, they picked it up at once and answered sometimes even faster and still very accurate. Some trawlers sent coded messages covering perhaps amount of fish on every catch or some technical information. PLO vessels sent information about their travel and load, messages that they have already been loaded and on the way to destination port with estimated time of arrival. Pure business. There were also pesonal messages about money similar to this: “make a transfer for my wife with amount of 100 US dollars” – it was really some amount of cash in Poland, three to four times an month average salary. This is why such messages were important. And of course we had private telegrams too. I had sent hundreds of thousands of messages. In 1996 I’ve dispatched 96 thousands of QTCs during one of the peak near Christmas. Of course you couldn’t compare us to Portishead, Norddeich or Scheveningen but Gdynia was for sure a busy station.

We used Japanese single lever „unbreakable” automatic keys, some Polish K2216 two lever squeezer key and there always was a straight key, used sometimes on 500kHz or when some R/O needed slower tempo. The keys were solid but sometimes you had to clean the contacts with a piece of cardboard torn from an old box of matches.

We had one special operator, Stanisław Kowalski, who could eat, drink, smoke and send – at the same time. When I went to my work for the first time he had done a small examination. I was told to sit down, receive and send. When I had trouble in receiving some weak signal in poor condition he yelled at me. He yelled all the time! Anyway he was very special man. I still don’t know how he could receive almost anything. No matter how noisy, weak and bad signal he had, he received anything. Anything that was thrown at him from the radio speaker – he got it all, correct, at the first try. I still remember how he sent „best wishes” (note – in Polish it was „najserdeczniejsze zyczenia” – really hard words to be sent via Morse). Just a long sausage of dihs and dahs but all the sparks on all the seas understood him very well. He was a first class operator, unfortunately he’d crossed the bar some years ago.

Phone patch calls were also very important to us. I worked on this position too. There was unwritten rule that a radio officer called for free. It was a short call, perhaps at the end of a queue, about 5 minutes but it was for free. This call was not put on a list. We were connecting so many calls that you just looked at the meters. All the words, everything that was said over the voice channel just flew over us. Nothing left. I don’t remember anything from almost all of the calls. The only exception from this rule was a call from first R/O of the ts/s Stefan Batory/SPYM. He made a special atmosphere of family connection over the radio waves. Sometimes it was like this: „honey, do not try to repair the toilet cistern, call a plumber perhaps”. We had also a family of R/Os, he always recognized her by her sending when she was on CW position. They talked on CW during the free time with little or no traffic.

We had separated stations for CW and QRJ in our building, as a rule every single operator had hers or his single room to work in. It was fantastic for us – no noise, nothing that could distract from work except the wonderful view to the antenna field or to the forest. Or uncomfortable chairs. Later the chairs were changed to very cosy office armchairs. I really liked the work.

Beside all the operators and technicians we had a supervisor, a traffic dispatcher, janitors, accounting bureau and local security. At most we had 16 operators on every shift. I remember when there were 108 persons working there, not including the technicians that serviced transmitters in Oksywie transmitting center. We worked five shifts, combined in a pattern – day, night, free, free. Anyway after 12 hours of a shift you would be tired. We had a huge traffic peak near all high days and holidays. Besides the Easter and the Christmas we had a lot of messages during name days. One of the most popular name was Krystyna or Krysia, we had a lot of QTCs adressed for them. As many women served as Gdynia Radio operators with the receivers, it was normal that young women got married and pregnant. They couldn’t work as a radio operator on the night shifts so they worked in the accounting – one by another. In the former socialistic system every price of our every service was centrally regulated and special accounting was required. It is now funny to hear but it wasn’t so funny when you lived here. Besides, everyone had to do their own work. So we did”.

The bands

Gdynia used 4MHz at night for almost all the years. 6MHz was not widely used, we were not convinced to use this band. We used 8MHz, 12MHz, 16MHz, we called them traditional. We intermittently used 22MHz . At this time propagation on higher bands was sporadical. Poland is more distant to the North from the Equator than perhaps Roma Radio or Bern Radio, and then Gdynia Radio was up to the North in Poland. There is a huge difference in propagation when one compares Mediterranean region to the Baltic one. 22MHz was closed for us most of the time.

The antennas

For many years Gdynia Radio did not have any omnidirectional receiving antenna. We used the excellent directional antennas built by Polish Institute of Radiocommunication in Wrocław but sometimes they were too good. When a vessel called us from Mediterranean Sea and we listened on ABRH set pointed to Far East, we couldn’t receive the signal at all. No matter how strong the signal really was here. This is why we announced the direction we are listening – we put the azimuth in an announcement. Most common were China, Singapore, Africa, Mediterranean. It made connection more difficult for the radiomen that were sailing but at least we could hear them on scheduled connection times. Direction that went via Russia (like China) had a set of two ABRH antennas, for the Mediterranean region and the Africa one ABRH set was enough to get a good signal. Later on extremely bad conditions we could borrow a high power transmitter from Warsaw Radio communication center, operated remotely by a landline, connected to high gain full-size rhombics pointed to the direction we frequently wanted to transmit. We had tens of kilowatts of RF power on shortwave, Warszawa Radio center had even more. It helped but not that much.

Our aerials were set to 12 different directions but we didn’t have any antenna that pointed North to the Pacific Ocean. At the time the antennas were designed no Polish ships sailed there. Some years later when Polish fishermen started to do their hard work on South Pacific we had to do something to achieve the coverage on this direction too. We installed a special set for this direction, Szczecin Radio did the same. Our antenna field covered 10ha, we had over 40 masts 25 meters each, large 100m antennas. After some years of my work I could install a omnidirectional antenna that was good for some signals. I joked that I smuggled in a new antenna, hung it and it worked.

We had a lot of QRJs on different radio conditions, sometimes very bad but anyway we provided connection. We were proud of it. SSB wasn’t accessible to all the listeners but anyway more and more people had proper receivers. This was one of the reasons to use satellite phones when they become available.

SITOR – the CW killer

As fast and automatic connection was needed we bought a set of STB750 SITOR terminals. First two Phillips sets were bought in Holland. They were installed on research vessel m/s Profesor Siedlecki/GDY-330 and the other one was installed at Gdynia Radio communication center. Then m/v Profesor Siedlecki sailed to Antarctic seas to check the fisheries. We had a scheduled connection, we all went to the room where the terminal was installed. We all looked how it works. It was great. Then similar devices called UTD were built in Poland, we had four channels to transmit and receive here. Every ship with SITOR terminal had their own SELCAL settings, we also had one. At this time some CW traffic ended, we connected the vessels via radio and SITOR terminals to the telex network, connection was established and the R/O on a ship could send a teletype message directly to the shipowner. Connection were billed for the time used. SITOR ARQ was a killer to telegrams sent by hand via Morse key. Anyway it was a really good communication technology.

End of second part. Third one will cover changes in technical part, problems during the 80s (martial law in Poland) and handling of distress signals including a failure that has shown weakness of former manual distress communication on 500kHz (it was a tragedy of train ferry m/s Jan Heweliusz/SQIK that went under in very bad conditions. It was really rough weather on whole Baltic Sea and SQIK was a bad luck ship too).

Non the clip below SZCZECIN RADIO/SPE traffic list

Marcin Marciniak, SP5XMI