Early Amateur Radio QSL card
There is some really interesting history behind this QSL card from 1933. Fred Green, VE5CH, was a 20 year-old ham living with his family at 347 Foul Bay Road, a Samuel Maclure mansion. VE9AW was the experimental call sign for a Fokker Super Universal aircraft, CF-AAM, which was built in 1928 and purchased new by the Consolidated Mining and Smelting Company (Cominco) to support mineral exploration. To provide the high voltage for the radio’s transmitter it had a small wind turbine hung below one of the wings. The aircraft is now in the Royal Aviation Museum in Winnipeg. In the 1930s it was operated on floats, not wheels, as there were far more lakes then runways in the north.
The Cominco employee behind equipping the aircraft with a radio was an avid ham called Donald L. Hings, VE5BH. During WWII he was called to Ottawa to develop military radios, which included the first walkie-talkie (number 58 set), of which some 18,000 units were produced. https://ingeniumcanada.org/channel/innovation/donald-hings-engineering-walkie-talkie Much later, he received an Order of Canada award from the Governor General for this work. https://youtu.be/mFtUwtsJpgM I have his collection of QSL cards from the early 1930s.
Very interesting for me, he worked on the same floor of the National Research Council building that I later worked in as a radio astronomer. It’s located on the Ottawa River beside the Rideau Falls, a beautiful location!
