Leisure: Friends in Radioland

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Phone Pafchers. Some hams have been close friends for decades without ever laying eyes on one another—and these include amateurs who are notables in professional or business life (see box). Many spend long hours "reading the mail" (eavesdropping on other hams' conversations); others are dedicated "phone patchers" who use their rigs to set up a telephone-and-radio circuit between servicemen overseas and their families in the U.S. Three times a week, Hollywood Television Actress Lenore Conn, W6NAZ, swings her antenna toward Greenland to let airmen stationed at both Sondestrom and Thule Air Force bases get in touch with the U.S. For three years Mrs. Conn has kept regular contact with another ham crew on T3, a drifting ice island in the Arctic. Occasionally, she even contacts a ham in Russia. "It has a tremendous air of mystery about it," she says. "The operator's name is always Ivan or Gregor. They talk about the weather or their equipment, but they don't say much."

The "DX (distance) hounds" make it their main interest to establish contact with other ham stations in the far reaches of the globe. Though some DXers have contacted more than 300 foreign countries, the excitement of meeting new people with strange jobs in exotic lands never diminishes. "The most fascinating thing about this," says one Hollywood ham. "is that it takes you into a world of disembodied voices. You can speak with them, know them, become friends with them; yet your mind gives them no image, no color, nothing solid at all. It's a strange concept of human associations without controversy, without social divisions, without status symbols and without aggressors."