[QCWA] Beverage Antenna in WW2

[Norm Gertz]

Walt........we often tuned in on Tokyo Rose when we had a chance.......she 
always opened her program with "Hello to my boneheads in the 
Pacific"......she would then always go on to her dissertation on how the 
wives and girl friends back home were cheating on us etc...
We really tuned her in because somehow she had the very latest music which 
we all loved to hear.
It was always perplexing to us that she would identify units in our outfit 
and mention casualties by name etc.
I dont think that was ever resolved.

73   Norm    K1AA


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Walter Maxwell" <walt at w2du.com>
To: "QCWA Mailman" <qcwa at mailman.qth.net>
Sent: Thursday, September 22, 2005 1:10 PM
Subject: [QCWA] Beverage Antenna in WW2


>     As a monitoring officer with the Radio Intelligence Division (RID) of 
> the
> FCC in Hawaii during WW2 I was privy to some interesting situations. Our 
> State
> Department was of course aware of the operations occurring in the Pacific
> Theater. The people there were also aware of the propaganda being spewed 
> by the
> Japanese short-wave broadcasters. But State was curious concerning what 
> the
> Japanese living on the homeland were being told-were they being told the 
> truth,
> or the same propaganda as told on the short-wave broadcasts, or a totally
> different story. State asked the RID to determine whether we could obtain 
> such
> information.
>
>     We cruised the AM broadcast band and found several nighttime signals 
> from
> Japanese mainland stations, but most were too weak to copy. However, JOAK,
> Tokyo, on 650 KHz was S9, but there was a problem in copying it. KFI, Los
> Angeles, was also on 650 KHz with an S9 signal-copying intelligence from 
> JOAK
> was impossible. How can we eliminate, or reduce KFI's signal level. A 
> Beverage
> Wave antenna, perhaps?
>
>      We then proceeded to the northern portion of Oahu and constructed a
> Beverage one-half mile long, five feet above ground, aimed at Tokyo, and
> terminated with a 1000-ohm pot resistor to ground at the Tokyo end. We
> discovered that by varying the pot resistance we could null the KFI signal 
> to
> almost zero. The resistance terminating the Beverage that produced the 
> null was
> around 600 ohms. Because the matching resistive termination rendered the
> Beverage a traveling-wave antenna with no standing wave, the signal from 
> JOAK
> was terminated by the input of our receiver, while the signal from KFI was
> dissipated in the matched resistance at the Tokyo end of the Beverage-no 
> KFI
> signal reflected toward the receiver. Voila-JOAK was perfectly readable 
> for
> recording!
>
>     We sent the first recording to Washington, and State was
> delighted-requesting that we continue recording JOAK continuously. 
> Consequently,
> our recordings were flown daily to Washington from Hickam Field in 
> Honolulu. We
> were left in the dark concerning the information on the recordings, and 
> how it
> affected the War effort, because State didn't share it with us. But it 
> must have
> been pretty good, because State was on our case every day to make sure we 
> sent
> them the recordings.
>
>
>
> Walt, W2DU
>
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