[South Florida DX Association] Another ICON SK

[NPAlex at aol.com]

I don't know how many members of SFDXA are familiar with W1FH, but those of 
us who have been around awhile know of him and the rather outstanding results 
he had from his location in hearing stuff others could not.  Time marches on.

Norm W4QN
===========================================================
TO. Officers/Directors OOTC

The following is from W1UQ, Director 1st District.

W1FH member #1413, joined OOTC 1/28/1972, W1FH since 1930,
Born 1914, died 12/10/2005.

Bert

TRIBUTE TO CHARLES MELLEN,  "W1FH", Boston, Mass.
"Silent Key"  December 10, 2005

Back in the 1940's, "ham radio" operator Charles Mellon used his
short wave radio to talk to amateur radio operators in essentially
every country in the world.  Charles, of West Roxbury, Mass. was
the first recipient of the DXCC award after WW II.  This was the
coveted award for world-wide contacts, presented by the American
Radio Relay League.

Charlie, W1FH, was well known to many of the world's short-wave
operators starting in the pre-war days and continuing for almost
50 years. He was a polite and courteous operator and his operating
habit was to spend 99% of his time listening for rare overseas
signals, with few stateside contacts. He never called CQ but it
seemed he was always the very first to find weak signals and have
a cordial chat with the rarest of overseas "DX" stations, -and it
was always before a radio pile-up would start.

In 1949 Charlie was the little-publicized operator who maintained
radio contacts with a British agent named Reginald Fox who was
living in the closed country of Tibet. Fox used his forbidden wireless
set to beam signals over the towering Himalayas -and Charlie was
the first persons in the U.S. to continually gather news and information
about the Chinese communist invasion and annexation of Tibet, and
news of the safe escape of the young Dalai Llama who had been deposed.
This information from Charlie was constantly used by the CBS radio
commentator Lowell Thomas in the U.S.  Ironically, this nightly
program was also rebroadcast "live" to the world over Boston short
wave station WRUL, where I was the studio engineer!

Charles, as he always preferred to be called, was of Greek decent,
and maintained weekly amateur radio schedules for over 20 years with
his very close ham friend in London , Norman Jolly, G3FNJ, -that as is
typical, he had never met in person.  When my wife Claire (G3YL) and
I were in London, we had a most enjoyable visit with Norman Jolly,
another distinguished gentleman who was the chief British Intelligence
Officer in Greece during World War II.

As a young High School student after WW-II, it was fascinating to tune
in on Charlie when he was usually talking to countries that even my
teachers never heard of!
It was in the 70's when I finally visited Charlie's DX station in the
West Roxbury section of Boston. Surprisingly, he had a quite simple
set-up using 600 watts and a 3-element beam. I admired Charlie -and
appreciated learning that what counted for his far reaching radio
contacts was simply lots of patient listening -and far less talking !

Regretfully, Charlie's major heart surgery had long kept him inactive
on the radio waves, and he passed away on December 10, 2005 at the age
of 92. Sadly most of this fine gentleman's old radio friends have also
passed on.