When you are a student any job can be a good job. If it's doing two of your favourite things in life -- "playing radio" and being around airplanes -- and getting paid for it, then it's heaven. I became a ham in 1954 and almost flunked out of school because I spent most of my evenings on the ham radio instead of studying. I also got my pilot's licence in about 1959. I read recently that ham radio very often leads to careers. Well, three of us teen-age hams saw a position advertised on the notice board. Spartan Air Services wanted students who were ham radio operators to work in the North for the summer. They said they believed that hams would be more ingenious and make things work in sometimes adverse conditions (and they likely didn't want to have to pay commercial operator rates). We got the jobs immediately. The pay was good and they even paid $10 per day for living expenses!
We went to their offices in Ottawa, were trained in weather observing and reporting, and had to obtain a restricted radiotelephone licence. They then flew us by commercial airlines to Edmonton and then to our sites at Fort McMurray, Yellowknife, Norman Wells, and Whitehorse. We found a place for the HF radio equipment and antenna, and a place to stay. We had to be ready to pass on weather information and keep position reports of their mosquito high level photography aircraft when they were flying. The following summer in 1958 they moved further north to the high arctic for their survey work. The
These sites and others you will find are interesting. Spartan had about 7 or 8 mosquitos then. They photographed the North in summer and Kenya and Columbia in winter. Bristol Aerospace subsequently purchased Spartan. Now I read there are only two mosquitos left in Canada. One is for sale in case you have a few hundred thousand dollars. http://www.adrenalin.bc.ca/zalesky/mossi.html The Canadian Centre for Remote Sensing has replaced airplanes for the most part for mapping the world. No more photography from 30,000 feet. Now hear one: (well, it's actually a spitfire I think). Link up to: http://www.warplane.com/hub.html and listen. Wait a bit for the audio to load. If that doesn't make the heart beat faster I don't know what will, especially if you have seen and heard a spitfire or mosquito bomber. The sound of the Rolls Royce Merlin engine gives me goose bumps too.
73 DO YOU HAVE A SIMILAR INTERESTING STORY WITH A HAM RADIO ANGLE? IF SO, WHY NOT SHARE IT WITH THE REST OF THE MEMBERS. NO NEED TO BE A WRITER AS YOUR EDITOR WOULD BE GLAD TO DO AN INTERVIEW AND PUT YOUR THOUGHTS TO PAPER. ed.
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Today was the first time I have ever gotten goose bumps while "playing on the Internet". I had a hunch that I might find something about aerial surveys in the North or about the company I worked for during the summers of '57 and '58. Today after finishing with my week-day morning CW sched. with a friend of mine in Toronto, I came down and checked out a couple of new web sites he told me about. I also did a simple search for "aerial photography" and "northern canada", but didn't get much. I then tried a Yahoo search as follows: "spartan air services". It found 11 web pages that made reference to Spartan Air Services.
three of us and a few other "ham" radio operators were stationed at Cambridge Bay, Prince of Wales Island, Pelly Lake and a couple of other places. The experiences would provide us with life-long memories.
The highlight of my summers had to be at Yellowknife, when one morning, one of the pilots came around to my tent. He asked if I was interested in going up in HMK -- one of the "mossys". Even though I had heard that the career expectancy of those pilots was about 10 years (1 in 10 had crashed), there was NO hesitation in this 18-year-old. If I had been older or had read the story told in this web site: