A QSL card from Cornell University W2CXM to the University of Texas W5NLH, 1952.

Although Amateur Radio at the University of Texas maintained a rather informal nature throughout the 1940's and 1950's, there was a club station licensed on the UT campus during this time. Sometime during the late 1940's, Fred Brooks (call?) and others applied for an Amateur Radio license for the "Longhorn Amateur Radio Club" and received the callsign W5NLH. This callsign appears in callbooks as early as 1949, and remained in use through the early 1950's.

The station to which the callsign was licensed was located in the northwest corner of the old Electrical Engineering building (Taylor Hall TAY, present-day home of the Department of the Computer Sciences.) The equipment consisted of a Hallicrafters BC-610H transmitter and various other World War II surplus equipment. Most likely, the station also served as the private station of Fred Brooks.

According to Jess Bain W5SYN , in the early 1950's club members set up a ten meter station on the walkway in front of the Texas Union on several occasions. A dipole would be strung up between the Texas Union and the Architecture Building. During one Round-Up parade sometime between 1952 and 1954, club members mounted a ten meter radio on the back of a pickup truck and took part in the parade as a float. A generator to power the radio was pulled in a trailer. The antenna was held by two poles, one in the truck and the other in the trailer. Club members also helped the parade organizers that year by providing communications assistance, also using the ten meter band.

The informal nature of Amateur Radio on the UT campus appears to have continued through the 1950's. Bruce Batchelor W5SGQ (now N4ALI) reports that several Hams in the Electrical Engineering building had various antennas and surplus CW and AM rigs on the air. They held semi-regular meetings and worked on the equipment to improve performance.

This old Victorian mansion on campus once housed an impressive Amateur Radio station.

The 1950s saw significant Amateur Radio activity among the members of UT's Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps. Jim Brown W5ZIT started his college education in 1955 as a freshman NROTC student. At the time, NROTC classes were held in Littlefield Home, an old Victorian mansion at the corner of 24th Street and Whitis Avenue. A complete Amateur Radio station was located in the building's basement. The transmitter was a Hallicrafters BC-610 with an antenna tuner mounted on top. A military receiver and speech amplifier were located on a desk adjacent to the BC-610. The antenna was a dipole fed with open wire transmission line.

Jim spent many hours operating this station during the 1955-1957 academic years, but returned to campus in the fall of 1957 to find the equipment missing: "All the ROTC units had been moved to a new building and Littlefield Home was no longer used by the NROTC." That new building was Russell A. Steindam Hall (RAS), located on the East Mall. Originally the home of George Littlefield, a UT Regent, cattle baron, and Confederate war veteran, Littlefield Home (LFH) is used today to host official University functions. Few know that it once housed an Amateur Radio station.

According to Jim, there were several other stations operated on or near the campus during those years. "One was located in a Quonset hut adjacent to the Intramural Fields. The transmitter consisted of a pair of 304TH vacuum tubes screwed to the wall of the hut, and the receiver used Heising modulation with a pair of 304TL vacuum tubes. A pole pig transformer served to supply the high voltage, and another served as the Heising modulation inductor. They both sat on the floor in their oil bath with the top cover removed. It was noted for TVI on all the receivers in the area."

Joe Makeever W5EBJ (now W5HS) also operated a station from his room at the Crow's Nest NROTC housing on 24th Street. Jim Brown W5ZIT also had some small success with a station he set up on the shelves of his room in Simkins Hall Dormitory (SHD). He used a military surplus receiver with a home brew transmitter based on the 815 vacuum tube. According to Jim, "W5AC at College Station was on the air most days when I fired up on 75 meters."

In 1957, Zeke Harvey W5NFC returned to Austin after having worked on an Arctic expedition. Back after two years, he was anxious to get back in touch with the friends that he had made via Amateur Radio. One of the groups he sought to get back in touch with were the regulars of a 10 meters AM group that met on 29.200 MHz. They all built their own equipment and had also enjoyed weekly transmitter hunts on Saturday nights.

Zeke was surprised to find that the group on 10 meters AM was nowhere to be found. Little by little, Zeke ran into and called the members and started encouraging them to get back on the air. The on-the-air visits were also accompanied by in-person visits, often at Zeke's house. At this time, Zeke's place was the unofficial Amateur Radio meeting place in Austin. Numerous Amateurs came and went from Zeke's workshop at all hours of the day and night working on various projects.

A few of the regulars at Zeke's house those days were a few students at the University of Texas at Austin. At the time, there was no longer an official Amateur Radio Club on the UT campus, and a lot of activity organized around NROTC had dropped off. One of the most active student hams was Mac Lingo K5DKA, who matriculated at the University in the fall of 1959. Mac decided that semester that there should be a licensed, organized Amateur Radio Club on campus once again. There were quite a few licensed hams on campus who went about the hobby in their own way, but they would soon have an official group to join.

On to the 1960s >>>