Just a few years after CW displaced King ‘spark’ as the radio amateur’s mode of choice, Mac Anderson began to build his first radio station. Having just turned 15 years of age money was tight and it wasn’t easy collecting the parts required for such an endeavor, but he finally did it. After an agonizing period of study and assembly, his station in the barn attic was ready for testing. He clamped the old cans on his head, powered the thing to life, and began tuning around. To his amazement he heard other stations in QSO. Eureka! A few days later came time to test the transmitter. With a shaky hand he called CQ and signed with his call sign. No one was more surprised then he when suddenly, his own call sign was coming back to him through his makeshift headset. He let out such a yell that his mother nearly had a heart attack and ran to the barn to see what had happened.

The other station was located in White Bear Lake, Minnesota and the operator’s name was Fred. They chatted for a brief moment until Mac’s Mom burst into the chilly radio shack and demanded to know the reason for the yelling. He tried to explain to her that he was communicating, wirelessly, with another radio experimenter nearly 600 miles away. She didn’t believe him. He took the headphones off his own head and put one of them to her ear as he tapped out a quick message and sure enough, Fred came right back. She didn’t look impressed, she looked annoyed and demanded he shut things down for the night and come into the house.

They discussed the incident over dinner as he tried, to no avail, no explain what had happened and how amazing this truly was. She was adamant that all she heard were ‘beeps’ in the headset, certainly nothing that could be understood by humans. Basically, she told him he was spending too much time in the barn in a way that let him know she thought he might be crazy. Sleep didn’t come easy that night as he agonized over how he could prove to his Mom that he really did communicate with someone in another state, via wireless that he had built with his own two hands.

His outlook changed over night as he dreamed up the solution to this situation. He got a postcard and wrote all of the details of his QSO with Fred on the card. He explained his station as best he could in the limited space. And he asked Fred if he wouldn’t do something similar and return the card to him by post.

A few days later, the card arrived and Mac ran with it to his Mom to show her. Upon seeing it, she nearly fainted. There it was, in black and white, and with a Minnesota postmark no less, proof that her boy was a wireless operator.

That’s the story of how QSL cards entered the world of radio. Except that it isn’t. I made the whole thing up. I don’t know how or why the tradition of trading QSL cards became a “thing” in amateur radio, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it didn’t happen something like that. Young folks, flushed with excitement from their radio conquests, running into those who didn’t know Morse code and didn’t believe what they were being told, it was all simply too amazing.

The QSL card became “proof” that a distant contact had indeed been made. The timeline for my fiction pre-dates any sort of awards or competition requiring a QSL card so why did hams take this up prior to DXCC, etc.? I believe that in the beginning these were just for fun and to prove to the doubters they weren’t just talking to themselves and concocting stories about their wireless set. I’m also willing to bet that over time these cards became more artistic as a means to coax others to return the favor. Speculation on my part, but it makes some sense.

Have a better story about how this unusual practice began? Drop me a note as we continue to discuss QSLing this week.