Loyola University Maryland Radio Club records

The Radio Club, also known as the Amateur Radio Club, was formed late in 1956. According to a January 17, 1957 Greyhound article, the club consisted of about twenty members, with Mel Miller as president and Steve Crosby and Al Slomba as the club’s other officers. The club’s goal was to obtain ham licenses for all members and conduct code practice sessions for all levels. In its beginning, the club did not have a permanent station so the faculty moderator, Mr. DiBagio, made his own station (W38VH) available in his office.

According to a February 16, 1959 Greyhound article, the Radio Club had recently installed a “vertically polarized antenna” on the science building that would “access most popular amateur frequencies.” Around 1974-1975, the club introduced radiograms to the campus; radiograms enabled students to make long-distance phone calls, including to many other countries, free of charge.

In a Student Clubs Past and Present feature in the December 2011 Loyola magazine, it was noted that “the club’s station, K31QG, boasted that its signal could be heard as far away as Dundalk . . . The club also held daily classes in Morse Code, and members could earn a ham (amateur) radio operator’s license.” In recent years, Mel Miller, Loyola emeritus professor of chemistry, donated “a shoebox full of the club’s QSL (Query Station Location) cards, postcards unique to each station that helped operators build connections with those they had spoken with by radio” (Loyola magazine, April 2012). The Radio Club survived into the 1980s.

The Greyhound of November 5, 1982, reported that club president Steve Beekman “spoke to people across the nation and the world in last weekend’s ‘CQ World Wide DX Contest’” (DXing means communicating by voice with distant radio stations). It is not clear exactly when the club ceased to exist. The last catalog to list it as a student club was 1982-83. It was not included in the budget for student clubs in 1983-84 or 1984-85. There is a 1996 note from Dr. Miller offering a demonstration of two-way radio transmission, but there is no evidence from catalogs or yearbooks that the club was still in existence at that time.