Chatterbox

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The chatter wave was created in the 1970s for informal radio communication between West German merchant ships or to their shipping companies . It enabled radio communications on shortwave between ships, land stations and occasionally airplanes.

Mutual radio support

The Hamburg Süd shipping company Columbus Line operated a service between the Panama Canal and Australia / New Zealand . Modern container ships with very powerful radio systems were used there. They had good connections with Norddeich Radio ( callsign DAN). All ships of the Hamburg-Süd shipping company contacted each other every four hours using the shipping company collective call sign DAAP assigned to them by the Deutsche Bundespost. Certain ships of the line, for example the Columbus New Zealand class , then accepted the telegrams from the other shipping lines and relayed them to Norddeich Radio. They also did the same for non-shipping vessels. These four-hour meetings were called the Hamburg South Period . The radio officers did not charge any additional fees that they would have been entitled to. The "foreign" ship then politely asked for QSP? according to the Q code . That meant “Would you mediate free of charge?” And the request was usually granted.

Origin of the chatterbox wave

Depending on the reflections of the radio waves in the ionosphere, depending on the time of day, the solar radiation and the radio frequency, shortwave radios have different ranges, which vary between a few hundred to thousands of kilometers.

From the beginning of the 1970s, the range of radio systems was significantly improved by the introduction of single sideband modulation in shortwave telephony . In the meantime, the ships had been assigned special telephony frequencies for ship-to-ship traffic. The best known was the frequency 16,587.1 kHz. It quickly became established that the radio operators of all German shipping companies around the world met regularly during the earlier Hamburg-Süd period to exchange messages of a private nature. Connections between Hawaii and South Africa were just as normal as between ships off Hong Kong and the Antarctic Georg von Neumayer station of the Bremerhaven Alfred Wegener Institute . Even Lufthansa aircraft in the middle of the Sahara occasionally took part. Since everything was discussed, the name Quasselwelle emerged.

literature

  • Walter Helmers: Handbook for ship command. Springer, 1994, p. 207.