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Radioamater - the Magazine of the C.R.C.

The foundation-stone for any amateur radio association is its members' magazine. Both before and after the Second World War, the distant predecessor of the Association of Czechoslovak Amateur Broadcasters, published a magazine called Kratke vlny - Short Waves. After the Communist putsch in 1948, this magazine was forcibly combined with another similar title thus creating Amaterske radio - Amateur Radio, which has carried on to this day.

The 'HAM Radio' concept broadened over the course of time and likewise the contents of Amaterske radio became more general. The subject of transmissions became more and more marginalized and when radioamateurs occasionally ventured to protest over what was happening to their magazine, it was 'explained' to them that they should be pleased because the percentage of space devoted to radio amateur subjects in Amaterske radio was supposedly a lot more than the percentage of radio amateurs in the total readership. The logic of this argument was like that involved in a situation where an association of bee-keepers created its own magazine which was gradually transformed into one on woodworking with the justification that hives are made out of wood and there are far more woodworkers than bee-keepers... And so radioamateurs practically lost their magazine.

Radioamateurs took advantage of the brief period of cosmetic liberalization in 1968 (the so-called Prague Spring) to establish a new magazine of their own, Radioamatersky zpravodaj - Amateur Radio Report. This magazine managed to survive and was even published after 1989 as the magazine of the Czechoslovak Radio Club until the dissolution of the Czechoslovak federation when it folded.

CRC then briefly found itself without a magazine. It reacted to this by working together with the publisher of a successful private periodical called AMA, ing.Karel Karmasin, OK2FD. AMA was the magazine until the end of 1999.

However, an association periodical requires much closer feedback with the requirements of the association and its members than is afforded by an entirely independent publication. Hence from 2000, has decided to again come out with its own magazine, this time called Radioamater.


The end of January and the beginning of February 2000 saw the arrival of this brand new magazine in the post-boxes of members of the Czech Radio Club and the majority of radioamateurs in OK - the plan seems to have worked out well and Czech and Moravian radio hams can again look forward to some interesting and useful HAM Radio reading.

One forward step has been our own Internet pages to the magazine, which is being created in parallel to the entire project.


Jiri, OK1AOZ, supervises the project for the Czech Radio Club as the editor-in-chief and the Chairman of the Board of Editors.


As an illustration of the contents of the previous association AMA magazine we present a selection which has not been put together by chance, in which we see the return of the amateur radio licence with call-sign OK7HZ to Jiri Hanzelka, one of the famous pair of Czech travel-writers.

Hanzelka and Zikmund started their travelling as radioamateurs and visited a large number of amateurs on their travels all over the world although they did not as a rule get to transmit themselves because of the difficulties in importing broadcasting equipment to various 'savage' countries. We can find some interesting reports from their first journey in a post-war edition of Kratke vlny.

After the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, Hanzelka's amateur radio licence was taken from him by the Communists as he was one of the leading exponents of the Prague Spring. This extract is thus one of the many items documenting the return to normal conditions in the Czech Republic.

© OK1XU, 2000