October 2024 marks the 75th anniversary of the National Traffic System®. When I peruse net bulletins and correspondence that accompanied the birth and infancy of NTS®, I am amazed the system even survived the early years! Of course, not only did it survive, it went on to thrive in subsequent decades! As George Hart, W1NJM, wrote later in the '50s, it did so not because HQ attempted to force it on amateurs but, rather, because of the "dogged determination" of a majority of traffic handlers of the day. This month and next, I'm describing a few of the challenges NTS® faced at the beginning.

October 1st was the target date publicized in September 1949 QST, but — because traffic nets of the era generally only formally operated Monday through Friday local time — full-up system operation began on the evening of Monday, October 3rd (which, of course, was really October 4th UTC). That's when the four newly appointed area net managers had agreed to hold their nets' first sessions, and most region net managers were planning to start as well. Nearly all section nets were already in existence; all that becoming part of NTS® required of them was to assign representatives to take out-of-section traffic to the new region net each weekday evening and bring back incoming traffic later that evening.

"Doc" Hayes, W1IIN / W2BYF, the first EAN manager, saw to it that EAN led off at 0130z that Monday evening on 3705 kHz. (EAN moved to 3670 on July 30, 1951, shortly after creation of the 3700-3750 kHz Novice band by the FCC.) The other three area nets (Central, Mountain, and Pacific) followed with their initial sessions one, two, and three hours later, on 3670, 3540, and 3670, respectively.

Yes, that's right — four area nets! That's because the original NTS® plan included a Mountain Area Net (MAN) so that each time zone in the "Lower 48" had its own daily cycle of section, region, and area net operations based on "local" time. But in the Mountain time zone in 1949, nets at all levels struggled, thanks primarily to sparse population density, few active traffic handlers, and abysmal HF propagation.

To that last point: The start-up of NTS® in October of 1949 could not have come at a worse time: HF conditions from then through at least the fall of 1952 were "the pits"! Two years in a row, EAN Manager George Sleeper, W2CLL, who replaced W2BYF in December of '49, wrote to W1NJM that he could not remember conditions ever being as bad in his entire ham career! Sunspot Cycle 18 was approaching its nadir and Cycle 19 — the strongest and best of all the sunspot cycles we older hams have had the privilege of enjoying — had not yet begun to ramp up. Winter long-skip zones afflicted even the relatively well-staffed EAN, which often had to rely on helpful CAN operators for intra-EAN relays between reps. So, when most of the country shifted to daylight saving time in the spring of 1950, the managers of PAN and MAN found it best to officially move those nets to 40 meters until the return of standard time in the fall.

But in May of 1950, MAN's manager chose to stay on Standard time rather than meet at 8:30 p.m. MDT, which would have been an hour earlier relative to “sun time” or UTC, as System sequencing anticipated. Suddenly, MAN and PAN were meeting at the same time and handling their traffic in what quickly became a single PAN session each evening. After reviewing the realities of the Mountain time zone activity and staffing with the affected net managers, W1NJM removed MAN from the NTS® structure and reassigned each region net in the Mountain time zone to CAN or PAN, as appropriate.

[To be continued next month.]