Royal Union of Belgian Radio Amateurs

Lore & Background

The UBA was founded on 25 January 1947, when two earlier amateur radio organizations—one based in Flanders and one in Wallonia—merged. The older of these, the Réseau Belge, was established in Brussels in September 1923 and drew its membership primarily from French-speaking radio amateurs in Brussels and Wallonia. In February 1926, it began publishing a membership magazine called QSO. Flemish amateur operators sought Dutch-language articles in QSO but were unable to persuade the editor to include them. With support from the publisher of a small Dutch-language magazine called Radio, the Vlaamsche Radio Bond was founded in Ghent on 22 September 1929, and it launched its own magazine, CQ VRB. After World War II, the two organizations agreed to unify into a single national radio society for Belgium. On 9 January 2001, the UBA was officially recognised as an amateur association by ministerial decree under legislation governing amateur radio stations.

Reader's Guide

The Royal Union of Belgian Radio Amateurs plays a central role in supporting amateur radio in Belgium. It sponsors operating awards, radio contests, and Amateur Radio Direction Finding competitions, and operates a QSL bureau for members who regularly communicate with operators in other countries. The UBA also represents the interests of Belgian amateur radio operators and shortwave listeners before Belgian and international telecommunications regulatory authorities. Its monthly membership magazine, CQ QSO, continues the tradition of the earlier publications QSO and CQ VRB. The organization's founding in 1947 resolved a linguistic divide that had split Belgian amateur radio into French- and Dutch-speaking groups for more than two decades, creating a unified national body that could effectively advocate for the hobby. Its official recognition in 2001 formalized its status under Belgian law, ensuring its ongoing role in the regulatory landscape.

Did You Know?

• The UBA was formed by the merger of the Réseau Belge (founded 1923) and the Vlaamsche Radio Bond (founded 1929).
• The Réseau Belge published a membership magazine called QSO starting in February 1926.
• The UBA publishes a monthly membership magazine titled CQ QSO.

The Architecture of Dits and Dahs

The International Morse code, as standardized by the ITU, encodes the 26 Latin letters A through Z, the accented letter É, the ten Indo-Arabic numerals, and a set of punctuation marks and procedural signals known as prosigns. Notably, the system makes no distinction between uppercase and lowercase. Every symbol is constructed from two fundamental elements: the dit and the dah, where the dah lasts exactly three times as long as the dit. Timing is governed by a half-beat as the base unit. Within a single character, each dit or dah is followed by a silence equal to one dit's duration. Between letters within a word, the gap stretches to three dits, and between words it expands to seven dits. This proportional, rather than absolute, timing means the code can be sent at whatever speed the receiving operator can comfortably decode, making it adaptable across skill levels.

From Needle to Alphabet

Before Morse and Vail, European experimenters in the early nineteenth century were already exploring electrical signalling using static electricity and Voltaic pile currents. The discovery of electromagnetism by Ørsted in 1820 and Sturgeon's electromagnet in 1834 opened the door to electromagnetic telegraphy. Early single-needle receivers, while robust, were slow because operators had to alternate between watching the needle and transcribing the message. A clever trick—installing one ivory and one metal stop so the needle's clicks sounded differently—made the signal audible as well as visible, paving the way for the Double Plate Sounder System. In Britain, Cooke and Wheatstone patented an electromagnetic telegraph in June 1837 and demonstrated it on the London and Birmingham Railway, establishing the first commercial telegraph. Meanwhile, in America, Morse's original receiver used a clockwork-driven paper tape with a stylus making indentations. His earliest code transmitted only numerals with a codebook lookup, but Vail expanded it in 1840 to include full letters.

Frequency as a Design Principle

Alfred Vail's contribution went beyond simply adding letters to Morse's numeral-only system. He engineered the code's structure around a statistical insight: the duration of each symbol should be roughly inversely proportional to how often that character appears in English text. To estimate these frequencies, Vail counted the movable type in the type cases of a local newspaper in Morristown, New Jersey. The result was a system where the most common letter, E, received the shortest possible code—a single dit—while rarer characters received longer sequences. This frequency-weighted design maximized transmission efficiency. After subsequent revisions led to the ITU standard, a few character assignments drifted from optimal, though many retained their efficiency. The code's proportional timing, specified by ratio rather than fixed duration, allowed operators to send at the highest rate the receiver could decode, making the system inherently scalable in speed.

A Language for Human Senses

What distinguishes Morse code from purely digital signals is its direct accessibility to human perception. It can be transmitted through sound waves, visible light, electric current, or radio waves, and a trained person can interpret it in real time without electronic decoding. The signal is present during a dit or dah and absent during the spaces between them—a simple on-off keying of whatever medium carries the information. Because many natural languages use alphabets beyond the 26 Latin letters, Morse alphabets were developed for those languages, largely through transliteration of existing codes. The code's memorability and its compatibility with multiple sensory channels made it a versatile tool: the same sequence of dits and dahs could be heard through a sounder, seen as flashes of light, or felt through a telegraph key, all conveying identical information to a trained operator.