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Natural History, Dec, 2007 by Carl F. Welser

Robert Anderson's mention of Sputnik 1's "evocative sounds" ["Beep Beep," 10/07] reminded me of that October morning in 1957 when I hastened from class to my dorm room to switch on my old Hallicrafters S-40B. Fortunately I had the presence of mind to switch on the beat frequency oscillator (BFO), which converted Sputnik's hisses into a few fading beeps. Ham radio operators working with Morse code used the BFO to convert continuous wave (CW) signals into audible beeps. A number of my memory cells have faded into retirement, but I remember thinking that the weak CW signal emitted by Sputnik could easily have been overshadowed by the signal emanating from WWV, the national standards station broadcasting from Ft. Collins, Colorado. I suspect that many who reported hearing Sputnik's beeps may have been using smaller, less sensitive shortwave radios lacking BFO capability and mistaken a few seconds of beeping from WWV for Sputnik's beeps.

Carl F. Welser

Hamburg, Michigan