Why is Amateur Radio referred to as HAM radio?
There are a lot of licenced radio operators around the world that may often wonder why Amateur Radio is referred to as HAM radio. Also a lot of licensed radio operators already know this.
This could be one of the reasons below: (why I say one of the reasons is that I am not 100% sure of this, so to cover my derrière, I am not responsible for this statement).
The word “HAM” as applied to 1908 was the station CALL of the first amateur wireless station operated by some amateurs of th e Harvard Radio Club. They were Albert S. Hyman, Bob Almy, and Poogie Murray.
At first they called their station “HYMAN-ALMY-MURRAY”. Tapping out such a long name in code soon became tiresome and called for a revision. They changed it to “HY-AL-MY”, using the first two letters of each of their names. Early in 1901 some confusion resulted between signal from amateur wireless station “HY-ALMU” and a Mexican ship named “HYALMO”.
They then decided to use only the first letter of each name and the station CALL became “HAM”.
