Experimental operators Harry Kauper/Lance Jones turn on first radio music for a dance, at North Adelaide in 1923
Experimental radio operators Harry Kauper (5BG) and Lance Jones (5BQ) controlling the receiver at the first Adelaide dance using music from radio in the 1920s.
Adelaide was astonished in June 1923 with the first public use of radio for music at a dance at the Royal Institute for the Blind hall in North Adelaide. Music for dancing was set by experimental radio station operators Harry Kauper (5BG) and Lance Jones (5BQ, also original owner of what became 5DN) at the Royal Institute for the Blind Hall in North Adelaide. The music was transmitted by radio from records played at the home station of Hal Austin, two miles aways.
In the previous year, Fred Williamson (5AH), another member of the South Australian division of the Wireless Institite of Australia had successfully broadcast speech and music. By the end of 1924, institute members demonstrated the reception of programmes on nine radio receivers set up on a specially chartered night train to Hallett Cove with 500 passengers.
The institute, meeting in Currie Street, Adelaide; then the YMCA, then Adelaide University, gained its own call sign 5WI as a registered company in 1921. It gave public demonstrations of radio at the Royal Show, with lectures on subjects such as: the tuned buzzer and sparking buzzer; theory of atoms and electrons; honeycomb, duo-lateral, pancake and spiderweb coils. A single stage amplifier was demonstrated, using a V24 valve built into a cigar box by Hal Austin (5BN, later 5AW).
With 30 to 40 amateur radio experimenters operating in the 1920s, people with licences to listen to commercial broadcast stations were complaining of interference from the spark transmitters of the experimenters. Twenty-plus clubs were started in the metropolitan and country areas, fuelled by articles on building crystal sets, in publications such as Boys' Own Paper, the SA Wireless (Monthly), Radio Magazine (from the institute) and Radio Broadcast.
The amateur operators were proving their practical worth. In 1924, the institute’s New South Wales division asked South Australian members to keep in touch with an exploring expedition in Western Australia. When a submarine cable to Kangaroo island broke during a severe storm in 1927, several amateur operators maintained contact with the island until it was fixed.
