Part of our The Evolution of Amateur Radio timeline series.
The HF bands reopened in late 1945, but the bigger long-term shift for amateur radio happened just after, when the FCC reshuffled the VHF spectrum and handed hams the band that would eventually become the backbone of local and regional communication: 2 meters.
A new home at 144 to 148 MHz
Amateurs had actually held a 2.5 meter band before the war. In the postwar reallocation, the FCC moved that band to 144 to 148 MHz over the ARRL’s objections, wanting it positioned next to government and military allocations rather than where amateurs had originally requested. The old 2.5 and 5 meter bands became what we now call 2 meters and 6 meters.
Why the FCC moved the band at all
The postwar spectrum reshuffle wasn’t specific to amateur radio. Television broadcasting was expanding rapidly in the late 1940s and needed a large, contiguous block of VHF spectrum to accommodate the new medium, and the FCC was juggling competing demands from TV broadcasters, FM radio, government users, and amateurs all at once. Amateur radio’s prewar 2.5 meter allocation sat close to spectrum the FCC wanted for other purposes, so hams got moved rather than displaced entirely, landing at 144 to 148 MHz partly because that slot was adjacent to government and military VHF allocations the FCC found easier to buffer amateur activity against than to squeeze in next to the rapidly growing commercial broadcast bands.
War surplus gear fuels the VHF boom
The timing couldn’t have been better for adoption. The flood of war surplus VHF equipment I mentioned in the last post in this series gave hams an affordable way to get on 2 meters without building everything from scratch. Converted military gear became a common sight in ham shacks, and VHF activity grew quickly as a result. Surplus FM transceivers built for military vehicles and aircraft, originally never intended to leave government hands, were retuned and repurposed by hams looking for an inexpensive way onto the new band, a preview of the same commercial-to-amateur equipment pipeline that would show up again decades later with repeater gear and, later still, with DMR radios.
A new call district and a changing map
Around this same time, in 1946, the FCC added the tenth US call district, using the numeral 0, and realigned district boundaries that had been in place since before the war. The call sign map amateurs use today largely traces back to this reorganization.
Roughly 60,000 licensed hams
The postwar amateur population sat at around 60,000 licensed operators in 1946, roughly matching the number active before the war, but this time armed with far better technology and access to a brand new slice of spectrum most had never operated on before. That growth was about to accelerate sharply: within five years, the FCC would completely overhaul the license structure, replacing the old Class A, B, and C system with the Novice, Technician, General, Conditional, Advanced, and Amateur Extra classes that, in modified form, still shape how new hams get licensed today.
Where VHF went from here
2 meters was just the beginning. Over the following decades, hams would push further into UHF, and eventually build the repeater networks that make VHF and UHF so useful for local communication today.
Sources
Previous: 1945, the WWII shutdown and reopening. Next up: 70cm and the repeater boom of the 1950s-70s.