Introduction

The Inland Marine Radio History Archive is a web-based cooperative research "organization" which one "joins" by contributing information to the Archive.  "Organization" and "joins" should be taken very loosely here as there are no dues, no roster of members, no officers, but contributors are recognized and credited.  It's strictly a non-profit project and monetary contributions are not sought.  

Our purpose here is to document and place in the Public Domain some of the 1930s to 1990s history of AM and SSB shortwave radiotelephone as used for ship-to-shore communications with towboats on the Mississippi, Ohio and other inland rivers and with the bulk-carriers and freighters on the Great Lakes.  The emphasis will be on the 10 large Public Coast stations that provided this service.  Some attention will also be given to earlier CW operation, these stations' later VHF-FM systems, and to government and Canadian stations.  This project is being undertaken because this era should not be allowed pass into almost complete oblivion without some better recognition of these fine stations and the dedicated people ("The Crew") who manned them.  Much of the information about this use of radio has likely already been lost, but with the help of veterans of the era and knowledgeable visitors to the site some of what remains can be preserved and many sources of additional information can be identified. 

Note that this project is as much about the people involved in the era and their recollections of it as it is about buildings, radio gear and antennas.  Information for "The Crew" pages is very much desired and those pages are as important as any other information about the stations.

Update - 7/9/2007

The site is now almost 2 years old, and has recently been updated to a fixed-width layout to better control the presentation of the content particularly on the wider monitors now coming into main-stream use.   Also, contributors have been  bountiful with their submissions and several sections of the site have become quite complex demanding improvement in the site's navigation.  A drop-down menu feature has been added to most pages to help with this.

The site is still a "work in progress," but the information content for several of the stations is now quite good.  However, for others solid content is still lacking, and  I still have many questions and requests (highlighted by green italics).  If you have applicable information,  your help would be appreciated.  While a few pages are still somewhat rough and unorganized the changeover to the fixed-width layout allows better layout control and helps with this.  It's surely a better site than when it was started 2 years ago as, thanks to all the contributors, there's now much to view.  So click on some of the links on the drop-down menu, or in the index tables below, and enjoy!  Please come back often to follow our progress.   The What's New button at the top of this page makes it easy for returning visitors to find the new content, and the Site Search function at the bottom of this page should be helpful also.

These Photo Viewing tips will help you get the most out of the images on this site.

The tables below duplicate the drop-down menu links and are provided for those who have disabled Java Script on their browser.  Many of the indexed pages have sub-pages, and there are links to other sites when appropriate.  The status columns are your guide to the completeness of the page's content with 1 being rough draft with little data and 9 being fairly complete.

Home Page and Site Search Best viewed using MS IE-6/7 or Mozilla Firefox 2 at 1024 by 768 resolution and Normal Text Size.  Except as noted here most of the site's content is in the public domain.   Last Updated