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In actual fact this is what happened: legislation was enacted 40 years later and the callsign SV1AAA was officially allocated to Nikita Venizelos after 54 years had elapsed! The recipients of these three licences were Costas 'Bill' Tavaniotis SV1KE, Aghis Cazazis SV1CA and Nikos Katselis SV1NK. As there were no relevant regulations the choice of callsign was left to the individual operators.
For instance, Tavaniotis ran his own electrical and electronic business called KONSTAV ELECTRIC so he decided to use "KE" as his callsign. As far as I know the following ten amateurs were active in the Athens area in 1937: 1. Takis Coumbias.....................SV1AAA 2. Menelaos Paidousis.................SV1MP 10.
In 1931 his family, like many other Greek families in Russia, moved to Athens where Takis built a 4-valve transmitter with which he was very active on 40 and 20 metre CW using the callsign SV1AAA. I frequently operated his station myself and when I asked him why he had chosen that particular callsign he gave me what proved to be a truly prophetic answer.
"It will be ages," he said, "before the Greek State officially recognizes the very existence of radio amateurs and begins to issue transmitting licences to them. After that it might take another 50 years for them to get to the three-letter series beginning with SV1AAA."
Two are of particular interest: the account given to me by Takis Coumbias formerly SV1AAA of the early days of amateur radio in Russia and the story of the Greek broadcasts from Cairo, Egypt during the German/Italian occupation of Greece in World War II. Nearly all the photographs of the period were taken by the author.
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