When I was in the Navy and there were no cell phones Ham operators in the US ran what was called the MARS network. If you were out at sea you could connect to a ham operator in the US who would dial a loved one for you collect and you could talk for 5 minutes. They were usually the best 5 minutes of the day, God bless them.
Not all of the MARS traffic consisted of phone patches. I operated Navy MARS for 20 years. (beginning in 1976) I have a certificate of appreciation from a Rear Admiral thank me for 15 years of service.
At one point I belonged to a HAM club in AZ where the “Chief” of Army MARS also belonged. Great guy.
There were some really good operators, not all retired military, but all loved the military.
There are very very few “lefties” in the HAM community. I’ll bet if you had a way to access it, there are very very few “lefties” that are engineers either.
During the 60’s and 70’s, Barry Goldwater (K7UGA/AF7UGA) had a team of hams authorized to use his station in Paradise Valley (on a hill at the head of 40th St) to run phone patches for servicemen, principally in Southeast Asia.
A friend of mine from work was on that team, and invited me to Barry’s shack one Sunday morning to watch the operation. It was in the guest house, next to the main residence.
As you drove up, you saw this tall aluminum forest consisting of several gigantic beam antennas (mostly log-periodic designs IIRC) on similarly gigantic towers. A couple of them were “sky needles,” which were tapered masts which rotated at the bottom, turning the tower along with its antennas.
Inside the shack was a station with two or three operator positions. Two things caught my eye: A TMC transmitter capable of about 4KW (IOW, about 4 times the Amateur’s legal limit) which they could use on the AF MARS (Military Amateur Radio Service) frequencies. And also the captured VietCong flag draped across the couch. The drapes over the window above the couch were drawn, Bob said, to frustrate any possible sniper.
When my friend Bob took over the operator’s chair, I saw how smoothly they ran the operation. He had a headset on which was in constant contact with an AT&T operator the whole day. Each military base in S.E.A. had an appointment list ready, and would read that list, along with stateside phone numbers, to Bob and simultaneously to the phone operator (whom Bob had set up to listen in).
The phone operator would phone the stateside family while the distant counterpart Ham made sure the service member was avaiable on base, either at the base’s station or on the base telephone system.
When both ends were ready, the Hams on both ends would say something like, “you’re on the air—go!” and there would ensue a three-minute phone call. Each Ham would operate their transmitter with a foot switch, listening to the conversation to know when to transmit. Meanwhile, the Ham on the far end and the stateside telco operator were getting the next pair ready for their appointed time.
In a good month, AF7UGA logged about 3,000 phone patches like this.
Too bad, but I reckon the various comm sats make up a fairly robust system, and in reality are pretty hard to shoot down (though I'm not sure they can't be effectively jammed).
Barry Goldwater ran ham radio autopatches from his home near Scottsdale, AZ during the Vietnam War.