The sounds of Sputnik

Jessica Garrison

COSTA MESA -- Thirty years ago, Jim Scott made history by taping the

sounds of Sputnik on his ham radio.

Now he uses the equipment to wow his children and grandchildren.

Nestled between a crib and tiny, brightly colored plastic chairs is

the black receiver on which the Costa Mesa resident says he captured the

beep, beep, beeps of Sputnik, the Soviet satellite launched in 1957.

The incident had been tucked away in his memories until he attended an

Aug. 24 school board meeting, where students from Harbor View Elementary

demonstrated how they talked to the Space Shuttle Columbia via ham radio.

Scott remembers his brush with Sputnik as if it were yesterday.

It was the height of the Cold War, and Scott was a young father living

in Texas. He spent his spare time fiddling with the technology of ham

radio, which let him talk to people half a world away.

He read in the newspaper that the Soviets had successfully launched a

satellite before the Americans, terrifying people and propelling the U.S.

to spend millions on its own space program in an effort to keep up with

-- and eventually pass -- its Communist enemy.

Scott’s first thought was: “I wonder if I can hear it.”

So he went out to the shack where he had his ham radio, and he and

friends started searching for a signal. He was in luck. There was a radio

transmitter on Sputnik, and the satellite was broadcasting.

“We found it,” he said triumphantly. “It was going beep, beep, beep.”

Thinking quickly, Scott, who holds seven patents and now operates a

company that makes gaskets for airlines, rockets and submarines, slipped

a tape into his machine and recorded the sound.

Then, he and his friends hooked up the signal to a machine that

translates noise into sound waves.

“We could tell what the amplitude of the signal was,” he said.

And from that, he said, he and his friends deduced that the satellite

was “nothing more than a tube ... and that it did not have military

capability.”

“It was propaganda. It had no military value to the Russians,” Scott

said, adding that he thinks Sputnik is “the best thing that could have

happened to America ... because it sparked the space race.”

At 4 that morning, Scott put on his bathrobe and went out into the

backyard. He looked up at the sky and saw Sputnik cruising by.

He then picked up his radio and told the world that he found the

signal.

Not long after that, Scott said, there was a knock on his door. Two

men identified themselves as officers with Naval Intelligence.

At first, Scott thought he was in trouble. He thought he was going to

be accused of accidentally interfering in transmission.

But the two men quickly got to the point: The Navy had been caught off

guard by Sputnik.

They had not been monitoring ham radio wavelengths at the time Sputnik

was launched and didn’t capture its transmission. But they later had

heard Scott tell his radio friends that he had the tape, and they wanted

it.

“Can you imagine the trauma that these guys felt?” he said.

Scott, who considers himself a staunch patriot and served in World War

II, said he was delighted and proud to surrender the tape.

“I would give my life for this country,” he said.

Jim Scott Jr., who has taken over the family company, SECO Seals Inc.,

said he vividly remembers his father playing the tape of Sputnik.

“We grew up in the ‘60s, so there was always rockets going up,” he

said. “But that tape was cool.”

With the high-speed communication of the Internet, ham radio is no

longer cutting edge, but Scott still has it all set up in the back

bedroom. And as he shared it with his children, he plans to share his

brush with space-age greatness with his grandchildren.