One day in 1984, a newly licensed amateur radio operator (a ham, to use the colloquial name), near the Sligo coast, made contact by Morse key with station J1A, with whom he exchanged call signs, as well as reports on strength and readability of signals. The man at the Sligo end was my brother Martin. The man at the other end was King Hussein of Jordan.
How the hell, I asked my brother, when he told me this story last week, did he know that the other man was King Hussein?
"Oh, that was dead easy," he said, "because, when you do the radio course, the older hacks tell you these things. Incidentally, the same station also used the signals J2A and J3A; but, whenever the king himself called, he was always J1A."
Only then did the thought pierce my skull that - yes, of course - the "J" stood for Jordan.
Voice contact
The next contact between the two men was not by Morse code, but by voice. Through the mid-1980s, they spoke about a half-dozen times. Then the king went silent and was not heard on air again until some time in the present decade, and then only rarely.
What had they talked about, I wondered, these two unexpected conversationalists, so far apart and so culturally different. Mostly about radio, it seems, especially technicalities.
"But he would sometimes drop the technical jargon," Martin says, "and tell you that you had a good signal; and that your readability was so good that he wondered what equipment you were using. He would ask who put up the aerials, and, if you said you put them up yourself, he would say, `Well done.'
"But the king did not leave it at that. He said more than once, whenever the matter came up, `Whenever I can - which is nearly always - I do, in fact, put up my own aerials. Now, I can have all this done for me, but I prefer to put them up myself, because that is part of the fun, isn't it?' "
King Hussein was never in a rush to cut a conversation short. "You could hear stations calling him all over the place and clamouring to get to it," my brother says, "because I could hear the European stations, and everyone jumped on him when he came on. But he dealt fully with whoever he answered, and only then did he move on. He was an ideal operator, because you are advised to behave that way, of course: even if the signal fades, you hold on and give the person at the other end the satisfaction of making full contact. Hussein was a wonderfully polite man, always meticulous about maintaining the courtesy of the airwaves."
Quite apart from the learned rules of international amateur radio operators, Hussein would have had the old desert chivalry of the Bedouins in his bones.
Little chuckle
Though ham operators contact one another by call sign, I wondered if the man on the west coast of Sligo had ever indicated to the King of Jordan that he knew who he was.
"Oh, yes, when we had chatted a couple of times, I sort of let it slip out that I knew who he was."
And how had the king reacted?
"It didn't knock a bother out of him. He gave a little chuckle, like a child would. I didn't push it so far as to ask how I should address him, because I knew that the thing to do was stock to the radio rules."
Martin recalls in particular his second contact with the king - the first time they addressed each other by voice.
"I recall that the signal was especially good on that occasion," he says. "It was high up on the 20metre band, which is the highest amateur band before you go into VHF. I had a great chat with him that day. Now and again, he'd say something like, `It's great that the old valves have gone,' and `Good on the man that made the transistor', and, `The chip is coming along now, of course.' He certainly knew his technical stuff."
About the third contact, the King said, "I spent part of my life not far from your country, when I was young" - a clear reference to his time as a student in England; but he did not elaborate, presumably considering that the Irishman who appeared to know so much about him would take the reference, like an eager trout, at first cast.
Barry Goldwater
On the amateur radio airwaves, you never know what famous person's signal you may pick up. Once, hunting along the dial, my brother bumped into the late Barry Goldwater, more than 20 years after the right-wing Republican had failed in his run for the presidency of the USA. The man from the moist west of Ireland found it difficult, however, to arouse interest in the man from Arizona, where, for 300 days a year, the sun beats mercilessly upon the shimmering desert.
Martin was the first Irish ham to contact Serjei Krikalov, a good English speaker, when MIR crossed the Atlantic and came over the Irish coast. A Donegal man went on RTE and tried to snatch the prize for himself; but the ham records show that he was a claim-jumper.
Now that Hussein is dead, my brother says that the king was high on his list of favourite radio contacts - a man, he says, with no more side to him than someone you might meet, any old day, along the side of the road.