Radio Service Bulletins were issued monthly by the Bureau of Navigation (and later the Radio Division), Department of Commerce 1 from January 1915 into the 1930s to keep mariners, aviators, radio listeners, and others abreast of developments in the new medium of radio. Radio was used for radiotelegraphy, ship-to-shore and ship-to-ship communications, and increasingly as the 1920s and 1930s advanced, broadcasting. The bulletins reproduced here offer a snapshot of the state of the radio art during these years.
Bulletin issues before 1921 are primarily concerned with radiotelegraphy communications between ships although there are some references to land stations too. Present-day readers should keep in mind that these bulletins were intended for the use of radio operators who must needs contact other ships or shore stations to relay messages. Hence there are frequent lists of radio-equipped ships as well as rates for radiotelegraph and radiotelephone messages. There are also references to weather, time, and ice warning stations, and occasional information such as warnings about areas that may contain explosive mines (after World War I). After 1921, there are an increasing number of references to early pioneer broadcast stations, some of which still exist today (although generally on different frequencies and at different power levels than initially authorized). Notice that many call letters presently used by broadcasters today were once assigned to ships' radio stations.
Tha August 31, 1931 edition of the RSB contained an index to orders of the Federal Radio Commission which were published in the RSB up to that date. For your convenience, this index has been extracted and is available separately as a PDF document: [ Federal Radio Commission Orders in RSB ].
The August 31, 1931 edition also contained a list of items appearing in the RSB over the previous decade, which is also available as a PDF file: [ Index of Regulations and Miscellaneous Articles Appearing the in RSB, Years 1920 to 1931 ].
The continuous series of 183 bulletins available here starts with No. 1 / January 1915. Bulletins in the years 1922 through 1927 are only available as HTML pages containing scanned GIF images. Bulletins before 1922 or after 1927 are only available as PDF files. Note that no bulletins were issued after March 1917 until August 1919 because of World War I.
When making selections from the drop down menu below, please allow suffcient time for the bulletins to download to your browser. Depending on your connection speed, it may take some minutes to download the individual bulletins.
Multiple Issues Selections or Slow Connections: Users who want to download multiple issues or who are retrieving documents over slower Internet connections may download the entire set of PDF files and HTML/Image files to their computer. This allows immediate viewing of individual documents. However, the zip file is very large (218 MB) and may take some hours over a 56K dialup connection. We recommend downloading the zip file overnight for best results.
The 218 MB zip file may be downloaded at http://www.fcc.gov/ftp/Bureaus/Mass_Media/Databases/documents_collection/radio_service_bulletins/all_the_radio_service_bulletins.zip. Save it and unzip it to a directory of your choice; for permanent use the files may be stored on a CDROM or other media. Open either index.html or _readme_index.html files with your browser. These files contain a listing of the individual documents by month and year and contain simple links to access the individual documents.
Highlights in these documents include the following references:
Footnote 1: Before the creation of the Federal Radio Commission by Act of Congress in 1927 (and later the FCC in 1934), it was the responsiblity of the Department of Commerce to license radio stations.
Some abbreviations in the Radio Service Bulletins:
Additional documents pertaining to early radio may be retrieved at http://www.fcc.gov/mb/audio/decdoc/engrser.html#EARLY. See also the Annual Reports of the Federal Radio Commission and Federal Communications Commission at http://www.fcc.gov/mb/audio/decdoc/annual_reports.html.