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| A 2001 CQ article by John Hey, G3TDZ (SK), inventor of the "HeyPhone" radio used in the rescue of the boys' soccer team from a flooded cave in Thailand. |
The world watched and waited a few months back
while Thai Navy SEALs and others launched a massive effort to rescue a dozen
young soccer players and their coach from deep inside a flooded cave in
northern Thailand. One of the tools that helped make it all possible, according
to Newsline, was the HeyPhone cave radio, a specialized transceiver that
operates on 87 kHz, a frequency at which it's possible to communicate through
rock.
The HeyPhone is named for its inventor, the late John Hey, G3TDZ, who was
a cave rescue expert in England. Hey developed the HeyPhone in 2001, soon after
he wrote an article for CQ, titled
"Cave Radio in Britain" (CQ,
January 2001, p. 26). In that article, he described a different communication
device which operated using magnetic induction rather than traditional RF. It
can be accessed (for a small fee) via the CQ archive on Hamcall.net at
<www.hamcall.net/cq>.
