If you have served in the U.S. Coast Guard, regular or reserve, and have an amateur radio operator’s licence, you are eligible for free membership in the Coast Guard Club. If you meet these requirements and would like to join our group, please fill in the Information Sheet. Upon receipt, I will immediately post you to the Coast Guard Club’s call book, and the following Saturday on the Coast Guard SSB Net, you will be announced as a new member. If you cannot remember the dates of your duty assignments, and cannot locate your discharge certificate(s) or the DD-214, your best guesstimate will be fine. Examples such as Spring of ’42, Fall of ’78, and so forth, could be a good indicator. Please do not use anything but the most common abbreviations—our membership expands over a wide variety of ages, and abbreviations understood by one group may be completely foreign to another. Let me also emphasize that you may use an entire page in the call book, so please spell out in detail your duty assignments, hobbies, interests, and so forth—the more information members add the better the call book becomes. We want everyone else to know all about you, as if there had been a long QSO between us. Quite a few of our members have found long lost shipmates through the call book. You may also include a photograph of yourself in uniform and a current photograph. In lieu of one of these pictures, you could also post a copy of your QSL card. If you send a picture by e-mail, please use JPEG format.

There are no membership dues. There are no ‘officers’ appointed in the club, but Dick Anderson, who normally is the NCS of the CG SSB Net, refers to me as the ‘Yeoman Emeritus’. There are no meetings, no sea bag or dress uniform inspection, no field days, no paydays (sorry), no soggying down, no brass work to shine, and no free chow; but we have open gangway and you don’t have to show a liberty card. We are simply a group of Coasties who have furnished information that has been posted to our call book. When you hear one of us on the air, you can check the call book and know quite a bit about the person. Nothing really personal, though. We don’t ask new members to fetch a bucket of steam, or look out for the mail buoy.

Members of the Coast Guard Club rank from CAPT to a Seaman 2^nd class who was an ET striker (called ETM in those days). Our members have served in aviation and in general service aboard white-, red-, yellow, and black-hulled cutters. RM/ARM/AL/AT/ET ratings are in the majority, but there are several pilots and a sprinkling of almost all CG rating. Of our many members, one is a YL (former RM) and another is a civillian who was given honourary membership due to his assistance in many SAR cases in the past.

The call book is bound in a spiral binder (about 1-1/2" thick) and contains an Index, 1Ø sections for the members in the 1Ø FCC Regions, plus 5 Appendixes of general Coast Guard/Ham information. One interesting appendix has information regarding each USCGC or USS that our members served on while they were on active USCG duty. With many USCGCs, you can trace commissioning to reconfiguration, reclassifying, decommissioning, and often, resale, renaming, and so forth. This appendix is largely the work of our club's historian, COMM-4 D R Peterson, Retired.

If you join our club and would like to have a copy of our call book, with you in it, the cost is $15.00, which includes postage. If you buy the book, I will also enclose a Certificate of Membership, which is suitable for framing. The call book is NEVER sold to anyone not a member of the Coast Guard Club. You DO NOT have to buy the call book to become a member, but, what the heck, you might find someone who shares an important hobby other than amateur radio, someone who lives near you, or someone you served with.

If you have further questions concerning the Coast Guard Club, please send an e-mail message to DGARDNER@NORTHSTATE.NET