CQ Calls and Ham Radio as Symbols in Kristen Radtke's Seek You

What Are CQ Calls and Ham Radio?

In amateur radio, a CQ call is a series of punctuated, monotone beeps broadcast across frequencies to invite any listening operator to respond. Radtke explains that “CQ,” pronounced in French—the official language for international telecommunications—sounds like the first two syllables of “securite,” meaning “pay attention.” English speakers later reinterpreted the signal as standing for “seek you.” The call is, in essence, a reaching outward: an attempt to make contact with someone you have never met, asking “is there anyone out there?”

The mechanics matter to the symbol. CQ calls travel on low frequencies that bend around the curvature of the earth, allowing contact across thousands of miles. Morse code requires less power than voice and cuts through noisy stations, pushing audible messages atop the static. When contact is made, operators exchange QSL cards—postcard-sized written confirmations of the interaction. Radtke describes these cards as evidence that contact has taken place between two people—proof, in a way, that the caller exists because another person has verified it.

That last phrase is the heart of the symbol. The CQ call is a broadcast into the unknown; the QSL card is proof that someone heard it. Together they form a two-part ritual of seeking and being found.

The Father's Nightly Broadcasts

Radtke first learns about her father's ham radio hobby from her uncle, late one night over bourbon. The uncle tells her that her father was obsessed with ham radio and stayed up every night making CQ calls. He would crawl onto the roof to repair an antenna he'd salvaged from a nearby dump, scavenging for a replacement after a winter storm snapped the aluminum. His first receiver was a secondhand model from the 1950s, built with metal vacuum tubes in a pre-transistor era, weighing 100 pounds.

The details are significant because they contradict everything Radtke thought she knew about her father. She describes him as stoic, religious, and extraordinarily strict—a man who treated waste as the biggest crime and whose footsteps in the hallway could terrify her. She had never thought he would have looked for, of all things, connection. The uncle's story gave Radtke her first glimpse of her father's need for anything beyond order.

The father's handle was WD9JHQ. The uncle, asked how he could remember the sound of the beeps, replied that he heard it constantly, every night, over and over. The image of the father—raised in a family of five boys in rural Wisconsin, with a drinking father and divorced parents—sitting alone at night sending signals into the dark reframes his stoicism as something closer to loneliness. The book's dedication, “For my Dad, Who keeps seeking,” ties this symbol directly to the book's central concern.

From Ham Radio to Long-Distance Dedications

The symbol recurs in a different register in the chapter titled “Listen,” where Radtke describes her childhood Sunday-night ritual of listening to Casey Kasem's Top Forty countdown. She didn't listen for the songs; she listened for the Long-Distance Dedications, reader-submitted letters that Kasem read on air. Some letters described ordinary separations—a husband transferred across the country, a deployment overseas—and hoped for reunion. More often, they were pleas for repair with an estranged parent, a former lover, or a friend who had wronged them.

Radtke observes that the subtext of these letters, whatever hope the writer reached out with, was that resolution wasn't coming. The song, she writes, was simply a song to that loss—a performance of grief and regret directed at someone who would not or could not be listening. Yet she found comfort in these stories, using them as an outlet for pain she didn't have an excuse for. She reflects that the act of telling may have been the catharsis, and she admires the bravery of sending personal letters to a stranger for millions to hear.

The parallel to ham radio is structural. The father broadcasts CQ calls into the night, hoping someone will answer. The letter writers broadcast their grief to a radio host, knowing the person they address will likely never hear it. Both are gestures of reaching outward without guarantee of response. Radtke makes the connection explicit when she notes that she was about the same age as her father was when he spent his nights making CQ calls.

The Symbol's Shifting Meaning

Across the book, the CQ call and its radio descendants shift in meaning. For the father, the nightly broadcast is a private ritual—a way of seeking connection that his public persona, stoic and strict, could not accommodate. The QSL cards he would have received are never described in detail, but the symbol of verification—others have verified it—suggests that the hobby answered a need for proof of existence.

For Radtke as a child, the radio is a source of comfort and vicarious emotion. The Long-Distance Dedications give her a language for pain she hasn't yet experienced. The letters are an outlet for misplaced pain she didn't have an excuse for.

By the end of the book, the symbol becomes aspirational. Radtke writes that she wants us to use loneliness—hers and ours—to find our way back to each other, and to play songs for each other on the radio. Her closing wish is that when people call out across an airwave, a telephone, a chatroom, an app, a city street, an open field, or a bedroom, they will each hear, miraculously, a voice calling back. This transforms the CQ call from a lonely broadcast into a hope for mutual response.

Character and Theme Connections

The symbol connects several threads. The father's ham radio links to the theme of American individualism and masculine loneliness: a man raised to be self-reliant and emotionally contained, who seeks connection only through a technology that keeps him physically alone. Radtke's own radio listening connects to technology and media as social surrogates, where mediated contact stands in for direct relationship. The Long-Distance Dedications also touch on the performance of selfhood, as letter writers perform their grief for an audience of millions.

The symbol also reinforces the book's argument that loneliness is universal yet isolating. Radtke asks whether her father, sitting before his radio transistor in the '60s, was any less lonely than she was twenty-five years later, waiting for a dial-up modem to grant her access to a network of strangers. The question suggests that the technology changes but the loneliness persists—and that the CQ call, in every era, is the same reaching outward.

For more on the figures behind this symbol, see the entries on Kristen Radtke, Kristen's father, and Casey Kasem.

Study Questions

1. Why does Radtke describe QSL cards as evidence, in a way, that the caller exists?

The QSL card is a written confirmation that a contact occurred between two operators. Radtke's phrasing suggests that the card functions as external verification of the self: if another person has heard your signal and responded, you are real in a way you weren't before. This connects to the book's broader concern with how people seek proof of connection in a world that often feels indifferent to their existence.

2. How does the father's ham radio hobby complicate Radtke's understanding of him?

Radtke describes her father as stoic, religious, and extraordinarily strict—a man whose need for order seemed to preclude any need for connection. Learning about his nightly CQ calls reveals a private dimension of longing that his public demeanor concealed. The uncle's story gave Radtke her first glimpse of her father's need for anything beyond order, reframing his severity as possibly a mask for loneliness.

3. What is the relationship between the father's CQ calls and the Long-Distance Dedications on Casey Kasem's show?

Both are broadcasts into the unknown. The father sends CQ calls hoping an unseen operator will answer; the letter writers send their stories to Kasem knowing the person they address will likely never hear them. Radtke explicitly parallels the two when she notes she was the same age courting her radio as her father was when he made his nightly calls. Both gestures are forms of reaching outward without guarantee of response.

4. How does the symbol's meaning change from the beginning to the end of the book?

Early in the book, the CQ call is associated with the father's private loneliness—a nightly ritual of seeking that goes unanswered or only formally acknowledged. In the middle, the radio becomes a source of comfort for Radtke as she listens to others' grief. By the end, the symbol becomes a hope for reciprocity: Radtke wishes that when people call out across an airwave or a telephone or a chatroom or an app, they will hear a voice calling back. The broadcast that once symbolized isolation becomes a model for reconnection.