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100 Years Since The First Transatlantic Broadcast
Diarmaid O'Loughlin writes "It's the 100th year since the first comunications over the pond
The Marconi Radio Club and The Falmouth Amateur Radio Association Amateur Radio operators are making plans to celebrate a Marconi world historical event. December 12, 2001 will mark the 100th anniversary of the first Trans-Atlantic radio transmission." The BBC is also carrying the story as well. Embedded Geek adds a link to
coverage on stardate.com, pointing out that "there will be events in the ham community to commemorate it, including a reenactment broadcast (look here under 'Marconi's Celebrations' for others)." This would be a nice day to swing by the Cape Cod station, too.
Actually I woke up this morning to CBC Radio One's hour long special on Marconi, the man and the mission. I was quite nice. In fact I gave up a little study time for it.
It really has been a long time relatively. Considering that transatlantic communication, especially transatlantic routing of IP packets, is more than commonplace now, its hard to imagine people still struggling to get a signal to each other over the atlantic. Stories like this really help to remind us that it wasn't always this easy.
It is nonetheless an appropriate day to celebrate though I do wonder how quickly they started getting spam on their lines?
Sigh.... what's being celebrated here has nothing to do with who invented the radio (take a look at the articles, there's nothing mentioned about Marconi having invented it)
What's being celebrated here is quite simple: It's the first ever wireless trans-Atlantic communication, which is quite clearly Marconi's. Even the site you link to admits that Marconi was the one who performed this feat. Sure, Marconi may not have been the first to invent the radio (he may not, as you point out, even have invented a version of it at all) But without him performing this experiment, it's unlikely we would be in the same place we are today. After all, the radio station in New York that Tesla was building to transmit electric signals and electricity to the entire planet didn't start construction until 1901, the same year Marconi made his transmission. From the sounds of it, I'm not sure if Tesla's project would have worked, even if he hadn't run out of funding.
Summary: Tesla beat Marconi to the radio, but that's not what is being discussed here. Marconi made the first trans-Atlantic broadcast, that IS being discussed, and is most definately a fact.
"I won't mod you down - I feel the need to call you a twit explicitly, rather than by implication."
The ham bands above the shortwave spectrum are perhaps a more interesting target, until you consider that many of them are shared (900 MHZ, parts of the 75cm band) and others are tiny (The most popular 2 meter band is only 4 MHz wide).
The ham radio bands are scattered through the spectrum (to allow for experimentation at different wavelengths) and thus do not represent any contiguous chunk of bandwidth.
Finally, ham radio has a number of justifications - often more important than the desire for bandwidth by internet nerds to be first to reply to a
You may think that the latter is superfluous, but it is still very useful. For example, the Hurricane Watch Net (www.hwn.org) provides valuable assistance to the National Hurricane Center and has been given awards by them and other organizations. Why? Because we communicate with people who do not have sat-phones and whose cell-phones (if they have any) have been disabled by the hurricane. We provide a central communications frequency for those who need to coordinate information on a hurricane - we have had rescue helicopters, warships, hurricane hunter aircraft, ships-in-distress, government research organizations and state department entities contact us in emergencies (contact with non-ham entities is only legal in an emergency). They wouldn't do that if they had the sort of communications you envision.
Likewise, the Skywarn organizations provides invaluable life-saving data to the NWS through ham radio. Why ham radio and not cell phone? Ham radio provides trained operators that filter information for NWS. It also provides a controlled shared frequency for coordinating communications among the many spotters. NWS invests significant resources to train and operate the spotter networks.
Hams help with many other disasters - partly because we can deploy equipment in unplanned for situations, partly because we have redundant and highly varied communications assets, and partly because we often become an inter-organizational communications mechanism for organizations that don't have interoperability.
Ham radio also provides a last-ditch communications method. When your phones are overloaded, or your other methods are out, the *simplest* transmitter to construct or own (if you are poor in the third world) is a CW (morse code) transmitter. All it requires is an oscillator that can be turned on and off, and an easily made antenna.
Ham radio also helps young people learn useful technical and organizational skills.
My father started his electronics interest with ham radio, went on to invent the VLF submarine antenna (his doctoral thesis) and is a respected scientist.
I started with an interest in ham radio. It led me to jobs (while in high school and college) as a broadcast engineer. When I joined the Navy, I was already a trained radio operator, and thus was able to become an airborne radio operator without going to a one year school for it. I got into engineering in college because of ham radio, and that let me into computers, and hence 35 years of computer geekdom. A person met through ham radio led me to group of computer geeks whom I have worked with for the last 30 years. Through ham radio contacts, I have met people in many interesting positions, making friends and also getting personal tours of such places as the Stanford Linear Accelerator and the Multiple Mirror Telescope. Ham radio led me to start my current company, which originally made embedded controller based ham radio repeater controllers. Ham radio has led to adventures including a NASA research expedition, disaster relief in Mexico City after the earthquake, and various other things.
Ham radio operators have developed new technology for use in ham radio, and even in this age of electronic engineering continue to do so. For example, extremely high altitude remote sensing balloons are currently a favorite hobby of some ham nerds.
The only good weather is bad weather.