THE
SPARK GAP
February 1997
Club Information
President: Dennis KI5FW
Vice Pres: C.P. W5OQY
Secretary: Bill KB5ASR
Treasurer: John W5DEJ
President
Report: First, I would like
to say tnx to everyone for showing their confidence in me by
electing me to serve as President of M.A.R.C. for the 1997 term.
We have a great group of local hams & I look forward to having
a productive year. In the near future I would like to get some
volunteers to serve on the Field Day committee so we can start
planning and preparing for that. Also I'll be talking to some of
the other hams in surrounding areas for possibly working together
to have a local Swapfest one Saturday afternoon in our area. Maybe
sometime this spring. That's about all. 73's
Dennis KI5FW
Vice President
Report: This has been a cold month but warm weather
will be here soon. Then we will be able to repair our outside
things like antenna etc. 2 meters has been good. Hf not quite as
good. The bands stretched out quite early for some. The election
is over and everyone who wanted to vote did. Now its time for us
to move forward and have a good year in amateur radio. Each one of
us can make a difference. Either good or bad. Hope you/we/me/I
make the change. Maybe you would like to build an antenna. One
kind of G5RV looks like this. 102 ft wire (I like 14 tw ) cut in
half. 29.5 ft 300 ohm flat TV leading down to 4:1 balun. Then 50
ohm coax to transmitter. Don't make coax to short. I find over 25
ft will be ok. You will need an antenna tuner with solid state
transmitters.
C P. W5OQY
Secretary Report:
Don't forget to check into the Tuesday evening 2-meter net at
7 P.M. each week on 146.700. Any announcements, emergency traffic,
or a simple hello and 73 can be passed along to others. Let us
know how you are doing.
A Noble History:
Nobody knows when Amateur Radio operators were first called
"Hams," but we do know that Amateur Radio is as old as the history
of radio itself. Not long after Guglielmo Marconi, an Italian
experimenter, transmitted the Morse code letter "s" from Poldhu,
Wales, to St. John's, Newfoundland, in 1901, amateur experimenters
throughout the world were trying out the capabilities of the first
"spark gap" transmitters. In 1912, Congress passed the first laws
regulating radio transmissions in the U.S. By 1914, amateur
experimenters were communicating nation-wide, and setting up a
system to relay messages from coast to coast (whence the name
"American Radio Relay League"!). In 1927, the precursor agency to
the FCC was created by Congress and specific frequencies were
assigned for various uses, including ham bands.
Although the origin of the word "ham" is obscure, every ham has his or her own pet theory. One holds that early amateurs were called hams because they liked to perform, or "ham it up" on the air. Another proposes that the name came from the "ham-fisted" way some early amateurs handled their code keys. One of the most exotic holds that "ham" is an acronym from the initials of three college students who were among the first radio amateurs. Perhaps the easiest to accept is that "ham" is derived from "Am," a contraction of "Amateur."
After a little more searching, I found this explanation
"Ham: a poor operator. A 'plug.'"
That's the definition of the word given in G. M. Dodge's The
Telegraph Instructor even before radio. The definition has never
changed in wire telegraphy. The first wireless operators were
landline telegraphers who left their offices to go to sea or to
man the coastal stations. They brought with them their language
and much of the tradition of their older profession. In those
early days, spark was king and every station occupied the same
wavelength --or, more accurately perhaps, every station occupied
the whole spectrum with its broad spark signal. Government
stations, ships, coastal stations and the increasingly numerous
amateur operators all competed for time and signal supremacy in
each other's receivers. Many of the amateur stations were very
powerful. Two amateurs, working across town, could effectively jam
all the other operators in the area. When this happened,
frustrated commercial operators would call the ship whose weaker
signals had been blotted out by the amateurs and say "SRI OM THOSE
#&$!@ HAMS ARE JAMMING YOU."
Amateurs, possibly unfamiliar with the real meaning of the term,
picked it up and applied it to themselves in true "Yankee Doodle"
fashion and wore it with pride. As the years advanced, the
original meaning has completely
disappeared.
Propagation Forecast
From Tad Cook, KT7H
We are still at the solar minimum, with very little
activity to report. Since there are no really active regions that
we know of on the solar surface, there is no activity to forecast
as the solar surface rotates relative to the Earth.
This week's average solar flux was exactly the same as the week
previous, and the sunspot numbers were barely higher. Unlike the
previous week, there were no periods of geomagnetic activity, and
the A index stayed in the single digits. The next few weeks are
expected to stay the same, with the solar flux around the low to
mid seventies, and the A index around five. The A index may jump
up to around ten on February 3, and again around February 6-9.
A wire service story this week said that scientists from NASA and
the astronomy department at Yale University presented findings at
a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Toronto which
predicted a decrease in overall solar activity for the next solar
cycle. They admitted that their forecast was at odds with many
other predictions, and that solar activity is highly
unpredictable. But the scientists said that if their prediction is
correct, it will reverse what they claim is an overall 400-year
trend toward greater solar activity.
