CQ Amateur Radio August 2021

AUGUST PEOTONE, ILLINOIS — The Hamfesters Amateur Radio Club will hold the Hamfesters Hamfest beginning 8 a.m., Sunday August 1 at the Will County Fairgrounds, 710 S. West Street. Contact Jim Riley, W9JPR, <w9jpr@gmail.com>. Talk-in 442.450 (PL 114.8). CARLINVILLE, ILLINOIS — The Macoupin County Amateur Radio Club, Okaw Valley Amateur Radio Club, Montgomery County Amateur Radio Club, Sangamon Valley Radio Club will hold the West Central Illinois Hamfest from 7 a.m. to 1 p.m., Saturday, August 7 at the Macoupin County Fairgrounds, 21149 IL Route 4. Contact: Jim Pitchford (217) 670-5777. Email: <n9lqf@arrl.net>. Website: <www.wcilhamfest.com>. Talk-in 444.250 (PL 103.5). VE exams, card checking. CENTRAL CITY, IOWA — The Cedar Valley Amateur Radio Club will hold the CVARC Hamfest and 2021 ARRL Iowa State Convention on Saturday, August 7 and Sunday, August 8 at…

YOTA Camp Held in Ohio The first-ever Youth on the Air (YOTA) Camp in the Americas was under way as this is written in mid-July. The camp was originally scheduled to be held in 2020 but was postponed due to the Covid pandemic. Hosted by the National Voice of America Museum of Broadcasting outside Cincinnati, Ohio, the camp hosted some 30 young amateur radio operators (ages 15-25) from around the United States. Continuing Covid-related travel restrictions did not permit young hams from other countries in North, Central, and South America to attend this year. Highlights of the week-long program included a scheduled contact with an astronaut in orbit through the Amateur Radio on the International Space Station, or ARISS, program, as well as a weeklong operation of special event station W8Y. Updates…

CQ has long given its columnists very broad discretion in selecting their topics, so it’s always interesting to me when two columnists independently focus on related themes in a single issue. We have one of those instances this month, and the broad topic is communications security and vulnerability. “Math’s Notes” editor Irwin Math, WA2NDM, writes (p. 39) about the vulnerability to eavesdropping and hacking of anything transmitted over a radio; and “Learning Curve” editor Ron Ochu, KOØZ, (p. 40) warns about the hazards of misinformation and disinformation, which can be spread as effectively over the radio as via the internet. What’s that? You can’t hack a radio, you say? Twenty-five years ago, that would have been absolutely true. But one of the hallmarks of technological advancements in our hobby over the…

Flashes of Brilliance? Or a Flash in the Pan? If all goes according to plan, then sometime in the next few years, you may be able to send a signal up to an orbiting satellite and have it flash back an acknowledgement. Students at Arizona State University are building a cubesat known as LightCube containing a xenon strobe that will be visible on the ground and controllable by anyone with a ham license and the proper radio. According to a university news release, the project has been selected to part of NASA’s Cubesat Launch Initiative and is tentatively slated to travel to space as a secondary payload sometime between 2022 and 2025. “The public will be able to track the LightCube satellite using an app, then transmit to the satellite with a…

The Marconi 2020 Project is bringing the amateur station at the Signal Hill National Historic Site in Newfoundland into the 21st century, helping local amateurs access the station remotely and demonstrating for visitors how far radio communication has come in 120 years. On May 12, 2021, history was made at the famous site where Guglielmo Marconi received the first trans-Atlantic wireless transmission from Europe to North America, Signal Hill, Newfoundland1 (Photo A). The authors, communicating remotely from different locations and countries, made the inaugural Signal Hill remote radio link contact. If Marconi were here today, he would have been amazed by the advances in technology over the last 120 years. This article will discuss Marconi’s 1901 experiment at Signal Hill, how the remote link station was set up in Cabot Tower on…

Signal Hill, overlooking St. John’s, Newfoundland, has played a major role in the city’s history for over 250 years. According to the Historic Sites Association of Newfoundland and Labrador, the last battle in North America of the Seven Years War between Britain and France (known in the U.S. as the French and Indian War) was fought at what is now Signal Hill, as British troops in 1762 dislodged French occupiers and retook the settlement. In 1897, Cabot Tower was built on top of the hill to mark both the 400th anniversary of John Cabot’s first landing in Newfoundland and Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. Just four years later, Guglielmo Marconi used the site to launch a 500-foot-long antenna on a kite and receive the first transatlantic radio signal (see accompanying article…