Marconi Centennial Celebration

[H. W. Petersen]

100 years ago Marconi transmitted the letter "S" from Poldhu, Cornwall,
England to St. Johns, Newfoundland, Canada - the first trans-Atlantic
radio transmission. For those who are disappointed by the blizzard of
emails containing a lack of information, vague information, and/or
conflicting information celebrating this event I offer the following
summary which may or may not be correct.

Poldhu Amateur Radio Club will transmit December 12 from 0900hrs (UTC?)
to 1600hrs using the call sign GB100GM. It will cease transmission the
last five minutes of each hour  for an RN (Royal Navy? Richard Nixon?)
spark transmission experiment on an unspecified frequency. At 1600hrs
PARC will try to "link up with Canada," presumably a two-way contact with
a Canadian ham station. PARC will continue on the air until 1730 at which
time the RN experiment will resume.The following excerpt from an email
provides additional needed information.

"The Poldhu Amateur will be operating form the new Marconi Centre which
is on
the wireless field at Poldhu, on 12th december, we will be using three HF

radio rooms and another one for VHF and 6Metres, the frequencies bands
will
be 20m, 40m and 80m and we will be using modern transceivers etc. at
1600hrs
we will send the S to signal hill in St Johns."

An unidentified Canadian station  (VE3BBN's email address is provided for
QSL cards) will transmit a 15 watt spark signal on 3.550 mHz from 0200
UTC to 0300 UTC, transmitting "Marconi S" the first 15 seconds of each
minute. This may not be the station in St. Johns referred to above
because the requested QSL data includes distance from Niagara Falls,
Ontario.

References to transmissions in the 160M ham band are apparently in error.

Maybe they will be better organized and put out more complete and concise
information for the 2101 celebration.

Pete Petersen

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