May
15
Amateur Radio at University of California
Filed Under Club News | Comments Off
Beginnings of our club in the dawn of the wireless age
Triggered by the discoveries of Heinrich Herz and James Clark Maxwell in the nineteen’s century, Amateur Radio was a movement of youngsters who were excited to use the discovery of radio-magnetic waves to communicate with each other. They managed to build wireless equipment literally out of nothing and established thriving communication networks in many metropolitan areas in the US around 1906/1907. Nothing was regulated and the official players like the Navy and commercial radio on ships (Marconi company etc.) just made their first clumsy attempts with this new technology. The concept of broadcast was not invented before the 1920ies. The Amateur Radio Club of the University of California was founded in 1914, still in the dawn of the wireless age. The founders were three senior students who had participated as high school students in the first wireless activities in the San Francisco Bay area around 1906 (see “W6BB” at www.qrz.com).
Amateur (Ham) Radio — uhhh, what is this???
Yesterday: In contrast to broadcast listening, the name Amateur Radio (Ham Radio) described the activity of radio enthusiasts who also built transmitters to engage in two-way communication. Amateur Radio went through a number of different phases. In the 1920ies, it was radio amateurs who discovered through their experiments that the short waves enable worldwide communication with moderate antenna size and transmitting power. In the 1930ies and 1940ies, amateur radio provided communication for various expeditions, such as the Byrd antarctic expeditions, many Russian arctic expedition, and Thor Heyerdahls first expedition. In the 1950ies and 1960ies, the amateur radio community grew steeply and formed the first worldwide network, connecting people from different countries and backgrounds (see Kirsten Haring: Ham Radio’s Technical Culture, MIT Press). Beginning in the 1970ies and 1980ies, radio amateurs were able to communicate with astronauts and through earth satellites.
Today: Before the internet, only Amateur Radio could enable affordable communication between two individuals thousands of miles apart. The internet provides now a cheap, much easier alternative. But at the same time, the internet is dominating our lives to an extent that we often feel trapped behind keyboard and screen within our virtual existences. Today, a crucial question has become how to sometimes sneak offline and have tangible experiences in the real physical world. Going wireless can provide such a refreshing break. You can be part of an international community crossing borders and continents by relying solely on your engineering skills and knowledge of terrestrial and solar physics, not on internet providers and cell phone services. Amateur Radio offers a unique playground for acquiring skills like operating transmitters and receivers, electronics, morse code, direction finding, digital signal processing, and many others. It enables communication in remote areas and during emergency situations, if telephone lines are far or dysfunctional. It is curious that analog modes on radio waves provide a real time quality of communication, which the web cannot easily match.
If you are at UC Berkeley in any capacity, and this sounds intriguing or interesting to you, please join in. In case you do not already hold a radio license, please participate in one of our licensing classes..
The W6BB/NU6XB University of California Berkeley Amateur Radio Club