Promoting Scottish Amateur Radio to the World
and the hobby of Amateur Radio to Scotland
GB1FVT - January 2006 to
January 2007
Centenary of the
First Trans-Atlantic Voice Transmission
Good Friday 14th April 2006
- Activity by Air Cadets
click here for more information
Remembering Fessenden
Marconi is recognised for proving that radio waves could span continents when, on 2nd December 1901, the letter "S", transmitted as dit dit dit in Morse Code from Poldhu in Cornwall, was heard at Signal Hill near St John's in Newfoundland.
Although messages were sent across the Atlantic on various occasions after that date, it was not until 10th January 1906 that the first two-way transatlantic radio telegraphy transmission took place.
Led by Reginald Aubrey Fessenden, stations at Brant Rock, Massachusetts USA and Machrihanish Scotland regularly exchanged messages across the Atlantic Ocean from that date and into early summer on frequencies in the 80-100 kHz band.
In December of that year news went out that Fessenden would be making a special radio tranmission on Christmas Eve. Those tuned in, ready to receive his Morse Code transmissions, were astounded to hear the voice of Fessingdon, the son of a Christian minister, reading from the Bible then playing "O Holy Night" on the violin.
GB1FVT
commemorates these immense events in communications history and recognises
the genius of the often forgotten name of Reginald Fessingdon.
GB1FVT operates from the orginal Machrihanish transmitting site. The callsign GB1FVT is now a permanent allocation to the Dalriada Radio Club in Campbeltown
GB1FVT The activity is being led by Duncan McArthur / GM3TNT assisted by a team of Radio Amateurs from the area.
Pictured at one of the anchor blocks for the Machrinanish
mast are
MM0KRC, GM7BAS, GM3TNT, MM0BED and MM0GTX
Equipment for the historic event jeld in January 2006 was an Icom IC-756PROIII supplied by ICOM UK.
- read the ICOM press release (Adobe Acrobat pdf file)
- Article from the Boston Globe
- Article from the Campbeltown Courier