Radio Archeology - Part 4 of a Series
Bolinas Point to Point Call Letters
Sometimes important artifacts are right under your nose. Take this story as an example.
As all True Believers know, the trans-Pacific point to point service began at Bolinas in 1914 with the standard rick-crushing Marconi 230kW rotary gap transmitter. This was replaced by RCA in 1920 with two boulder-crushing Alexanderson alternators of 200kW each, operating under the call KET.
At just about that time the first glimmers of what might be possible using short waves began to be seen. Soon the vast commercial potential of the short waves became obvious and by 1929 RCA was busy building a new transmitter building at Bolinas and a completely new receive site at Point Reyes to accommodate all the new short wave circuits.
At the beginning each circuit had its own three letter call. Later the calls were composed of three letters and two or three numbers.
At Bolinas each antenna was identified by its number and each circuit was identified by its call letters. These were stenciled on small wooden plaques that were nailed up near the open wire feed lines for easy identification. Transmitter Supervisor Steve Hawes recently came across a stash of these plaques with the call letters of important early short wave circuits on them.
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Call letter plaques on the work bench at Bolinas
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Naturally we wanted to know more about these call letters and the circuits they represented. So we turned to our extensive library of ITU publications and there in the August 1932 edition of the List of Fixed and Land Stations we found the call letters shown on the plaques.
According to the listing the call letters on our plaques used these frequencies:
- KKR - 15460kc
- KWE - 15430kc
- KQR - 18040kc
- KES - 10410kc
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| Extract from the 1932 book |
Like most such discoveries this one begs a question. Note in the extract above that the venerable call KET is assigned to a short wave frequency. Yet we know that the Alexanderson alternators were in service at least through WWII. So... what call letters were assigned to the alternators in 1932? As is always said in such situations... "More research is needed."
Operations Report
We continue to make good use of our new 18097.5kc frequency for K6KPH. It's very helpful when other bands are crowded with contest traffic. And it's useful to have another frequency with its own propagation characteristics available for communications.
Newsletter readers will recall that in the last issue we experimented with posting the Stations Worked section of the Operations Report as a linked file. Feedback from users indicated that the basic idea was good but the choice of format - a MS Word document - was not. It was suggested that we post the Stations Worked part of the report as a .pdf, which we have done for this issue. Let us know how it works for you.
