Guglielmo Marconi, portrait, head and shoulders, facing left.
On Saturday 24th April 2021 we participated in International Marconi Day, celebrating Marconi’s birthday. Many of the other special event stations on the air transmitted from locations around the world which had some significance to Marconi, so what has Oxford got to do with him?
Well, Marconi did receive an honorary degree from the University in 1904, but it was 100 years later that the large Marconi collection was presented to the Museum of the History of Science, as it was called then, and to the Bodleian Library. A selection of his most significant early apparatus is on display in the museum. ODARS was invited to the original opening of the collection in 2005 and have put on a station at the museum most years since.
This year, of course, we had the pandemic and so we asked OFCOM to use the special event callsign from our home stations, and this was approved. So we did Working DX from Home, or at least tried to. The museum asked me to look into ways the public could be involved, as they could when we operated from the physical museum, and here is what we came up with.
Anyone may visit a web site called dxsummit.dx and put the special call sign GB4MHS into the search box. The most recent entry will have our current operating frequency. If you happen to have a shortwave receiver that can handle single sideband you should then be able to find us.
However, if you don’t have a receiver you can use an Internet one. Just visit http://websdr.ewi.utwente.nl:8901/ and enter the frequency. You may have to select USB or LSB depending on the wave band in use. Good luck and let us know if you hear us!
See https://www.hsm.ox.ac.uk/marconi-day-0 for more details.
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