100th Anniversary of Transatlantic Radio Communications




Special Event Stations

Special event stations commemorate past historical and noteworthy current events. The above QSL or contact confirmation card is from KM1CC. The callsign KM1CC is a special event callsign, with the M standing for Marconi and CC standing for the Cape Code National Seashore site where the event took place. The K (or a W) in the first letter signifies the radio station is licensed by the United States of America. The number 1 relates to the geographical location in the USA, in this case the New England area. One new wrinkle for special event stations are special (and short!) 1x1 callsigns, which makes it easier to identify such stations on the air.

This station operation commemorated the one hundredth anniversary of the first public two way communication across the Atlantic (on January 18, 1903). Messages were sent between President Theodore Roosevelt and King Edward VII of England. The site on Cape Cod's seashore was not an accident. Cape Code is obviously relatively close to England (versus say, Texas). The seaside location provided an excellent conductive salt water "ground" for the antennas, greatly enhancing their performance. This is also the reason that many ships at sea were successful with relatively weak transmitter output power by today's standards too!

Readers may recall that this special event made worldwide headlines. Princess Marconi traveled from Italy to the USA to visit the special events held at the Cape Cod National Seashore to commemorate this historic event. President George W. Bush sent a proclamation. Astronauts on the International Space Station sent their messages of congratulations, handily illustrating how far telecommunications has come in the last 100 years. Many tens of thousands of contacts were made by operators at KM1CC with amateur radio stations all over the world. As you can see, S.M.U.'s amateur radio station W5YF was one of them!

Check the Special Events Calendar at the national ARRL organization website for information on the latest and upcoming special events. You can also find online forms here to register your special event station at this site, and in the special events column of QST magazine.

Working a special event station is often relatively easy, if the band conditions are good. Most special event stations will advertise which bands they will be operating on, scheduled times of operation, and what mode of operation (e.g., voice, code or cw). Notice on our above QSL card that we worked KM1CC first on single sideband voice (15 meters) at 20:37 UTC on Jan. 16, 2003 with a strong (5 by 9) voice signal both ways. Similarly, we switched to 10 meters for a morse code (cw) contact a few minutes later (at 20:52 UTC). Again, we received an excellent (599) signal report both ways during this contact. Since we were only running "barefoot", with only 100 watts or less to the triband beam antenna, this QSL card illustrates the potentially very good performance of our W5YF campus amateur radio station - when the bands are open!

The final point is to note where to send QSL (meaning confirmation of contact) cards to the special event station so they will confirm your contact and send back a nice QSL card or certificate. Please consider working some upcoming special event stations as part of the fun of amateur radio, and enjoy building a collection of historical and special event QSL cards such as the one shown here!

See our W5YF club Calendar for 2004 for more upcoming events as they are announced!...