utility radio by Joe Cooper
This year is an important benchmark in the history of utility radio. It was on a cold day one hundred years ago this December that the Morse code let- ter "S" was transmitted without wires across the Atlantic Ocean and then received by an experimental radio mon- itoring station in North America. The success of that experiment laid the foundations for the global point-to- point utility radio services that we monitor today. The event that I am describing is of course the test per- formed by Guglielmo Marconi to see if his scientific lab 'equipment could be applied to the real world of com- mercial communication. One of the myths of popular history has been that Marconi invented radio. Most radio historians today agree that the phenomena of radio wave creation and propagation was discovered by accident and design by several people many years before Marconi began his own experiments. If Marconi can be given any credit for really dis- covering anything, it was how he made a business out of the phenomena of radio. He did this by copy- ing the practices of the existing landline and cable - based telegraphy industry, and then undercutting his costs by not having to string wires from poles over long distances. Building In Marconi's vision of radio it was to be a commercial tool 2 as it is KPH/KFS commercialtoday at Bolinas,California. radio complex Part of the for sending messages point-to-point from one person or group antenna farm where the are located. Photo transmittersand to another for a fee. For years he treated the radio waves as his courtesy MRHS. own private domain and attempted to dominate all commercial interests in the field. It was only after the events of World War I showed the strate- gic importance of radio for political and military use the radio spectrum came to be considered a publicly owned resource. Not URL address for that site will be provided to you in a sidebar, soon after the radio spectrum came under public control thatas well as their regular mail address. the concept of broadcasting came to be introduced, first through I've also lots of letters and many excellent logs to share with the efforts of amateur radio experimenters and then commer-you. Again this month I will be continuing to include as many cial stations. of the letter based logs as I can, as promised. I mention these facts due to the theme of this month's col- So on to the fascinating story of KPH and the work being umn. I will be looking at a decommissioned commercial radiodone to preserve it in original working order today. station with the historic call KPH. Located on the West Coast of the United States near San Francisco, it can trace its begin- nings back to before the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. In The Story Of KPH 1913 the Marconi Company built a rotary spark gap transmit- r ostonangq.,e..troaxiwtoAftsionsmorenotortscio. ter at the current site, along with two huge vertical antennas. Located with in the boundary of Point Reyes National Today the National Parks Service, and a group of ham radio Seashore Park just north of San Francisco, California, is the site operators, industrial historians, and volunteers called theof radio station KPH, which was once the most famous coastal Maritime Radio Historical Society, are working together to pre- utility radio station in the world - rivaling only RCA's Radio serve the buildings, antennas, and equipment of this importantCentral on Long Island, New York. You may remember this sta- point-to-point utility radio station. tion being mentioned in the pages of Pop'Comm as the last com- I will be outlining a bit of the long history of this station, and mercial station to use CW in North America. This event took showing you some interesting pictures of it, courtesy of theplace on July 12, 1999,but this was not to be the last time that MRHS. I would like to point out that most of the information the station was to be on the air. provided here came from their excellent website, and with their Unlike most sites of this kind, the buildings, antenna, and permission I have used some of their text in my writing. Theequipment of that station are being preserved for future gener-
www.popular-communications.com August 2001 / POP'COMM / 69