ZCZC AX10
QST de W1AW
Special Bulletin
10 ARLX010
From ARRL Headquarters
Newington CT September 26,
2019
To all radio amateurs
SB SPCL ARL ARLX010
ARLX010 WWV
Centennial Celebration and Special Event Kick-Off this Weekend
The culmination of months of planning will come to a head this weekend as the WWV
Centennial Celebration and the related WW0WWV Amateur Radio special event get underway. WW0WWV will begin operation on Saturday at 0000 UTC and continue through October 2 at 0000 UTC. The National Institute of Standards and
Technology (NIST), the Northern Colorado Amateur Radio Club (NCARC), and the
WWV Amateur Radio Club have teamed up to organize 100th
anniversary
events. WW0WWV will be active around the clock on 160 to 6 meters on CW, SSB, and digital modes (FT8 operation will be Fox and Hound, except on 160 meters). WW0WWV will operate from the challenging RF environment at
the WWV site near Fort Collins, Colorado. Logs will be streamed live to Club
Log and all logs will be uploaded to Logbook of The World (LoTW) after the event ends.
Further details can be found online at, http://wwv100.com/ .
WW0WWV committee
member Dave Swartz, W0DAS, said he's been addressing last-minute details and
putting out "many little fires." Swartz is camping out at the WWV site ahead of the special event.
WWV is reputed to be among the oldest - if not the oldest - continuously operating radio stations in the world. It started out as an experimental station that eventually became a time and frequency standard, and WWV often broadcast music in its early years. WWV served as a
beacon for Amateur Radio pioneers, who may only have had a rough idea of where they were transmitting. When they began, early time announcements were in CW. Voice announcements did not start until 1950. Time announcements used
to be every 5 minutes, but WWV switched to announcing the time every 60
seconds in 1971.
* W3V East Coast Special Event Will Also Mark WWV
Centennial
An unrelated east coast special event, W3V in Maryland, will also celebrate the 100th anniversary of WWV. Originally
an experimental/demonstration radio station, WWV was licensed to what then
was called the National Bureau of Standards - today NIST - on October 1,
1919. The transmitter site, initially in the Washington, DC, suburbs, moved
to the grounds of the Agricultural Research Center (BARC) in Beltsville,
Maryland, in the 1930s, before relocating to Colorado in 1966.
The
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) also was located on the BARC campus,
and the Goddard Amateur Radio Club (GARC) will host the W3V special event
September 28 to October 2 at the GARC club station, just north of the old
WWV site. It will use the former WA3NAN space shuttle HF retransmission
frequencies of 3.860, 7.185, 14.295, 21.395, and 28.650 MHz, as well as
amateur satellites. For many years, the GARC retransmissions used 100-foot
wooden antenna poles that it inherited from WWV.
As part of the WWV
centennial, HamSCI and the Case Amateur Radio Club of Case Western Reserve
University (W8EDU) invites all radio amateurs and others capable of making
highly accurate HF measurements to participate in the WWV Centennial Festival
of Frequency Measurement. The event will take place on WWV's centennial,
October 1, from 0000 to 2359 UTC (starting on Monday evening, September 30,
in the Americas). Participants are requested to share their data with the
HamSCI community on the Zenodo data-sharing site.
Information may be
found online at,
https://hamsci.org/wwv-centennial-festival-frequency-measurements
.
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/EX
