eHam.net News for Monday 6 March 2017
 

eHam.net News

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Times Gone By: Radio Reached the Parts Where Others Failed:

Posted: 05 Mar 2017 04:00 PM PST
http://www.eham.net/articles/38758


TAKE a look back to 1972 and an age before the internet and mobile phones
and where the only means of communicating with people living in distant
parts was a landline telephone. Even in those days, telephone calls to
different parts of the world were not easy and often at the busiest times,
Christmas for instance, calls had to be handled manually by staff at
telephone exchanges. But one group of people could overcome the difficulty
of contacting people on the other side of the world as they used
their "radio ham" equipment to maintain worldwide radio contact. Radio hams
-- amateurs -- were licensed to use the airwaves and they included, in
1972, members of the Stone (St Michael's) Scout group based at their Common
Lane headquarters in Walton, Stone.


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Former Underbarrow Resident Awarded War Medal for Morse Code Efforts:

Posted: 05 Mar 2017 04:00 PM PST
http://www.eham.net/articles/38757


A FORMER Lyth Valley resident has been awarded a war medal in recognition
of her services to her country. Diana O'Brien, who used to live in
Underbarrow, spent the Second World War transmitting coded messages from
India to England using Morse code. Mrs O'Brien (nee Ballantyne) was born in
Gloucestershire before moving and growing up in Letchworth. Now
90-years-old and living in Shrewsbury, she joined the First Aid Nursing
Yeomanry at the age of 17, in May 1944. She was a wireless operator and
learned the specialist skill of Morse code in order to help in the war
effort. After her initial training at Henley-on-Thames and briefly at
Bletchley Park, she was posted to Delhi and then Calcutta in India. She
worked as a wireless operator with the Special Operations Executive
supporting troops behind enemy lines in Burma, transmitting their coded
messages back to England. She was presented with the War Medal 1939-1945 by
the Mayor of Shrewsbury, Cllr Ioan Jones, surrounded by family
members. "She loved it and she was very proud to get it," daughter Fiona
Lear said. "Although she thought it was a huge amount of fuss!"


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We're Sending a Spacecraft to the Sun. That's Hot:

Posted: 05 Mar 2017 04:00 PM PST
http://www.eham.net/articles/38756


Could we really send a spacecraft to the sun without turning it into a mass
of molten metal? NASA seems to think so. The Solar Probe Plus may sound
like something out of a sci-fi novel, but this very real collaborative
effort between NASA and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics
Laboratory is expected to get closer than anything ever made by human
hands. It will shed light on solar phenomena by observing the great ball of
fire from 4 million miles away. If that's not hot enough for you, consider
that up until now we've been trying to illuminate its mysteries from 93
million miles away. Handling the heat is a challenge scientists have
equipped the probe for in anticipation of its 2018 launch. Needless to say,
anything venturing this close to extreme radiation needs much more than
SPF. Protecting it from temperatures of up to 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit will
be a carbon-composite shield 4.5 inches thick. Heat that manages to
penetrate the shield will be re-radiated into space by specialized heat
tubes called thermal radiators and its electrical circuits will also have
extra protection against emissions that could mess with its memory. That's
some heavy-duty sunblock. NASA and JHU's mission goes beyond curiosity
to "answer pressing questions about the corona and provide new data on
solar activity and make critical contributions to our ability to forecast
major space-weather events that impact life on Earth," as stated on the
official Solar Probe Plus website. Meaning not only could it light up some
answers science has been in the dark about but it may also prevent
potential power outages and trillions of dollars' worth of technological
damage due to a solar temper tantrum.