Sailing Vessel with Ham Radio History Marks 100 years

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Sailing Vessel with Ham Radio History Marks 100 years

The schooner Bowdoin is a century-old this year. Now owned by the Maine Maritime Academy (MMA) as a training vessel, the ham radio history of the 88-foot (LOA) Bowdoin is often neglected.

Constructed in Maine specifically for Arctic exploration, the vessel relied on amateur radio for communication during explorer Donald B. MacMillan’s Arctic Expedition of 1923 and on the MacMillan-McDonald-Byrd Expedition of 1925 — thanks in part to ARRL co-founder Hiram Percy Maxim, W1AW. The venerable vessel, the official vessel of the State of Maine and the flagship of Maine Maritime Academy’s Vessel Operations and Technology Program, recently underwent a complete hull restoration and refitting and has done a little touring to mark its centenary. Its home port is Castine, Maine.

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Vanderbilt’s Silent CubeSat Awakens 6 months after Launch

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Radio Amateur Satellite Corporation, or AMSAT, volunteers have established communications with RadFxSat-2, a small CubeSat that had been silent since it deployed in a Virgin Orbit launch 17th January 2021.

That day, the California-based company successfully deployed 10 CubeSats selected by NASA as part of the agency’s CubeSat Launch Initiative. Nine of them were designed, built and tested by universities across the United States. The RadFxSat-2 CubeSat was built by AMSAT with the science payload built at Vanderbilt by electrical engineering graduate students Rebekah Austin and James Trippe. Austin is now with NASA Goddard Space Flight Center; Trippe is with Sandia National Laboratories.

“It’s alive after all. After six months of hard work, our AMSAT partners were able to establish communication with the satellite, which had been unresponsive since the launch.”
— Brian Sierawski, a research associate professor of electrical engineering and a member of Vanderbilt’s Institute for Space and Defense Electronics

RadFxSat-2 is a joint mission partnership between Vanderbilt University and AMSAT and the fourth miniature satellite launched in the partnership to test radiation effects on space electronics. This project was supported in part by the Arnold Engineering Development Complex, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, and Broadcom Corporation. The Vanderbilt-AMSAT missions run concurrently and provide experiment telemetry and amateur radio communications worldwide.

More Information - https://engineering.vanderbilt.edu/news/2021/vanderbilts-silent-cubesat-awakens-6-months-after-launch/

Bonaire Amateur Radio Club Established

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As of 2021, there are 9 radio amateurs who actually live permanently on the island and who are also active.

Apart from that at least six PJ4-callsigns were issued to amateurs who live outside Bonaire, but who have an address on the island, so the group have decided to start their own radio club -- Bonaire Amateur Radio Club (BAR; club callsign is PJ4BAR).

The club meets weekly at the Tera Cora Ranch from 18:00 hours until late at night. To celebrate this, BAR has organized a field day on the seafront at Sorobon Beach between 27-29th August 2021.

BAR currently has a Web page under construction - http://www.pj4bar.club

QSL PJ4BAR via M0URX.