2012-04-09
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The first appearance of the “computer-generated illustration produced at the Arecibo Radio Observatory in Puerto Rico” of pulsar CP1919 (now known as PSR B1919+21), credited to Jerry Ostriker, in Scientific American’s January 1971 issue.
The image is best known as the album art for Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures, as appropriated by Peter Saville, but this post (by Adam Capriola) is the most thorough attempt I’ve ever seen to go into its history.
2012-04-03
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Australis Oscar V, an amateur radio satellite. Alice Gorman, Saving space junk, our cultural heritage in orbit:
Space heritage isn’t all about the superpowers, though. In 1970, a small striped box representing the ambitions and dreams of a bunch of Melbourne University students was launched into low-earth orbit, piggybacked on a NASA rocket.
The students had designed the satellite – dubbed Australis Oscar V – and constructed it from begged, borrowed and scrounged components. They then coordinated amateur radio enthusiasts across the world to collect data from the satellite. Australis Oscar V transmitted data for six epic weeks until its batteries died.
2012-03-31
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You never forget the first time you see RAF Fylingdales, usually as you’re tootling along the A169 gently in thrall to the natural wonders of the North Yorkshire Moors. Could anything be more incongruous than those vast, dimpled radomes, those eerie ’golf balls’, blistering out of the green surroundings? It’s a sort of rude-awakening, where you’re reminded the world is less a James Herriot novel and more a Noam Chomsky essay. As the comedian Mark Thomas famously said, “It’s like giant Tarby has found his pitch and putt.”
For a 10-year-old, the sight is disconcerting and strange. But when the coach driver passes as close as the barbed-wire and steel allows him and, with a certain devilish glee, slows right down and turns his radio up, revealing a barrage of crackling static, stuck signals and unworldly whistling, strange turns to frightening.
”2012-02-24
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More from Ptak Science Books: Fantastic Cover Art: a Picture of the Future of Television:
This image is that of the television antenna of station WNBT and for many years it sat on top of the Empire State Building. WNBT was the flagship station of NBC, which was owned by RCA (Radio Corporation of America, 1919-1986) which (according to its name) was really the first national broadcasting radio network in the United States, and which (as experimental station W2XBS) became the first to broadcast a television picture (of a papier mache Felix the Cat) in 1928. This fantastic cover art for a 1947 promotional for the company pictured the famous antenna, the great visual of the company’s external hardware, right there on top of the world’s tallest building.
2011-11-18
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2010-12-22
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2010-02-16
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Do You Know?, a poster at a site devoted to the history of the UK radio licence.
2009-09-06
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The pips. It’s occured to me that these are one of those lovely small element of Britishness (Radio 4 bias version) that people tend to ignore.
