GBT Dedication Photos, 25 August 2000

"This is Whiskey Nine Golf Foxtrot Zulu." With that call, Dave Finley activated Grote Reber's amateur radio call sign W9GFZ for the first time since the 1930s at a Special Events Station on the occasion of the dedication of the Green Bank Telescope, 25 August 2000. Over the next two days, six NRAO ham radio operators and ten others (including Nobel Laureate Joe Taylor, K1JT Princeton NJ) operated the stations and were contacted by 1,922 hams from 52 countries. In this photo, (l-r) Mike Barts (N4GU Blacksburg VA), Jim Condon (AD4YM Charlottesville), and Dave Finley (N1IRZ Socorro) operate the three stations set up in the Green Bank warehouse.

Grote Reber was a ham radio operator in the years prior to his pioneering research in radio astronomy. He let his license lapse in the late 1930s, and his call sign was unused and unissued by the FCC until 1997, when Dave Finley, then NRAO's Public Information Officer in Socorro, obtained W9GFZ for the NRAO Amateur Radio Club.

Caption information taken from Spring 2000 Point Source article by Gary Anderson (W8IVF Green Bank WV)

Records of the NRAO

NRAO/AUI/NSF

Still Image

HAM-Radio-1.tif

2000-08-25

NRAO/AUI/NSF

Photographs Series

GBT Unit