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The text below was copied from http://w5ac.tamu.edu/history.php3 on November 3, 2004. It's the "Background Information" section. Please edit it, add to it, and make your edits show up somehow (bold text perhaps) so the info is right. (example - look! i'm an edit!) You have to register first, but it's extremely easy to do so. Ideally, the club webmaster will periodically check out the changes y'all make, and update the .edu site accordingly, since this text started out as an educated guess by one student. On with the history!
As history (and one of our logbooks) shows, amateur radio transmissions were suspended during World War II. After the 1960's, the club was known as the "MSC Radio Committee". We are currently housed in the Memorial Student Center, as we have been for decades. We moved temporarily to Bizzell Hall in the early 1970's during remodeling of the MSC, at which time we installed our antennas on the Goodwin Hall tower that then held TAMU's weather radar. We've been located above the bowling alley and apparently in a guest room of the MSC hotel, among other rooms. In Fall of 1983, we moved from room 152 on the first floor of the west side of the building (next to offices of the Texas A&M Board of Regents) to our current location on the third floor. We renamed our unique student organization to the current name, the "Texas A&M University Amateur Radio Club".
Our callsign has been W5AC since at least September 11, 1947. Former calls for W5AC include:
- 5AC, circa 1914,
- 5YA, Fall of 1920, (Y meant a Technical or Training School radio license)
- 5XB, late 1920 through at least 1922, (X meant an experimental radio license,
which was allowed higher power output than Y stations)
- 5XAU, circa 1924,
- 5AQY, up to October 1, 1928*
- W5AQY, up to the 1940's, and
- AC5AC, our Centennial callsign (1976).
* On this date, "W" prefixes were added to existing amateur radio callsigns in the continental U.S. to identify them internationally.
Pictures of past QSL cards for those callsigns are below.
i, too, am an edit - an "extended text" addition kind of edit.
Note: I'm a note.
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