No subject

Thu Mar 8 06:28:51 EST 2007

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The South African licensing program is considered to be one of the most 
progressive to be found anywhere in the world.  (Q-News, SARL)

**

DX

In DX, G0TQJ, is currently in Afghanistan and operating portable Y-A. He 
reports he has openings to Europe on 10 meters around 13:00 UTC. Chris is 
using a Yaesu FT-890 transceiver running 100 watts to an 80 to 10 meter Windom 
antenna 50 feet high. He is active on SSB and RTTY.  QSL to his home call.  
(GB2RS)

And OZ7SM will be active from Bornholm through June 16th.  Most of the 
operation will be on SSB on all bands including 6 meters. Bornholm counts as 
EU-030 for the Islands on the Air  awards program.  (GB2RS)

**

THAT FINAL ITEM:  ITS AN ENIGMA NO MORE

And finally this week, we have reported before on Germany's World War Two  
top-secret Enigma spy machine.  This was the message encoding device that gave 
Germany the ability to keep its military movements secret during much of  the 
conflict.  Now, it appears as if a British woman actually cracked a major 
component of the Enigma before World War Two began, but her supervisors 
dismissed her theory as too simple.  Bruce Tennant, K6PZW, picks up the story:

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British newspapers have printed excerpts from the new publication titled 
"Action This Day."  The book claims that discoveries made by a female 
codebreaker known only as "Mrs. BB" that could have opened the secrets of the 
encoding machine much earlier and shortened the war. 

In the late 1930's the Enigma was dubbed the key to Germany's military 
communications system.  Codebreakers including Alan Turing, the father of the 
modern  computer, were trying in the late 1930s to break the Enigma cipher, 
but they could not work out how the keys of the Enigma machine were wired.  

The book's editors, Michael Smith and Ralph Erskine, say that "Mrs BB" 
suggested the Germans wired the A key to the A rotor, B to B and so on through 
the alphabet.  This theory dismissed as too simplistic, but was later proven 
to be correct. 

For the Amateur Radio Newsline, I'm Bruce Tennant, K6PZW, in Los Angeles
--

The full Enigma code was finally cracked by a team of thousands of men and 
women, including chess masters, civil servants and mathematics geniuses.  
(Published news reports)

**

NEWSCAST CLOSE

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News, that's all from the Amateur Radio Newsline(tm).  Our e-mail address is 
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