[Milsurplus] "Under a Jarvis Moon"

[Hue Miller]

In the 1930s the U.S. Gov’t recruited Hawaiian men to be colonists or place-holders on Jarvis and Howland Islands to stake the U.S. claim to the islands.
These men were to operate a weather station, and later, to prepare Howland for Amelia Earhart’s refueling landing.  On their own time, the men operated
the radio equipment in ham radio communications. The Bishop Museum in Honolulu created a documentary about this episode, “Under a Jarvis Moon”.  
Here’s kind of a trailer for the movie, about 6 minutes. Pretty bleak life. No shade trees of any kind; only water was in 50 gallon drums for cooking and
drinking only. Better bring plenty of sunblocker. Japanese bombed Howland shortly after Pearl, killing 2 of 4 men stationed there. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVWmzvLQZFg

I noticed there’s a number of You Tube AE-related videos there for your pleasant time-wasting diversion.
This one, a chopper’s-eye view of Howland, shows just how difficult it would be to spot this fly-speck of an island with clouds and glare to work against.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9c3yZ0xeHw


BTW, CQ Amateur Radio magazines for Apr 1998 article “Amelia Earhart and the Radio Amateurs” states that the actual radiated power of her plane’s
transmitter was 1/2 watt on 3105 and 3 watts on 6210. Seems to me this would be a devilishly difficult analyses to do, as the V antenna did not 
simply cancel the horizontal field RF currents at all points, but for a computer, I suppose, all calculations are possible, if the input is good. Those power
levels, if correct, kind of call into question some of the post-loss reception reports from the USA.

via: Hue Miller