SCCARA has several videos on VHS tapes and one 16 mm film made in 1925.
The tapes and film have been converted to mp4 video files, available for download (below) and on DVD.
A HD version of the 1925 film is available free, but not for download here because of the file size.
From the VHS tapes:
1989 video ATV.mp4 (251 MB, 20 min. 40 sec.)
ATV by W6ORG (in So. CA), circa 1989.
ATV is Amateur TV. It's same as the old commercial analog broadcast TV. Today many amteurs are moving to the digital standard.
ATV transmitter
ATV station WA6MYJ Automated Pan-Tilt camera shown on ATV
1991 video HAM Radio in Space.mp4 (389 MB, 33 min. 10 sec.)
Amateur satellites and Space Shuttle astronauts who are amateurs, Oct. 14, 1991.
VCR tape was donated to the club by Ed Hajny W6ACW, owner of Books, Etc., early January 1993.
Reprinted with permission; Copyright 1991 ARRL. This video is not for distribution.
Micro-Sat
OSCAR satellite
All astronauts on STS-37 were amateurs
Jay N5QWL
Tony W7ORE
1992 video KC6SOC at Norwood school works space shuttle.mp4 (177 MB, 14 min. 29 sec.)
SCCARA member Terry Young KC6SOC set up a radio station at Norwood Elementary School for students to talk to astronauts on board the Space Shuttle, March 28, 1992.
1992 video KC6SOC at Norwood school works space shuttle edited.mp4 (134 MB, 10 min. 59 sec.)
Edited: Some of the waiting at the beginning and some panning of the crowd at the end were trimmed.
Student asks a question of an astronaut on board the Shuttle.
1991 video WB2JKJ JHS 22 school radio club.mp4 (357 MB, 29 min. 26 sec.)
WB2JKJ Jr. High School 22 HAM Radio club, New York, 1990 or 1991.
This video is a collection of various clips. English teacher Joe Fairclough uses Amateur Radio as a teaching aid in class.
(SCCARA made a donation to them.)
1991 video WB2JKJ JHS 22 school radio club edited.mp4 (309 MB, 25 min. 27 sec.)
Edited: The dead spots between clips and the lengthy showing of their address at the end were trimmed.
Robert (student)
student operating
class club: 22 Crew
"Amateur Radio is a better way to teach English than 'see spot run' "
1992 video SCCARA Field Day.mp4 (309 MB, 25 min. 23 sec.)
SCCARA Field Day at Mt. Madonna Park, June 28, 1992.
Click here for info on who's who in this video.
beam on our 60 ft trailer-mounted tower
typical station
logging with member-written software
making a contact
From 1925 - the 16 mm film:
A HD version is available (see below). This is a lower resolution version:
1925 video SCCARA.mp4 (219 MB, 17 min. 7 sec.)
The film is 90 years old as of this transfer (Dec. 2015). It's starting to show its age and the exposure wasn't always set properly, but it's still interesting to see the first members from way back then.
The first four minutes appear to be a trip to a mountain lake by some of the members. The rest shows the founding members, some of the equipment used, and a bit of silliness for the camera.
Many of the guys show their call signs on cards -- notice the 6xxx format. In 1928 they all got new call signs with the W6xxx format. Most of them kept the same call, just added the W prefix.
The object with the rotating wheel is a rotary spark gap. Those are illegal today because they generate broad band noise, but that was a common method of generating low and medium band frequencies in those days.
The submarine sandwich size piece of equipment is a dynamotor for generating high voltage.
Eleven minutes into the video, these two radio chassis are being shown off by proud members.
The club still had those (or ones like them) in the early 1990's, but by then they weren't in good shape. From the late 1980's through late 1990's the club was very active in the local electronic flea market for fund raising. Unfortunately, those chassis were sold at the flea market along with a lot of other donated old electronic items. Had we known their background at the time, no doubt they would have been kept.
Philip F. Scofield 6JK / W6JK and Frank J Quement 6NX / W6NX (left to right). Thanks to the Quement family for donating this film to the club shortly after Frank died in 1989.
Click here for information on some of the members and dozens more still images from the film.
HD version of the film:
The HD version of the 16 mm film is available free, but not for download here because of its size (6.3 GB). We can copy it onto your USB flash drive or make other arrangements. Likewise for all the other videos. Contact the club editor (below).
DVD:
A copy of all DVDs are available, no charge to club members.
All the VHS videos - with the two edited versions - are available on a single two-hour DVD.
The non-edited videos are available on DVD too, but everything won't all fit on a single two-hour DVD.
Technical details and info:
The only DVD type available at this time is single-side, single-layer DVD-R (4.7 GB). Presumably we'll have others available in the future, such as Blu-Ray.
The VHS tapes were transferred to DVD in one-hour mode (minimum compression) to preserve maximum quality, so any image quality issues will be due to the original recording. It takes three of these DVDs to hold all the tapes. The mp4 video files were made from these DVDs.
A second transfer was made of the VHS tapes with the DVD in two-hour mode (slight compression). Further, the KC6SOC and WB2JKJ videos on this DVD are the edited versions. This allows all of them to fit on a single two-hour DVD.
The 16 mm film was scanned frame-by-frame; each frame is a 3 mega-pixel, 1920 x 1080 image. All those individual images were then re-assembled to make the HD digital video. (The actual image format is 1485x1080, aspect 1.375.) That HD video is a 6.3 GB mp4 file. A lower resolution (720 x 576) version was made for faster download here. We are looking into doing video processing to restore some of the film's quality.
Last updated: June 23, 2019
Editor: Gary Mitchell, WB6YRU, (wb6yru @ ix.netcom.com)