KPH - Marconi Station
Point Reyes National Seashore
In those days before GPS navigation and satellite communication vessels around the globe relied on the services of "Marconi Wireless Corporation
Established in 1897 this British telecommunication company was a pioneer of wireless long distance communication and mass media broadcasting. Nobel Prize winner (1909 together with Karl Ferdinand Braun) and brilliant engineer Guglielmo Marconi founded the company and he is also often credited as the inventor of radio.
The company operated Ship to Shore, VLF and Trans-Oceanic wireless telegraph stations. One of these stations is KPH Radio Station located on the West Coast of the United States and is now part of the Point Reyes National Seashore.
The station was initially located in the Palace Hotel in San Francisco and used the call-sign "PH". After the big San Francisco fire after the earthquake in 1906 in was relocated several times and found its home in Marine County after its acquisition by the Radio Corporation of America (RCA). Globe Wireless was the last owner and still holds the KPH operating license.
The KPH station is comprised of a receiver and control station located in an 1920s Art Deco building on Sir Francis Drake Boulevard in Point Reyes and a transmitter station 20 miles south near the town of Bolinas.
Landlines connect the stations. KPH has always been a morse code station, but its morse codes disappeared from airwaves in 1997 after acquisition by Globe Wireless.
Today KPH is maintained and operated by former KPH employees and volunteers of the Maritime Radio Historical Society. MHRS has been granted a new coaststation license and a amateur radio call-sign (K6KPH).
Images taken on Kodak Portra 400 with a Hasselblad 500c/m - scanned and processed by Richard Photo Lab, California