Foundations Of Amateur Radio

Foundations of Amateur Radio The other day we were aligning an antenna for a contest. It had slipped on the rotator pole during a recent storm and when the rotator was set to zero it was pointing somewhere south east. Not ideal if you want to point your antenna at a particular station. The topic of the direction of north came up. There was vague hand-pointing, some mobile phone compass magic performed and north was arrived at. I asked if that compass took into account magnetic declination which in turn was met with blank stares. So, what is magnetic declination and where is north? It's likely that in school your first physics lesson was around magnetism. Playing with magnets is an easy way to start the conversation around science. One thing you learn in school is that opposite magnets attract. A north pole to a south pole and so on. A compass is a simple magnet with a north and a south pole. So, the north pole of the compass is attracted to the south magnetic pole of the Earth. This means that the Earth'