The rich history of the FOC may, perhaps, be best documented by the News Sheets that the club publishes each month.

An archive of these News Sheets, created by Membership Secretary N4TY, is available in the Members-Only area of this web site. Currently, that archive contains issues from January 1992 (issue 508) to the present. But Tyler, N4TY, is in the process of adding older issues. Those that will be added reach back as far as December, 1947. Back then, the publication was called the FOC Circular Letter. That’s because, rather than posting each month’s C/L to each member individually, only a handful were created and each of those was passed, or circulated, among sub-groups of the membership. (This didn’t always work well. Note the comment about this near the end of the first page of the C/L below).

Back then, as now, the C/L contained information about the workings of the club, what it’s members were doing and a list of operators who had been sponsored for FOC membership.

Below is C/L #13, from December, 1947, written by Fergie Houston-Fergus, G2ZC, FOC #2.

Pull out your reading specs, squint your eyes and scroll down. It’s a fascinating read.