Radio broadcast .. (1922-30)

Record Details:

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RADIO BROADCAST Vol. 2 No. 3 January, 1923 The March of Radio WHEN WINTER COMES B Y THE radio man the flight of the summer months is not viewed entirely with regret. A vacation in the woods or at the ocean has its attractions, but to the real fan an equal joy is found in getting ready for a winter's efforts to improve the performance and records of his receiving set. The increased interest in radio with the coming of winter is due not to the lack of the summer's entertainment alone, but largely to the better reception made possible as the summer disappears, taking most of the static with it. On a hot summer's day the atmosphere is intensely active, electrically speaking; electric charges form and spread more rapidly in proportion as the rate of evaporation and condensation taking place in summer increases. Every motion of an electric charge means radiation of energy, and thus a certain amount of static for the listener. But in the cold, quiet winter nights little electromagnetic radiation other than that sent off by stations is taking place. We have no proof, or reason to believe, that radio waves travel with more efficiency in winter than in summer. A signal of such strength that it cannot be heard even above the summer's hissing and crackling, may in the winter time be perfectly clear and several times as loud as required for good audibility. This is due to the fact that the ear automatically adjusts itself to the loudest sounds coming to it; with heavy static, the ear becomes so insensitive that the radio signal, plenty loud enough to be distinctly heard by itself, is lost in the crackling noises in the phones. One of our neighbors now reports that he hears, nightly, stations from 1,000 to 1,500 miles away, although in summer two or three hundred miles is his limit. His outfit is not extraordinary, consisting of a single wire, 30 feet high, and a three-tube receiver, one radiofrequency amplifier, a detector, and one step of audio-frequency amplification. Another experimenter reports that a single-tube set, with regenerative connection, located in New York City, consistently hears a station in Iowa over a thousand miles away. Such instances will multiply during the winter months as atmospheric conditions improve and by next spring there will be many people who, for the first time, will appreciate why the early workers in radio always established their records for long distance at night during the winter. Of course these long-distance records ^ith comparatively low-powered transmittip^g sets do not serve to indicate the power of /apparatus required by a commercial company to maintain a regular transatlantic servipe; guaranteed service, through the day as^ell as the night, requires a transmitter at/least one hundred times as powerful as tho^se used in most present broadcasting stations ."