Radio Broadcast (Nov 1922-Apr 1923)

468 Radio Broadcast ONE OF THE "LONELY SHACKS " Which used to house the long-distance receiving apparatus, but which now exist only in the popular imagination, at least as far as transatlantic work is concerned ness of the station was transacted efficiently during his tour of duty. Under the supervisor there were as many as twenty operators during busy stretches. There were three daily watches: Midnight to 8 a. m., 8 a. m. to 4 p. m., and 4 p. m. to midnight. Each watch had its staff of operators and supervisor, and the watches were changed every week, so that a man did not have to stand the graveyard watch, as it is called in steel mills, more than seven days in succession. This placated the operators' wives by widowing them not over a week at a stretch. The station was in charge of a superintendent, who in turn reported to the New York office, discharging the usual functions and assuming the ordinary responsibilities of an official in charge of an outlying factory or branch office of a corporation. As there might be as many as fifty skilled operators at a receiving station, with power house and radio engineers, linemen, cooks, servants, gardeners, and other help, this was quite a sizeable job. The unmarried men lived at a large brick hotel maintained by the company on its property. There were cottages in which the superintendent and other officers lived. The social life of the place was much livelier than that of the average small community, for inasmuch as almost all professional radio men have served an apprenticeship on shipboard, the men at the stations were generally welltraveled and often highly interesting in conversation. There was always a fair percentage of Britishers, as is usual in any communication enterprise, for England has a far-flung empire, whose natives learn communication as a matter of course, and go wherever cables are laid or wires are strung. The atmosphere of the recreation rooms was highly cosmopolitan. At one of the stations, for example, there was a supervisor who had sailed with William McFee, and had heard Titta Ruffo sing "Hamlet" at the Milan opera, which is more than many literary and operatic critics can boast of. All this is a far cry from the lonely beach shack. And as for isolation, it was nothing for the staff to have twenty girls, vigilantly chaperoned and matroned, down from New York for a week-end party, and not a few of them were quite at home in the smart supper clubs of the town to which all the wires run and where all good circuits, line and radio, find their end. But efficiency required that the signals be received in New York City directly, and to-day Belmar is only an experimental station. All the operators are now at the Broad Street Central Telegraph Office. At the same time it would not be expedient to pick up the signals in New York, for an urban receiving location is generally inferior to a rural one, and the present system of static elimination requires a large amount of space — specifically an eightmile line on poles, which of course could not be readily obtained in the city. The problem was solved by the development of line-transfer apparatus. That is, the signals as they come out of the audio-frequency amplifiers at the receiving stations, are put through repeating coils on to metallic wire circuits, and at Broad Street re-amplified and given to the operators. In short, there is a system of audio-frequency tones sent along wires, following the radiofrequency oscillations sent through space. Under normal conditions the operator in New York hears exactly the same signal that the engineer in Riverhead, say, listens to. This system, of course, is subject to the usual troubles of a wire telegraph under bad weather conditions, but by the use of good lines, spare pairs, and other standard expedients, serious delays are obviated, and the advantages of a single central telegraph office and an outlying receiving station effectively combined. The Radio Corporation's main receiving station is at Riverhead, L. I., at the head of Peconic Bay, about eighty miles east of New York City. The antenna runs southwest to Eastport, a distance of about nine miles. This collecting system, the invention and development of Mr. H. H. Beverage of the Radio Corporation and Messrs. Chester Rice and