Radio Broadcast - 1925, February - 113 Pages ... - VacuumTubeEra

What We Are Doing With Broadcasting 733
THE TECHNICAL EQUIPMENT
on the wire, and the Government does the
WE ERECTED rest, and it sometimes arrives at the other end.
eight main stations of
the same power as your WEAF., etc.,
in New York. We had one and one-half
kilowatts. These stations were erected, and
dotted over England, to try to get uniform
distribution throughout zones, just as you
are doing.
just a little bit better than the next one, and
Now the Englishman is a peculiar person, if they can talk about it on their radio, it
and having once got this scheme going, he pleases them. So we give these stations over
does not keep on living seventy or eighty to local civic functions, etc. In Sheffield,
miles away from the station, and getting they give the annual talk of the master of
more and more distance. He does not care that city, or in Liverpool someone speaks
to reach out I think you call it, nor has he treating of cotton prices, etc., all the things
the ambition of "the man to reach Australia that appertain to the locality. They use that
on half a valve. He is far more keen to get a station to create local interest, whereas if
pure, undisturbed signal, and he only hears there had been some impersonal, large, highpowered
station, it would have bored Liver-
the one single one coming from his local
station. And our ambition is that any man pool, for instance, horribly, to have to listen
in England can listen in on an apparatus made to the superlative merits of Glasgow or Manchester!
So then we had the royal stations
up of a clothes-line or a piece of string, and
really hear his program uninterruptedly. And and main stations, and with that establishment,
estimate I
that, taking crystal reception
that is the way we have worked it out. The
one ambition I have had is to give everybody
so good a signal that they can not complain
of the engineering side of it, but always
must complain of the I
programs. am not an
engineer! Well, that ideal was not realized
by the erection of the one and one-half kilowatt
stations, because outside, thirty miles
from that place, the service is not what we
consider perfect, because it is liable to interruption.
You know, in England we are
all packed together, and there is a great
deal of shipping, and they have not the wavelength
allocations you have.
A Frenchman fishing off our coast will
signal back and forth with his nearest home
station about how many fish he has caught,
and every time he tells about it, the while the
fish constantly growing longer, he requires a
longer message to narrate the thing. And
so we must create much stronger signals perhaps
than you have to use here. There were
large areas in densely populated places where
people could not receive; so we erected a royal
station, designed to serve only the town or
city in which it was located. We put these
stations down, and it would be too expensive
to provide programs every day up to the
excellence of the programs we do provide in
the large stations, so we linked these up by TIME SIGNALS FROM "BIG BEN"
ordinary wire to our London program. But Are frequently broadcast from 2 to, at London.
here is the difference in England: As technical
men, responsible for the technique of
The photograph shows engineers for the company
with
our
a portable microphone, pulling in the sound.
own
At the start and conclusion of station, we are
some of the inter-
not, of course, responsible
for those trunk lines outside. I
put a signal
As a matter of fact, the service, considering
it has grown up in the way it has, is an extraordinarily
good one.
Another function of the royal station is that
you are able to give a local program from that
station. Every city, of course, thinks it is
as a basis, out of the forty-three million people
we serve, exactly fifty per cent, could get a
national broadcasting in November, time signals
from this clock were sent out