WIRELESS CHAOS

Evening Post, Volume CXII, Issue 97, 21 October 1926, Page 14

WIRELESS CHAOS

WAVE-LENGTH REFORM IN EUROPE.

On 15th September Europe will, duplicate the command of King Canute — only it will be addressed to broadcast Wireless waves instead of to the sea, says the "Daily Mail." On that date every broadcast station will take up its allotted new; wave-length and (it is hoped) will cease to distort the harmonies of its neighbours. . But, at the moment, there is a horrid climax of chaos for those who listen to any but their own "home" station. Selective valve-sets can pick up mutilated music anywhere on the 300 metres of the broadcast wave-band. Frankfurt and Birmingham are fighting it out between a barrage of mutters and howls (heterodynes the experts call them). i Glasgow is putting up a grim battle with no fewer than four foreigners at her throat. She is the victim of an unholy alliance in which Moscow, Breslau, and Bilbao are the chief partners. Yet she is doing her share to hctero- | dyne them and got even. Borne and j Eadio-Toulouse mangle each other's conj certs, while Dublin has a duel with Salamanca, which can be heard nightly, in the shape of a thin but piercing shriek j A fine set brings no pleasure to its owner —and still less to his family. . When the great change comes, the one all-important point; is that the European and British broadcast stations shall stick exactly to their new agreed wave-lengths. If they bulge out of their compartments, the old heterodyne howls will come back again. It is not believed that the British main stations will cause any trouble. Their present margin of error is of the order of 1 in 5000 of 1 in 10,000. That is very near perfection. It is our relay stations which have to be reformed, and the B.B.C..engineers are now fitting them with master-oscillators —a device for steadying the wave-length. After these have been installed, factors such as variations in modulation (change in the quality of speech or music transmission) or the swaying of the aerial will no longer affect the wave-length broadcast to listeners. No wireless engineer promises perfection or instant reform of the ether as soon as the new arrangement comes into force. There will be many days of shaking down and readjustments. Still, almost anything will be better than the present Witches' Sabbath.