HARK! HARK! THE SPUTNIK

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 949, 18 October 1957, Page 11

HARK! HARK! THE SPUTNIK

INCE Russia’s artificial satellite (the sputnik) began whizzing round the earth on Friday, October 4,,.NZBS technicians have kept an ear cocked for any changes in the "beep" it transmits back to the mother planet. At the time of going to press, they were fairly certain it was a common or garden kind of beep, with no built-in codes or catch phrases or quotations from Marx. The monitoring staff of the NZBS station at Quartz Hill first heard of the satelljte’s launching in the BBC news at 2.0 p.m. on the Saturday. At 6.15 they heard a recording of the beeps in the BBC’s Radio Newsreel and knew what to listen for. By 7.30 they had tuned in to the satellite themselves, and half an hour later, when the signal became stronger, they made a recording of the sound for use with the nine o’clock news. The sputnik was then thought to be somewhere over India. According to V. M. Stagpoole, at present in charge at Quartz Hill, listeners whose sets lack a beat frequency oscillator (and that means. most) will be unable to hear the sounds as broadcast. On an ordinary set, the satellite’s signal sounds like a succession of slight bumps. Reception, he says, varies a great deal, the beeps sometimes remaining clear only for a minute or so and at other times for upwards of half an

hour. He thinks it likely that the signals are behaving in a similar fashion to short waves from earthbound stations, except that they bounce off the outside of the ionosphere and are reflected away into space. The station anyway is recording its observations, and hopes. they may prove useful to scientists studying the propagation of radio waves. "But at the moment,’ says Mr Stagpoole, "listener interest is our main concern, and we will be trying to determine just when the satellite is in our piece of sky." 8 Judged by the radio watch, the closest the sputnik had then approached New Zealand was between 11.35 and 11.40 am. on Monday, October 7. Twenty minutes after it had been tracked over Hiroshima it passed somewhere south and west of Quartz Hill. The signal on that occasion was so clear that technicians thought they could detect a "Doppler effect" consequent upon the enormous speed of the satellite’s approach. Other variations in the signal they are inclined to attribute to interference by other stations, shortcomings in receiving sets or, if the sputnik is rotating, to movement of its transmitting aerials. Any one or all of these factors might produce apparent. variations in frequency and lead to reports that the satellite was sending back scientific information,