NOTES AND COMMENTS

Radio Record, Volume I, Issue 44, 18 May 1928, Page 8

NOTES AND COMMENTS

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Pun difficulty of procuring an honorary secretary confronts. the Amateur Radio Society of Wellington. . Nobody wants the job, and as the society has not sufficient income to pay Wwiges to a ‘secretary, a serious situa- | tion has arisen. HE temporary honorary secretary, Mr. I, M. Levy, accepted the post purely as a formal appointment, and he states he is quite unable to spare the time to function in. that. position eyen, temporarily. [Zz is rather a pity thut sopie of the younger members of the Wellington Radio Society do. not ‘select. an | honorary secretary among themselves; and submit his name to the executive for appointment. Without a secretary, the society cannot but remain -dormant HE Amateur Radio Society of Wel- ' Jington has now about 250 members, but it is put out of action for want of a secretary. The retiring secretary was yoted an honorarium of £10, and this reduced the exchequer almost to the disappearing point on the year’s operations. HE number of radio receiving sets jn use in the United States is estimated to total seven millions, aceording to a nation-wide investigation by the National. Electrical Manufacturers’ Association. New York State leads with 876,000 sets. California is second, with 704,000, and Illinois is third, with 539,000,. And still thous-, ands of sets are being sold weekly, ‘A THEORY is offered by scientists to the effect that a flexible atmospherie shell, expanding in the day and eoutracting at night, is responsible for the difference between day and night radio reception. They contend

that this shell, acting as a reflector of radio waves, is expanded by the heat.of the sun. Much day-time radio energy is wasted in the ascension of current, After sundown the cooling atmosphere reduces the size of the shell, they suggest, decreasing the vertical distance the waves must travel before hitting the retiector. As a result, it is contended more eurrent is available for the horizontal extension of the signal area. [AN Arab concert transmitted from Toulouse (in the south of France) has been such a success that arrangements have been made for a eoncert of Chinese music, all the performers to be Chinese. FPHE province of Ontario has almost ‘ as many radio fans as the other provinces of Canada combined. There are now between 300,000 and 400,009 receiving sets in that State. A R. DAVID CASEM, radio editor of the ~ New York ‘Lelegram," pointed out editorially recently that numerous commercial broadcasters are already considering ways and means in which they can use picture broadcasting, He points out that if picture transmission is used to distribute miniature billboards in the home its growth will be stifled at the outset. The public is not going to buy picture receiving apparatus in order to have itself exploited by advertisers. HOSE interested in studying sales and distribution figures will find the report compiled by the Electrieal Squipment Division of the United States Government Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce, aided by N.E.M.A,, on stocks of radio equipment in the hands of radio dealers in WWS.A, very Uhnuninating, This is the second of a series of quarterly reports to be issued. A little over 30,000 dealers contributed to the information. On October 1 the dealers had 65,921 battery sets in stock, and on January 1 the number had fallen to 62,778, The total stock on hand averages but two per dealer, a number, it is considered, facuilicient to cause uneasiness,

Wii municipal authorities of Buenos Aires are planning to extend the service of their station, LOS, in the Colon Theatre, which has so far been used exclusively for broadcasting operas and concerts from the gtage of the theatre. RAvrI0 reception is flawless a few thousand yards in the air, says a° ‘pallonist writing in the "Revue du Ciel," published in Paris. ‘

N English writer states :--‘At the end of November, 1927, the number of licensed radio receiving sets in Britain was 2,355,600; which is equivalent to one set per 14 heads of population, including Swiss waiters, Belgian barbers, and Greck ice-cream magnates. (Yes, we haye them here. tco!). That, as we say here, is not so dusty. It means that we use one. set for every 3.63 families, not counting the boarders or ‘lady helpers.’ " ---__-

ICROPHONES may come and go, " but a voice goes on forever. Thus says an official of the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company, whose theory it is that a message ence broadcast is never lost. "So far as we can say," declared this engineer, "they may go on forever, of course getting fainter /and fainter as the time goes by. We have actually trapped a message on its third circuit around the world. If Wireless continues to develop at its present rate it is not too much to say trat 100 years hence people will be able to pick up messages we are transmitting to-day." HIRTY-SIX county agricultural agents of Colorado recently gave thirty-six broadeast speeches in thirteen minutes. The speeches were so arranged that they combined to make one continuous story. The topics discussed were farm improvements in each country. YYVIRELESS was expected to play an important role in the general elections in France held on April 22, Radio publications called upon wireless enthusiasts not to yote for parliamentarians who had done nothing for their favourite pastime. Pie following telegram was lately published by the American daily papers ----"Hartford, Conn., March 22, -The United States bureau of standards has matched the piezoelectrie crystals of stations WTIC, of Hartford, and WIIO, of Des Moines, Iowa, in order to avoid heterodyne interferance betaveen distant stations that are required to operate on the same frequency, It was at the suggestion of WTIC that this method of avoiding such trouble was undertaken. It is an experiment looking toward a cure for the many squeals we get on our receivers when two stations supposedly of the same frequency interpose." SE a Ue ea en At See DT

La AAs U.S.A, federal radio commission has been informed of the establishment of a 500-watt broadcasting station at St. John's, Newfoundland, with call letters SWM(C, and operating on 760 kiloeycles. There are seven stations in the United States operating on this channel. News reports broadcast every evening by KOA, Denver, U.S.A. have caused a new precedent to be established in the legal werld. A prominent man in the vicinity of Denver had been charged with owning a still. Conviction would have carried a prison sentence of from two to five years. In broadcasting the news of the Rocky Mountain rezion, KOA naturally included an account of this bit of news. When prospective jurymen were being questioned by the attorney for the defence, they were all asked if they had heard the news items at broadcast by KOA. This was the first time in the history of crimintl trials in Colorado that prospective jurors haye been asked if they were influenced by radio reports, L N American writer says :--*That night when you invited your friends in to hear your receiver perform is a typical example. Your set was probably in applie-pie order, and atmospherie conditions excellent. But it failed to do what it had done the night before, simply because you were suffering from a case of ‘buck fever,’ or stage fright. You would not have admitted it; perhaps were not even aware of it. But just the same, knowing that your friends were waiting to see what your set would do, you were a bit excited, neryous; and, as a result, lost that delicate touch, that little margin of skill with the dials indispensable for the best DX (long-dis-tanee) work, In other words, you found yourself in much the same situation as a young pianist who can perform superbly alone, but who becomes merely mechanical when playing before an audience; though, if your friends had not been there, you could probably have done just as well as the night before," |