Wireless Wanderings

Radio Record, Volume III, Issue 11, 27 September 1929, Page 24

Wireless Wanderings

NE of the many duties of the B.B.C, engineers, and one that is little heard of, is to listen-in nightly from a special station to British and foreign broadcasts in order to check frequencies and trace interference. This "detective" station has previously been located in a small hut, but in the near future it will be transferred to a new building at present in course of erection. ‘THE recent advent of the "talkie" film has caused a shortage in good radio announcers. Broadcasting studios all over the world are at present being explored by the "talkie" people, and announcers with suitable voices : are being lured away to Hollywood gand other locations. The effect is alMady being felt in Australia, many of’ the most popular announcers and artists having left. If this depletion of the rather scanty number of good microphone voices continues, listeners’ will surely have cause to rue the rapid advance of modern invention. SyFC has employed one of its announe- + ers in a new role. Mr. Lawrence Walbert now concentrates on investigating various effects to produce atmosphere in radio plays. It is recognised that effects are to the radio play what scenery is to the legitimate theatre. WHEN the German liner Bremen was establishing a record trans-Atlantic trip recently, the . operator on board was in two-way communication with:an operator of the Sydney Coastal Station, who was using a low-power short-wave set. A trawler off the coast of Greenland has also been "worked" by the coast station at La Perouse. A PARISIAN engineer claims to have invented an effective substitute for an aerial. This consists in the main of a silvered copper wire housed inside a sealed glass tube, and the whole is considered quite suitable for panel mounting. This claim is quite feasible, as with the modern tendency towards powerful super-sensitive valves we can soon hope to avoid the need of any other than panel-mounted antennae,