A New Radio Thrill for New Zealand

Radio Record, Volume IV, Issue 21, 5 December 1930, Page 7

A New Radio Thrill for

New Zealand

By

A. J.

Heighway

EDITOR, "RADIO RECORD."

HAT a thrill this is, A.J." These words, spoken in a beautiful Wellington home, shortly after eight o’clock on Tuesday, November 25, and: heard instantaneously in a Sydney residence by the writer, marked the opening of one of the first wireless telephone conversations across the Tasman. More than that, they convey the wonder of the achievement that science has now made possible-regu-lar every day commercial telephone ganversation between New Zealand and ‘Australia, and, through the A.W.A. beam telephone service, even beyond her borders, with Great Britain, twenty-two countries of Europe, the United States, Canada and Cuba and Mexico. For that is the service that is now available to anyone in New Zealand, who has a telephone and neeessary occasion for world-wide telephony. "What a thrill," indeed! This. service now brought to New Zealand has been available in Australia since April last, when the shortwave commercial telephone service was opened between Australia and Great Britain. The success of that service was so outstanding in its commercial utility that the New Zealand Post-master-General, the late Sir Joseph Ward, immediately put in hand arrangements for the. provision of a similar service with the Dominion, Amazing Incidents. Wit that blase acceptance of the unusual that is now forced upon humanity by the rapidity of scientific advancement, the feat: of talking half round the world is now a commonplace of commerce. But the citation of a féw incidents may show the scope and elasticity of the service. A Swiss farmer resident in Northern QueensjJand, 400 miles from Rockhampton, desired to speak to his family friends in Switzerland. He put in. his call. Connection was established by landline to Sydney, thence from the transmitting station at Pennant Hills direct to London. There land lines to the Continent were called upon, conversation established with Lausanne and two-way conversation carried on with rfect ease. Again, when the Malolo, tse American luxury tourer, was in Maney, her telephone system was connected up with the Sydney service and from their own cabin, two wealthy girls spoke to their home-circle in Atlantie City, their voices being carried across the A antic by the now fully-used Atlantic telephony channels between London and New York. In the recent political crisis affecting Australia, the Prime Minister, Mr. Scullin, absent in Hngland, has been able to keep in touch with home developments from day to day by telephone. On one occasion the limited between Sydney and Melbourne was stopped at 2 o’clock in the morning to drag from his sleeper Mr. Fenton, the Acting Prime Minister, to speak from \ an isolated country, station with his- ' chief in London. These are some of ’ the things that have been done and are being done day by day in the ordinary course of commerce. Wonderful, certainly, but just accepted in a day as

part of the service due to humanity. Now our turn has come and New Zealand is linked with the world. Because of our past relative isolation the novelty will strike home the more and be the more keenly appreciated, but soon the novelty will pass and routine acceptance will take it place. Of Men and Means. QTILL, while the novelty lasts, while we can still say "what a thrill" and respond to the joy of friendly voices across the Tasman, it will be interesting to chat about the men and means by which this work has been done. Writing here on the Maunganui on Saturday afternoon as she ploughs steadily back to New Zealand over a sunlit sea, the Morse is sparkling quietly in the wire-

less room outside, a fitting background to the radio picture I am endeavouring to piece together. I have been much with radio in the past month, and have taken every opportunity of visiting the radio centres and stations carrying out the splendid services inaugurated by Amalgamated Wireless (Australasia), Ltd. In Victoria, through the courtesy of Mr. J. L. Mulholland, I was motored to Ballan, 56 miles from Melbourne, to see the beam transmitting station working London and Montreal ; to Rockbank, nearer the city,’ where the incoming messages are received; to Braybrook, where 8LO and numerous other broadcasting services are put on the air. In Sydney, by courtesy of the management and under the tutelage of a guide, who judiciously and capably

combined hospitality with instruction, I saw the La Perouse receiving station, picturesquely overlooking Botany Bay, the factory at Ashfield, and finally, twenty-five miles apart from La Perouse, the transmitting: centre of Pennant Hills. Now for a little of the ways and means of this magic of wireless service. Looking back, the most vivid impression is how much-is done with how little. Here is a service which is even now handling over half of all Press and commercial cable matter between Britain and Australia, and this is what happens. Into a small office in Collins Street, Melbourne, you drop your message for London. Checked and paid for, it is flashed by pneumatic tube to Wireless House, Queen Street. There an operator nonchalantly taps it out on a muchine which punches Morse signals in a half-inch tape. That tape is fed immediately into a small machine about six inches long by four in diameter, and, presto, it is on its way at the rate of 1250 letters per minutefirst by direct land-line to Ballan, thence automatically on the air to London. There it is automatically received and recorded in Morse utline on a quarterinch ribbon. This ribbon, streaming, forth from the receiver, can be interpreted either by an operator and the message hand-typed, or, most marvellous of all, it can be fed into another machine which converts the inscribeé Morse into English and delivers the message actually tpyed on ribbon, lea¥ing to human hands the task enly of cutting and pasting that ribbon on to the delivery form for dispatch to the recipient. And all this ig done at in: credible speed-so quickly indeed that an average time from receipt of a message in Collins Street to delivery in complete form in London is about three minutes! This account shows how automatic the whole process is. One quiet little room in Queen Street, with a few operators; one impressive powerroom at Ballan with a transmitting room attached; two huge sending aerials stretching over 1200 feet in length between 400-foot masts; two or three engineers moving casually about -and that is all! To an old newspaper man familiar with the batteries of operators necessary for: manual transmission by Morse the thing is extraordinary, quite uncanny. Plainly the cable, with its tremendous outlay and cost of upkeep, is doomed for dis- tance work. ‘The ether does not wear out. Cables do, and as they do, they will not be replaced except in special instances. How Works the Beam? ND how does the beam work? Two things of interest struck me. First, there-is the beam itself and seeondly, the messages sent along it. Now the beam is harnessed and controlled in this way. Imagine a stone thrown into a pond. Its circles widen and spread in all directions until the energy is diffused and dies. To prevent that diffusion of energy from the originating point Marconi devised the beam aerial, He reasoned that if he established a number of sending points at

-- -_-_ right angles to the point he wished to reach, the side circles would cancel out one another. Thus, imagine this row of dots ‘to represent sending aerials. ® e . .,.,e e s . e . e e e * s Now the side circles of all those points (except the end ones) would be -eancelled out by their neighbours, and the energy permitted full expansion only forward and backward. But the leakage to the rear represented a dead waste, so a screen of identically similar aerials was erected at the back at, a certain distance, thus reflecting the energy forward in a definite beam, capable of reaching the object station the other side of the world. That is the mathematical theory of the beam. By another clever thought the upright aerials are divided into three, one above the other with the object of giving the beam long-low-angled hops against the Heaviside layer, and so avoiding losing energy by minimising the number of rebounds to reach the other side of the world. So the beam or carrier wave connection is established. But this wave travels best in darkness, and that means that if only one way round the world was used, the time available for transmission _ would be limited. So two-way traffic is provided for by duplicate aerials through which the beam is switched the long or the short way round the world as occasion requires. The short way is north-west over Australia, ‘ over India and direct to Britain. The long way is over the South Pole and Home over the Atlantic. By this means contact can be maintained practically continuously. UT the engineers have not been content with providing the beam. They have sought to make that beam work to maximum capacity. So they have succeeded in getting three channels of communication on one beam -simply by varying the rates of frequency of the sending apparatus. So far this has given them two channels for wireless telegraphy and one for telephony. Credit to Whom it is Due. MPROVED almost beyond words by ‘the wonders of the A.W.A. services -services operating not only to Bngland, but over the Australian coastal area in connection with trawling fleets and cargo steamers, and to all the scattered isles of the Pacific-I finally sought Mr. B®. T. Fisk, the managing director of this organisation which, originated seventeen years ago, has grown to employ over 1000 men and advantageously operate a_ million pounds of invested capital, half being found by the Commonwealth Government. Mr. Fisk is the presiding genius of the organisation. His physiognomy is most extraordinary and he at once impresses by his personality and, in conversation, quiet efficiency and wide vision of the future. He is noted in his own circle for his great-hearted-

ness and courage. Deservedly so. He has conquered technical and business difficulties deemed insuperable. Highly qualified technically he has been fortunate in adding to that equipment a business vision and business capacity quite universal in the technician. To that combination and to his genius for selecting capable associates and loyalty in standing by them he owes the position occupied by his organisation today. So while the official opening of the New Zealand short-wave telephone service is proceeding, and one after another of the prominent business, political and press leaders invited to the board room of Amalgamated Wireless are waiting their opportunity to speak to confreres in New Zealand on this memorable day, I seek the views of Mr. Fisk upon the future. "What more is there to do?’ I ask, "there seems little that is left. What will be the developments of the future?" "The immediate development will simply be the extension of the present work of direct wireless services to various parts of the world," says Mr. Fisk. "I think the telegraph services may be regarded as an omnibus which carries everybody’s communications in bulk. The telephone is more of the nature of a taxi-cab which carries the individual from point to point. The wireless telegraph which is already operated at very high speed and which will be established to work as many countries direct as possible, will always handle the many millions of words which have to be sent throughout each year. The wireless telephone, on the other hand, will link the home and office telephones of New Zealand and Australia with the home and office telephones of all other parts of the world. We are already approaching the point where the private telephones of Australia and New Zealand can be connected with 90 per eent. of the telephones of' the rest of the world. ‘We now reach Great Britain, twenty-two countries in Hurope, the United States and Canada, Mexico and Cuba-how many telephones they represent, I simply do not know." "Is the wireless telephone secret?"

"Not in the absolute sense, but we regard it as secret for all ordinary purposes. On some services we can invert the language in transmission, and re-collate before the receiver is reached, but that is not done on all services. With the developments that are going on secrecy may speedily be applied to all. The cost of the services will tend to be reduced as time goes on. At present while’ wireless telegraphy can work over long distances for the greater part of the twenty-two hours, wireless telephony is possible only for five to nine hours out of the twenty-four, but that will be extended as we make new developments, and as the earning power is extended so costs will drop. Pictures and Television. "'THEN the next thing to be done in a big commercial way is the transmission of pictures and facsimiles. This is waiting to be done. In part it is already being done, but further development must be made before very much greater use is made of it. However, the job is there. "Another big thing that will develop is world-wide broadcasting. With the use now being made of world-wide telephony and the improvements that are in sight we can look forward to the time when all our local broadcasting services will be supplied regularly with special features from big world centres such as London, Paris and New York, and so on, on short-wave and picked up and rebroadcast. Some form of beam transmission will probably be used for this work. The transmission of programmes between Australia and New Zealand should now be possible, and would be a distinct novelty and service. "Of course, everybody is looking for wireless television, but I think it will be some years before we see it in any practical form. It will come all right, but.there is a lot.to do. An ordinary picture takes from five to twenty minutes to transmit. To secure television of moving pictures you have to transmit one picture in one-twelfth of a second so that there is a tremendous amount of work to be done.

Cannot See the End! "AND I don’t think it will stop there," declared Mr. Fisk. "AS we attain that, we will find otherthings to be done. We are dealing with electricity which is a very flexible form of energy. The ether also is a very flexible thing so that on the one hand you have the unlimited possipilities of electricity, and on the other the unlimited potentialities connected with the ether. What the ultimate developments will be are largely a matter of technical science and engincering as to what we want to do and how far we can learn how to do it." ak x *

Then, interruption !-- "Mr. Heighway, you have a call in for Wellington. Stand by!" ‘ "Are you there? Heighway here! "What a thrill this is, AJ. Your voice is wonderfully clear." "So ig yours. I received your letter this morning and will be glad to dine with you next Monday evening!" And so on. Wireless telephony is here. The Tasman is bridged. We in New Zealand can now speak to the world. It IS a thrill, isn’t it? ~ = = * And there is the bugle call for dinner. My hand is tired. But as the shades of evening fall there comes in from, the East the voice of 2YA and from the west, the call of 2FC. Radio-Radio-the wonder of it!