RADIO BEACONS

Evening Post, Volume CXXXI, Issue 117, 20 May 1941, Page 8

RADIO BEACONS

BROADCAST STATIONS

WHAT THE 8.8.C. HAS DONE

WARTIME MEASURE

■'A correspondent wrote to "The Post" recently raising the question whether the broadcasting stations in New Zealand could be used as navigation beacons by enemy ships or aircraft.. The answer is .in the-affirmative. With equipment which is now in .general use a navigator can make very good use of-a broadcasting service of the normal type. The New Zealand authorities have had to face this possibility, and it can be safely assumed that appropriate measures to prevent it have been arranged. The 8.8.C., long before the war, made a simple arrangement which made its home service stations useless for direc-tion-finding purposes and yet allowed the service to go on, except that in some areas reception was not as good as usual. DmECTION-FINDING PREVENTED. When war broke out, the engineers in charge of the stations opened sealed orders, and found instructions to change their, wave-lengths. From that moment, only two wave-lengths—449 and 391 me tres —were used; and only one programme was used throughout the service. This meant that, as similar signals on the same wave-length were being sent from many points at once, no one station could be picked out by direction-finding apparatus. Subsequently it was found possible to add more wave-lengths for the greater part of the day; and interruptions in the home service have been slight and few. GERMANS CLOSE DOWN. On' tht; other hand, when the British began making air raids over Germany, it was not unusuaL to read that the German broadcasting service /had been closed down, and, although this has not been reported lately, it seems that the enemy have not followed the British example, and the result has been the imposition of a widespread "radio curfew" over Germany, the Lowlands, France, and other territory under Nazi control. Some months ago the Germans themselves paid a tribute to the British broadcasting service, in a short-wave transmission from Zeesen. "London goes on with its radio programmes," said the German station, "as if nothing had happened —people singing in their shelters; report from a cricket match; nice and clever people making their talks;, there is more dance music than, before; male and female announcers face the 'mike' briskly and nicely as if air raids were a thing they had heard of in a fairy tale. I think we must respect them for this." SHORT WAVES NOT AFFECTED. Short-wave listeners know, of course, that there has been no interruption in either the British or the German oversea transmissions. These have continued normally because they are not suitable as navigational aids.