EMERGENCY RADIO.

Manawatu Standard, Volume LVII, Issue 7, 7 December 1936, Page 12

EMERGENCY RADIO.

SUCCESSFUL TEST. Those owning short-wave wireless receivers who happened to tune across the wavebands between 85 and 103 metres between 1 p.m. and 6 p.m. yesterday must have thought there was unusual activity with dozens of stations telegraphing curt messages to all parts of the country. Had they been able to decode them, their surprise would have been even greater. The occasion was a national test of the New Zealand Radio Emergency Corps. For the purposes of the test, each section assumed that some disaster had taken place, and instructions from the officer in command at Auckland were to the effect that each section must exchange five messages'with five other stations in arranged parts of New Zealand. In Palmerston North an imaginary liner was assumed to be in distress off the coast. A portable transmitting station was established at Tangimoana and maintained excellent communication with the base at Palmerston North. The base in the city relayed the messages to stations located up and down the coast. A third portable transmitter with operators available, as an intermediate relay station between the base and the outpost, was found unnecessary, but was set up in the Totara Reserve bush for experimental purposes. The central position of the base at Palmerston North made the task of the operators here particularly arduous, as it entailed a considerable amount of relay work, there being a steady stream of messages each way, from Taranaki and Hawke’s Bay, for Wellington, Master-ton, and the South Island. A very successful test concluded at 6 p.m., leaving no doubt that the high standard set by individual sections in actual emergencies could be maintained, if necessary, by the corps as a national unit.