Radio

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLIX, Issue 21971, 24 May 1941, Page 11

Radio

Tire A B.C. news service (through 2FC and other stations) at 9 p.m., is usually much more interesting and valuable than our own Newsreel. It is followed by the 8.8. C. Radio Newsreel and by talks which occasionally are arresting. Two recent ones, by the Minister for the Navy and the Minister for War, have been outstanding.

American newspapers record that there has been a pronounced swing there towards patriotic and sacred or semi-sacred music. This wartime demand seems to have been satisfied in every English-speaking country but one.

Many listeners are under the impression that the messages from New Zealand troops In the Middle Bast are relayed from the mobile broadcasting unit there. The N.B.S. has never made any suggestions of this kind. The so-called broadcasting unit is a recording studio, and the messages come to the Dominion by steamer mail in the form of gramophone records.

“The inclusion in wireless programmes of so many dance bands and so many poor serials denotes a deplorably low level of intelligence and culture,” declares a highbrow critic. That sounds plausible, but It is not necessarily accurate. This column knows a city doctor of high reputation who confesses that he likes Bing Crosby and Dick Todd; a man high In the education world whose favourite singer is Carson Robieson; and a woman, a university graduate, who never misses “Easy Aces.”

It has been customary for our N.B.S. to follow pretty closely the lead of the A.B.S. One hopes that it will not adopt the Idea of organising shows such as “Merry-go-Round” or “Out of the Bag,” two trashy features with which the Commission’s programme organisers believe they are rivalling the “brightness” of commercial stations.

People have become so accustomed to listening on shortwave to Moscow, Berlin, New York, Rome, China, Britain and other countries that it has been almost forgotten how recently it reached its present rather imperfect state. Twenty years ago shortwave was little more than a hobby for amateurs, Who were pushed on to these frequencies because they had become a nuisance on the ordinary bands. Contrary to expectations, amateurs with crude and low-powered apparatus began to establish communlcattlon at phenomenal ranges, and, once their claims were found to be accurate, the Government services and radio corporations began to take notice, with results that are apparent to-day.

Some people are inclined to scoff at the exclusion of birthday calls from children’s sessions, and at other measures taken to exclude the possibility of cypher messages being transmitted to the enemy, Bernard Newman, a secret service agent in the last big war, and since then Writer of spythrillers, in a book entitled "Siegfried Spy,” asserts that the British Government was warned of the magnetic mine by means of a play broadcast in English from Berlin. He alleges that the script was prepared by a British spy, who had Wormed his way into the Nazi service. The ostensible object of the play was to discredit Winston Churchill, and the Prime Minister’s slight stammer was lampooned. One ‘“scene” depicted a conversation betweeh Mr Churchill and a shipping magnate. There was a stammer on one word in each of Mr Churchill’s’ sentences, and the story goes that when these words were arranged In column the first letter of each, read downwards, spelt "Magnetic mine parachute.”

For some time Australian commercial rgdib interests have been suggesting to politicians that the National service should be closed down. . Now one of the radio journals controlled by the trade advances the bright suggestion that the million a year that the National service is alleged to cost could be used to build a battleship. This scheme, of course, is inspired by purely patriotic motives, and has no thought of securing a monopoly for shareholders. Most people thought that battleships cost twenty or thirty millions, but sqme poetic licence is allowed to “B” stations. But viewed on its merits the theory is most attracive and indicates an easy way for Australia to build up a pig navy. The 35 millions a year spent on Australian spirits, wines and beer, and the 25 millions spent on tobacco, would pay for 60 bgttelships, and money saved from the “flicks” would provide half a dozen more. That a million people would lose employment would not be a great matter, so long as the radio trusts secured a monopoly.

“Wireless” has been turned to many uses besides air transmitting. Sound travels slowly through water—the rate being not above 5000 feet per second—but It travels, and a diaphragm with microphone attached enables an operator with earphones to pick up the beat of a submarine’s propellers. When this hydrophone was first invented it could be used only when the submarine chaser’s engines were stopped. These blanketed the relatively feeble sound of the seaphone. The difficulty was overcome by trailing a fish-shaped arrangement in which the hydrophone was housed. Now the instrument has been perfected so that different kinds of ships can be classified, and direction and distance estimated. Another nautical use of the ‘“mike” is to take soundings. The original method of heaving the lead was superseded by a machine, but now that is out of date. A completely automatic sounding set records on a paper drum the depth of the ocean as a ship steams along, the record being made in the same way as barometric pressures are permanently registered. This type of hydrophone, used in connection with a chart, gives mariners their position in the densest fogs. The trick is accomplished by automatic signals being sent out from a diaphragm in the ship’s bottom, and the echo being registered by the microphone when it returns from the ocean floor. The depth is determined by the time the echo takes to return.