ADVANCES IN RADIO

Waikato Independent, Volume XLIV, Issue 6074, 9 July 1947, Page 6

ADVANCES IN RADIO

MINIATURE COMPONENTS Wartime advances in radio and its kindred fields, which, he* was convinced, would have wide peacetime application, were outlined by Dr A. G. Bogle, chief radio engineer of the Dominion Physical Laboratory at a meeting of scientific workers, in Wellington. ( Dr Bogle went to England some years ago as a Rhodes Scholar, a distinction recently shared by his younger brother, Mr G. S. Bogle, and served during the war on the technical staff of the British Admiralty. He has returned only recently to New Zealand.

The development of miniature techniques would, within ten years, have its impact on the household radio, Dr Bogle forecast. He exhibited a valve, not much larger than an acorn, which did the work of pre-war radio valves. With such components, he said, a receiving set could be produced, with speaker as a separate installation, to cover the palm of the hand. Another possibility, envisaged as the result of war research, was the use of radar beams as a means, of communication as well as detection. Successful experiments in this direction had already been carried out in the United States. Developments in the supersonic field provided a method of finding faults in cables. "Pulses" could be injected into the cable and these used both as receiving and transmitting stations for sounds inaudible to the human ear. Instruments checked the speed of these sounds against the known length of the cable and any discrepancy in calculation would indicate a fault. Great advances had also been made in di-electric heating, and these would have much impact on industry.