Short-wave Stations Research Articles

Increased Azimuth Resolution by Extrapolating the Antenna Array Aperture Function by Least Squares Linear Prediction Estimation Using Autoregressive Model Coefficients

Introduction. Short-wave stations for detecting airborne objects of the ionospheric type have a number of limited technical characteristics, one of which is their low azimuth resolution. This limitation is manifested in the impossibility to separately observe air objects in a group, the distance between which is less than 30 km (at an observation range of 2000 km). The technical characteristics under consideration can be improved by making changes to the dimensions of the receiving antenna array (AA); however, such changes lead, as a rule, to unjustified engineering and financial costs. In practice, space-time signal processing is carried out using conventional superresolution methods, which, although increasing the resolution of the station, decrease the rate of delivery of observation results to the operator due to an additional computational load. It is necessary to find a compromise between the maximum possible resolution indicator and the acceptable load on the system during signal processing.Aim. Analysis of the phase distribution of the incident wave scattered by objects at the AA aperture, as well as the azimuthal images of these objects when performing spacetime signal processing after extrapolating the AA aperture function by evaluating linear prediction using the least-squares method using autoregressive model coefficients.Materials and methods. Modelling of phase distributions at the AA aperture and azimuthal images of the observed objects was conducted in the MATLAB environment.Results. It is shown that the problem of increasing the azimuth resolution of a short-wave station for detecting air objects can be successfully solved using linear prediction based on the least-squares method using autoregressive model coefficients for the extrapolation of the AA aperture function. The results obtained during modelling were analysed using the example of group observation of air objects.Conclusion. The proposed approach for extrapolation of the AA aperture function for short-wave stations with large receiving AAs proved its relevance. The method proposed for increasing the resolution is characterized by a lower computational load, thereby being promising for practical application.

John Wheelwright, Sound Engineer

John Wheelwright, Sound Engineer Matthew Kilbane (bio) The life and poetry of John Wheelwright (1897–1940) testify to a subterranean link between two ostensibly very different cultural forms, the sonnet and radio broadcasting. To set about unfolding this surprising affiliation is also to assume the delightful responsibility of introducing readers to an idiosyncratic modern poet little-read these days, one for whom the sonnet and radio were objects of characteristically ingenious aesthetic investment. In the 1930s, Wheelwright’s artistic commitments to these sonorous technologies—first to the poetic form, and then to the communications medium—found their authorization in one-and-the-same deeply felt requirement: the desire to engineer a politically usable modernist poetry. In the final years of that decade, Wheelwright believed he had located at last, in the radical implications of radio broadcasting, a socialist horizon for modern verse. And yet his prior innovations in sonnet form so vividly betray the early stirrings of this quest that the largest stakes of these printed sonnets are most clearly apprehended in the light shed by his later career on the air. To read his sonnets well, in other words, we must read with an ear to radio. For that reason, it makes sense to begin in 1938 at the University Club in Boston’s Back Bay, where for several months that autumn, Wheelwright ran a weekly poetry program on the World Wide Broadcasting Foundation’s noncommercial shortwave station W1XAL (later WRUL). According to its funders at the Rockefeller Foundation, since 1935 W1XAL had been “the only station in the United States with national coverage . . . devoted exclusively to educational programming.” Transmitting 50,000 watts across four shortwave bands, [End Page 238] W1XAL was by the late 1930s a leading “university of the air,” disseminating “New England enlightenment” with the collaboration of faculty from Harvard and other universities to listeners across the country, and, increasingly in non-English languages, around the globe. To recite poetry into a W1XAL microphone was to hitch a ride on a powerful cultural apparatus, one that other entities like the Rockefeller Foundation, the Pan-American Foundation, and the federal government were simultaneously using, in Good Neighborly fashion, to secure US interests abroad. It is high testimony indeed to W1XAL’S soft power that in May 1938, when congressional efforts to establish a government-owned shortwave station “to counter the heavy-handed propaganda of the Nazi and Fascist competition” were squashed by major networks, the Daily Boston Globe could point with beaming hometown pride to W1XAL, already pouring a star-spangled “deluge of high-powered thought . . . into the ether for a world audience.” Given W1XAL’s educational mandate and its high-cultural affiliations, it’s hardly unusual that some of this “high-powered thought” issued from poets. It’s a good deal stranger to find a poet like Wheelwright in the mix. Those listeners tuning in from Peru, Trinidad, or New Zealand were doubtless unfamiliar with W1XAL’s poetry impresario, but Bostonians may have recognized Wheelwright, less perhaps from his poetry than from his minor cultural celebrity, the baffling figure he cut in a city so indelibly his milieu. “What Dublin was to Joyce,” recalled his friend Winfield Townley Scott, “Boston was to Wheelwright.” When remembered today, Wheelwright’s life is often recalled as a spectacle of contradictions. A direct descendent on his father’s side of the Antinomian rebel Rev. John Wheelwright (1592–1679), and on his mother’s side of the merchant Peter Chardon Brooks (1767–1849), once New England’s wealthiest man, even as his family’s finances deteriorated rapidly in the poet’s lifetime Wheelwright could boast of near-perfect Brahmin pedigree. But he also relished confounding this upper-crust exemplarity. As a young man grieving his father’s suicide, Wheelwright rejected the Puritan faith of his ancestors for a [End Page 239] very high church Anglicanism, and after his political radicalization in the early 1930s, set himself the task of squaring Anglican and apocryphal Christian traditions with a drop-dead serious dialectical materialism. He describes his third and final collection of poems, 1940’s Political Self-Portrait—which marshals St. Paul alongside Lenin, and references to the “Apostolic Orders” alongside exhortations...

Placing Radio in Sackville, New Brunswick

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's (CBC) site near Sackville, New Brunswick, exemplifies the material and spatial foundations of radio. Designed by the CBC's own architecture department and constructed in 1939, the station operated as a regional transmitter, broadcasting to the Maritimes of Canada and the northeastern United States, and visually and materially represented the CBC in this area. During World War II the Canadian government decided to establish a powerful shortwave station at the Sackville site, resulting in the erection of a much larger facility on the location of the earlier building and an innovative system of antennae on the surrounding marshlands in 1944–45. The recent dismantling of these towers, which marked the skyline for seven decades, has radically altered the built environment around Sackville and raises questions about the role of architecture and space in the history of radio.

Book Review: Radio Journalism in America: Telling the News in the Golden Age and Beyond, The Early Shortwave Stations: A Broadcasting History through 1945 and The Digital Television Revolution: Origins to Outcomes, by Jim Cox, Jerome S. Berg and Michael Starks

Three on Broadcasting Old and NewRadio Journalism in America: Telling the News in the Golden Age and Beyond. Jim Cox. Jefferson: McFarland, 2013. 272 pp. $45.00 pbk.The Early Shortwave Stations: A Broadcasting History through 1945. Jerome S. Berg. Jefferson: McFarland, 2013. 340 pp. $45.00 pbk.The Digital Television Revolution: Origins to Outcomes. Michael Starks. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. 247 pp. $85.00 hbk.Radio Journalism in America the first attempt in many years to tell the story of American radio news, a business that has now long been in decline. Indeed, many sta- tions provide no news at all, a thing once unheard of.As Cox makes clear in his introduction, his book is heavily slanted to the golden age encompassing the time period roughly extending from the early 1930s to the late 1950s. The emphasis on network-level news, chiefly the work of CBS and NBC with some comment on the lesser networks. The reason at least twofold: little survives of most local station programming (especially for the period on which he focuses), however, we have a fair record on the network level, especially of NBC, which years ago deposited its archives in the Library of Congress as well as the State Historical Society of Wisconsin.As television eviscerated network news starting around 1950, local stations (espe- cially in larger cities) took a more active role and some of that traced here as well- including the rise of early all news operations. At the end of the main text, Cox touches on the impact of television and later media and the role of the twenty-four-hour news cycle driven by social media and mobility.Cox writes in an engaging way with oodles of examples to illustrate key points. But do understand that he aiming at a popular audience of OTR (old-time radio) fans, not academics. With fourteen prior books on different aspects of radio programming to his credit from the same publisher, Cox a retired (though apparently not very!) college professor living in Kentucky.Of perhaps the most value for any readers of this journal will be more than 100 historically important radio news figures who are given mini-biographies (about a half page each) in the 50-page biographical dictionary that appears at the end.The Early Shortwave Stations: A Broadcasting History through 1945 the fourth and final volume in the author's invaluable history of shortwave radio broadcasting, all published by McFarland. Now retired from a Massachusetts legal career, Berg has long been active in shortwave broadcast circles. He clearly kept everything that passed by his transmitter.His latest volume builds on his first (On the Short Waves, 1923-1945, 2008) by care- fully assessing the stations on the air in the first two decades of such shortwave operations-from roughly 1925 to 1945. Arranged chronologically, Berg relates the stories of the many stations around the world (chiefly those in Europe and North America at first, and then other parts of the world by the late 1930s) that broadcast on a scheduled basis to a general audience. …

The early shortwave stations: a broadcasting history through 1945

The early shortwave stations: a broadcasting history through 1945

American Radio in China: International Encounters with Technology and Communications, 1919–41 by Michael Krysko (review)

Reviewed by: American Radio in China: International Encounters with Technology and Communications, 1919–41 by Michael Krysko Christopher H. Sterling (bio) American Radio in China: International Encounters with Technology and Communications, 1919–41. By Michael Krysko. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Pp. xiii+ 286. $85. This valuable study traces various American efforts to introduce U.S.-style radio telegraphy and broadcasting services into what became Nationalist China in the two decades prior to American entry into World War II. Melding the study of technological innovation, foreign affairs, and what is today dubbed cultural diplomacy, we learn why those efforts were doomed to failure long before Japan invaded China in 1937. This book began as the author’s dissertation (SUNY-Stony Brook, 2001) and is here revised for publication and a broader readership. Michael Krysko now teaches history at Kansas State University. Despite its two-nation title, this is really a study of a three-way national struggle involving the United States and China, but increasingly in the 1930s, Japan as well. The growing anti-American tone of Japan’s aggressive imperialism was easily as much of a reason for U.S. broadcasting’s failure as was chronic Chinese political instability and resistance to the messages transmitted. This tone is set in chapter 1 as the Federal Telegraph Co. tries to develop wireless links between the United States and China in the 1920s in the face of existing contracts held by Dutch and Japanese firms. Close government ties to commercial radio companies were evident in both the American and Japanese cases as they competed for the potentially huge Chinese market. But in a complex tale, Federal was forced out of the picture by 1929. Initiatives from the growing Radio Corporation of America (RCA) from 1928 (after it ceased supporting the Federal initiative) to 1937 are assessed in chapter 2. Here again, the unstable Chinese political situation made marketing dicey to say the least. Revenues barely met the costs of operating. Unwilling [End Page 504] to deal with growing Chinese nationalism, and in the face of an everstronger Japanese military presence, RCA withdrew in 1938. Chapters 3 (which originally appeared in this journal in October 2004) and 4 describe several broadcast efforts, many based in the international settlements of Shanghai. Attempts to broadcast faced growing Chinese resistance, especially after the Nationalist government took power in 1927. Amateur shortwave stations within and directed to China were impacted as well. Importing radio equipment, first officially banned in 1915 as “military contraband,” grew increasingly difficult. The particular role of religious broadcasters and the American Missionary Movement in Nationalist China is discussed in chapter 5. Made famous for later audiences in such films as The Sand Pebbles (1966), this was a period of committed, if too often naïve, religious drives to convert the rural “heathen” Chinese. As Krysko makes all too clear, many such broadcasts seemed to reinforce the expatriate ministers’ ideals (and link them to home) while being largely ignored by their intended Chinese listeners. Chapter 6 explores the role of news broadcast from expatriate transmitters (mainly in Shanghai) to a largely expat audience amid growing U.S.-Japanese conflicts over China on the eve of the Pacific war. Some broadcasts were jammed—a sign of things to come elsewhere. Many of the Americans in the period photos look positively smug—which at least suggests why they faced such problems trying to implant their ideas and ideals within a very different culture. For as Krysko sums it up: “American radio initiatives in China from 1919 to 1941 consistently underscored and antagonized the incompatible visions that Americans, Chinese, and Japanese held for the future of East Asia” (p. 188). Too often real American commercial or religious self-interest was gilded (the author’s term) in rhetoric about improving China’s way of life with Western ideas and technologies. And thus not surprisingly, these radio ventures were seen as just another Western attempt to dominate “backward” Asia. For both the details on who did what and when, and the conclusions as to why virtually nothing worked out for the American efforts, Krysko’s fascinating book is valuable in rescuing a time and place largely forgotten in...

Radio Free China

Often lost in recollections of World War II is the eight-year conflict fought between Japan and China. The war claimed 14 million Chinese lives and, for a time, China was nearly cut off from contact with the outside world. But Charles E. Stuart, a dentist in the sleepy California beach town of Ventura who was passionate about amateur radio and a staunch defender of the nationalist Kuomintang party that controlled China was able to broadcast its message to the outside world. Working from a bunker carved deep into the rocks beneath the wartime Chinese capital of Chongqing, a cadre of young freelance journalists and Chinese information ministry employees operated a shortwave station known as XGOY to broadcast free China’s news and information. Despite the fact that the station was constantly bombarded and Japanese forces jammed its signal, Doc Stuart’s mastery of shortwave radio was able to capture and record XGOY’s transmissions, while Stuart’s wife, Alacia Held, tirelessly transcribed their contents for delivery to Chinese officials and news organizations in the United States. Without Doc Stuart, free China may have been completely cut off from the outside world.

Nelson A. Rockefeller’s Office of Inter-American Affairs (1940-1946) and Record Group 229

Nelson A. Rockefeller’s Office of Inter-American Affairs (1940-1946) and Record Group 229

Europe Dithers Over Digital Radio

Because of unspecified technical glitches, Digital Radio Mondiale (DRM) technology failed to take off when it was first introduced in 2005. As the 2006 holiday season draws near, DRM advocates are once again optimistic about the prospects of the technology. DRM technology was originally developed as a non-proprietary digital technology for terrestrial broadcasting at frequencies of 30 megahertz and below, to supplement the satellite transmission technologies already in place. Although DRM's sound quality wont match that of true hi-fi, listeners will appreciate having shortwave and AM stations coming in at near-FM quality. More importantly, listeners will be able to get many more stations than before, and if they purchase a well-equipped radio, they will have user-friendly ways to identify and select programs of interest

Homeward Bound

This article explores KGEI, an American shortwave station established in 1939 to broadcast American programming to American listeners in East Asia. At its founding,KGEI (initially called W6XBE) captured widespread enthusiasm about radio's believed ability to promote beneficial cross-cultural and economic exchanges across international borders. In practice, however, KGEI did little to further that idealistic vision. Listener reaction to this station's entertainment and news programming indicates that it became a vehicle for Americans abroad to strengthen their connections to their distant homeland and solidify their expatriate identities as American citizens. As war approached, KGEI discouraged the very international exchange it was thought to promote. KGEI's story remains pertinent today as Americans continue to debate the promises and perils of growing global entertainment and news networks.

Calibrating Frequency Data Collection Systems Using Shortwave Radio Signals

The atomic-clock-derived audio tones broadcast on the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) shortwave station WWV are used to calibrate computer frequency data collection systems via Fast Fourier Transforms (FFT). Once calibrated, the data collection system can be used to accurately determine the audio signals used in several instructional physical chemistry laboratory experiments. This method can be applied to virtually any hardware-software configuration that allows adjustment of the apparent time scale (digitizing rate) of the recorded audio file.

Ethereal curtain. The biggest shortwave station in the world

Roughly 160 km north of Los Angeles, at the foot of the Sierra Nevada mountains, a giant antenna pours megawatts of power into the sky. The Voice of America's shortwave station at Delano is an isolated site making it ideal for experiments in super power with electromagnetic energy. Here, the author describes how VOA Delano was rebuilt in the last days of the Cold War to force its message past Soviet jamming by sheer power.

Artificial modification of the ionosphere by launches of rockets which insert space vehicles into orbit

Results are presented from vertical (ionogram) and inclined (frequency and signal strength variations of reference shortwave stations) probing of artificial ionospheric disturbances (AIDs) formed by powerful rockets during the active portion of their flight. Experimental data obtained over the course of several dozen rocket launches are generalized. The processes of evolution of an AID initiated by shock-acoustic waves are studied theoretically and experimentally, together with questions of shortwave radio scattering on such disturbances.

Some observations of the maximum frequency of radio communication over distances of 1000 km. and 2500 km.

Measurements have been made on the magnitude of the discrepancies to be expected in the practical application of maximum usable frequency (m.u.f.) calculations. The maximum usable frequencies for radio transmission over distances of 1000 km. and 2500 km. have been deduced from continuous observations at sunrise and sunset of the relative field strength of signals received at Slough from short-wave broadcasting stations located near Berlin and Moscow respectively. It was found that the discrepancy between mean calculated and observed values of m.u.f. amounted to - 3% for 1000 km. and to - 11% for 2500 km. From a critical examination of the results it is concluded that a large proportion of these errors, particularly for the distance 2500 km., was due to inadequate knowledge of the ionosphere characteristics near the mid-point of the trajectory, and that the real errors of the mean calculated values probably do not exceed ±2% at 1000 km. and ±3% at 2500 km.

International Telecommunications Union

In September, 1946, representatives of China, France, the United Kingdom, the United States and the USSR met at Moscow to consider questions of telecommunications. Particular attention was given to proposed reorganization of the International Telecommunications Union in order to provide for an Administrative Council, a permanent Secretariat and a Central Frequency Registration Board. This revision was to be undertaken at the World Telecommunications Meeting, seheduled for July, 1947, at which time the Telecommunications Convention of Madrid (1932) would be amended to provide for the new structure. Matters relating to the improvement of the organization of radio communications and re-allocation of radio frequencies to maritime, aeronautical and long distance land services were considered, while attention was also directed to proposals for a new frequency allocation for various services. Organization of international telephone and telegraph communications and the proposed revision of telegraph and telephone regulations were studied. It was also agreed that a World High Frequency Broadcasting Conference Should be called in the fall of 1947 to assign frequencies to short-wave stations and that a World High Frequency Broadcasting Organization should be established in order to facilitate the interchange of short-wave broadcast programs between countries. The Conference further recommended that an Administrative Radiocommunications Conference be convened on May 15, 1947 and that a World Conference on telephone and telegraph communications be called in 1948.

Ionosphere Storm Effects in the E Layer

DURING the course of an ionosphere storm, and more particularly near its beginning, I have frequently observed that the signals from short-wave stations which are situated within the skip-zone are subject to a form of distortion which is peculiar to them alone. This is quite different from the 'flutter' and other types of fading to which signals from more distant stations often become subject during an ionosphere storm, and it takes the form of a partially rhythmic note of low audio-frequency, producing the effect of a distinct and pronounced 'rumble' upon the received signal. The intensity of the 'rumble' varies directly with the wave-length of the received station, and also, apparently, directly with its power and the directivity of its aerial system. It is particularly noticeable in Britain upon the signals from the B.B.C.'s high-powered short-wave stations. I have observed this effect to begin very early in an ionosphere storm, the signals from stations within the skip-zone often being affected in this way before those from more distant stations begin to show any signs of deterioration due to the storm.

Short-wave station in New Brunswick

Short-wave station in New Brunswick

A Five-Band Receiver for Automobile Service

Many sections of the United States are without adequate daylight radio program service from the standard broadcast stations. These areas in the main are located in the southern part of the country, where the static level is higher and continues for a longer portion of the year, in the Rocky Mountain states where radio stations are scarce, and in New England. Many of these areas contain resorts and represent the most popular recreational areas in the country. Since automobile receivers are mobile, this particular situation becomes serious for the touring public. At the present time there are some 30,000,000 registered automobiles in the United States of which 27 per cent are equipped with radio receivers. One possibility of reception in the areas not now adequately served with broadcast stations lies in the use of short waves in the international short-wave band. This paper describes a receiver intended for this type of service. It is believed that the development of this receiver has opened up markets not heretofore available in this field. It is suggested that an economical approach to coverage of the large areas not now served by broadcast stations might be accomplished through the employment of present domestic international short-wave stations with or without directional antennas for this purpose. These stations might be operated at frequencies not usable at the time for intercontinental broadcasting.

Broadcasting in India

IN Electrotechnics, the journal of the Electrical Engineering Society of the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, of April, we learn that the Government of India is making progress with the construction of broadcasting stations. In December 1937, the 5-kw. medium-wave transmitter at Lahore and the 10-kw. short-wave station at Delhi commenced operation. The short-wave station at Bombay-also of 10 kw.-started to radiate early in February, and Lucknow early in April. The 0-25-kw. medium-wave and the 10-kw. short-wave transmitters at Madras were put into regular service from the middle of June. The Trichinopoly 5-kw. medium-wave station is expected to commence operation at an early date. Several Provincial Governments have already distributed a small number of receivers for group listening in villages. The broadcasting authorities of the Central Government have under way a programme for installing 120 receivers in as many villages in the Delhi Province. At the present moment, the broadcasting service touches but a fringe of the population and the programmes are of limited appeal. The element of novelty and wonder is still the dominating factor in reception amongst all classes of listeners. Listening for pure entertainment and enjoyment, oblivious to the mechanism, is as yet virtually non-existent in India. Until the present uncritical listening gives place to the habit of turning to radio for enjoyment, such questions as the acoustical requirements of studios and the special requirements demanded by Indian music and its technique can receive no adequate and satisfactory answer. In this journal, Mr. K. Sreenivasan's thoughtful address on the design of studios for broadcasting is published.

Solar Activity and Radio Communication

IN the speech made by the Postmaster-General, Major Tryon, at a luncheon of the Newcastle-on-Tyne Chamber of Commerce, he announced that the Post Office, after consultations With the American telephone authorities, is constructing a special radio receiving station to combat the intense sunspot activity which is expected to interfere seriously with world-radio communications in 1940. The long distance international radio-telephone services are mainly operated on short wave-lengths, and are found to be particularly susceptible to serious interference at periods of great sunspot activity. This has been proved by the graphs at short-wave reception stations, and the connexion between solar flares causing sunspots and fade-outs and magnetic disturbances has been clearly established. Approximately, they appear to follow an eleven-year cycle, a disturbance being due in 1940, and owing to the enormous increase in the long-distance telephone traffic, engineers are doing their utmost to prevent disorganization of the traffic at that period.