"Mac," I said over the telephone, "would you get one of your operators to ring the B.B.C. in Bush House (from where the World Service originates) and ask them if they have any plans for a broadcast by King George of the Hellenes." I immediately tuned one of my receivers to the frequency of the London telegraph link, which was carrying high speed morse traffic. In a short while the tape was stopped and an operator, using a hand key, asked my question slowly in plain language, and then the tape was put on again. I waited anxiously for about five minutes. Again the tape was stopped, a single letter 'R' (for received) was sent by hand, and traffic returned to normal. My telephone rang; it was McTaggert. "Nothing doing, old boy. The B.B.C. have no plans for such a broadcast." I thanked him and looked at my watch. It was 11.25, just 25 minutes had elapsed. I called my boss and told him the answer to his question. "How do you know?" he asked. "I asked the B.B.C., sir." "You what?" he shouted at me. "Don't you know there's a war on? I'm coming to see you." He stormed into my office and demanded an explanation, so I told him what I had done. "Good God, what is this going to cost us?". "Nothing at all, sir. There is no provision for anything like that in the operating procedure". "Then I must write a letter to Cable & Wireless to thank them." I thought to myself, why don't you write a letter to Norman and thank him for having friends in the right places. But I kept my mouth shut.
My equipment and my staff of 20 men and 5 girls were housed on the 6th floor of the Metohikon Tamion building. When ELAS marched on Athens, there was constant firing, shelling and bombing throughout the 24 hours of the day and night for three or four weeks. The bombing was by light aircraft of the R.A.F. on the ELAS positions in the suburbs and Beaufighter aircraft straffing them with 20 mm cannon. Then ELAS set up a 75 mm gun in the northern suburb of Aharnon, and started hitting us back. When we had received several hits on and around our H.Q. building, I was ordered to move down to the second floor, to safer accommodation. I extended some of my antenna down-leads, and resumed normal service. One of our assignments was to transcribe, every day, what was said in the Greek transmissions of nineteen different countries about the situation in Greece, and to produce a daily summary in English, for the benefit of the Press Department.
In the summer of 1945 we began having interference on GIN, a station of the British Post Office which operated around 10MHz, transmitting a REUTER news service for Europe on the German Hellschreiber (Hell printer) system. This was a sort of very course TV picture of 49 dots, seven by seven. The letter 'I' for instance came out as seven dots vertically, and the letter 'T' just had another six dots across the top. The letters were very crude but readable, provided there was no interference, or crashes of static. The interference, which made our tape quite unreadable, used to start around 3 in the afternoon and fade slowly away about three hours later, when the tape became readable again. I decided I would try and identify the source. All I had in the way of recorders were office-type Dictaphones using wax cylinders. I removed the three weights from the speed governor, and the cylinder spun round like mad. I managed to record for about three minutes and when I played the recording on another machine at normal speed the cylinder yielded up its secret—it was high speed morse traffic in 5-figure cypher. I typed it all out and noticed that some of the paragraphs began with the letter 'B'. I subsequently found out it was a characteristic of stations carrying Royal Air Force traffic. I sent my text to London, and three weeks later the interference stopped. It was more than a month later that I was told what had happened. The transmitter causing the problem was located in Kandy, Ceylon. It operated with a rhombic antenna beamed to R.A.F. Calcutta. Its frequency was only 500 Hz away from GIN. The department which had allocated the frequency never imagined that it could possibly cause interference in Europe to the REUTER news service. But sunspot cycle 20, which was a good one, had decided otherwise.
In 1947 I was transferred to the British Police Mission to Greece, which was headed by Sir Charles Wickham. My principal duty was to interpret for Sir Charles, and for his second in command Colonel Prosser. My friend Mr Eleftheriou at the Ministry issued me with a special licence and I came on the air again using my pre-war callsign SV1RX. When the Police Mission closed down in 1948 I came to England and got the callsign G3FNJ which I have now held for over 41 years.
8. Wartime Broadcasts from Cairo.
Elias Eliascos, a former teacher of English at Athens College (a joint U.S./Greek institution) described to me how he came to be a news-reader at Radio Cairo in 1941 together with his brother Patroclos.
"When Hitler declared war on Greece and after the collapse of the front in northern Greece and in Albania, my brother Patroclos and I were summoned to the British Embassy in Athens and told that owing to our close ties with the British Council (of Cultural Relations), it would not be prudent for us to remain in Athens or even Greece after the German army had occupied the capital. We were told that we would be helped to leave Greece together with the British Embassy staff, the staff of the British Council and all the British nationals in Greece.
"The British Consul-General provided us with the necessary documents for my brother and me to board the last evacuation vessel sailing from the port of Piraeus. It was the s/s 'Corinthia' which left Piraeus on the 18th of April 1941. It happened to be Good Friday according to the Greek-Orthodox calendar. About five days later Hitler's army marched into Athens.
"The ship was packed and the British Embassy staff carried most of the Embassy files with them. One of the passengers was David Balfour who was the vicar of the little chapel attached to the Evangelismos Hospital, an impressive tall figure of a man sporting a large black beard. Although he had been ordained as a priest of the Greek-Orthodox Church he was a British national and it was widely rumoured that he was an agent of British Intelligence. His official title was 'Father Dimitrios'. He was also the spiritual father of the Greek Royal family. I refer to David Balfour because recently the 'ATHENIAN' which is the only English language magazine in Athens, in its issue dated January 1988, published a feature article about him, saying that even before the Germans had entered Athens he had shaved off his beard and divested himself of his clerical robes.
"I can say quite categorically that this was not true. When the 'Corinthia' sailed he was still 'Father Dimitrios' and in fact he officiated at a Resurrection service while we were still at sea. On the voyage we carried out lifeboat drill on two occasions, once when it was thought that there was a U-boat in the vicinity, and another time when an aircraft flew overhead which turned out to be friendly. I shall never forget how I was moved with emotion when I saw the women getting into the boats, most of them carrying babies or children in their arms, calmly singing hymns in low voices.
"Some time later I met David Balfour again in Cairo, and this time he HAD shaved off his beard, and he was wearing the uniform of a Major in the Intelligence Corps which is a regular unit of the British army."
Eliascos said he would like to quote a little more from the sensational article written by J.M. Thursby in the 'ATHENIAN'.
"Several years before war was even declared, the Abwehr (German military intelligence), along with the Nazi civilian secret service, had highly trained undercover agents operating in Greece. With consummate skill they had catalogued all military and civil information that could be useful to the Third Reich, and organised spy rings throughout the country. As war became more and more inevitable, it also became increasingly imperative that Britain and other anti-fascist countries should gain specific and accurate knowledge of these operations.
"During this period a monk, who had embraced the Orthodox faith inWarsaw, arrived from Poland via Mount Athos, to join the monastery ofPendeli, just outside Athens. According to his biographer JohnFreeman, his registration at Pendeli reads,
Cell 102 Serial number 75Secular name David BalfourEcclesiastic name DimitriPlace of birth EnglandAge 35Inscribed order of His Holiness the Archbishop ofAthens.Coming from the Russian Church.Archbishopric ordinance number 3197 of 9 May 1936."
"Father Dimitri was obviously a well-educated and very courteous person. He had studied in various parts of Europe and spoke several languages fluently. These included ancient, Byzantine and modern Greek, not to mention colloquial 'mangika' (slang). When a vacancy arose for a priest to serve the chapel at Evangelismos Hospital in central Athens, who should be more suitable for this post in the heart of the select neighbourhood of Kolonaki than the well-educated, well-bred, charming and conscientious Father Dimitri."
(David Balfour died aged 86 on the 11th of October 1989.)
"Anyway, let me continue my story of the 'Corinthia trip", Eliascos went on. "We celebrated Easter on board and when we arrived at Alexandria some of us were sent on to Cairo and others went to India. My brother and I presented ourselves at the offices of the Press Department of the British Embassy in the Garden City. We were received by the well-known Byzantine scholar Stephen Runciman who was in charge of all foreign language broadcasts directed to Europe, that is, the Balkans, Yugoslavia, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, Poland and several others. One of our colleagues was Lawrence Durrell who later became the famous author of many successful books like the banned 'Black Book', 'Bitter Lemons', 'The Alexandria Quartet', 'Prospero's Cell' and others. But at that time, he used to entertain us daily with a fresh episode about his Aunt Agatha with the wooden leg."
Eliascos continued: "My brother Patroclos and I were told that we would be attached to the section producing the broadcasts in Greek directed towards occupied Greece, acting as translators, editors and newsreaders. The Head of this section was George Haniotis the sports editor of the Athens newspaper 'Elefthero Vima' who used to sign his sporting articles 'GEO'. Under him was the well-known literary figure of Dimitri Fotiadis, who died in October 1988.
"When the broadcasts began early in May 1941 I was the principal newsreader. Later when Haniotis was posted to the Greek Embassy in Washington D.C. as Press Attache, my brother was appointed Section Head. At that time the Prime Minister of the Greek government in exile was Emmanouil Tsouderos, a former Director of the Bank of Greece. The foreign language broadcasts from Radio Cairo were under the over-all control of the Political Warfare Executive (P.W.E.) of the British Ministry of Information. Later, in conjunction with the Americans, the title of the unit was changed to Psychological Warfare Branch (P.W.B.)
"Every evening we had two broadcasts, at 7.30 and 10.30 pm, which went out on the medium wave transmitter of Radio Cairo at Abu Zabal, run by the E.S.B. (Egyptian State Broadcasting). The transmissions in eleven foreign languages were also relayed by three short wave transmitters, two belonging to the telegraph company Cable & Wireless (callsigns SUV & SUW), and an experimental transmitter of 7.5 kilowatts belonging to a British army signals unit, with the odd callsign JCJC, operated by young corporal Rowley Shears G8KW, a radio amateur friend of Norman Joly.
"The Greek broadcasts began in May 1941 and went on to the end ofJanuary 1945.
"During this period many important personalities broadcast fromStudio 3, which was also used by well-known war correspondents of theB.B.C., the N.B.C. and many other news organisations. The people ofoccupied Greece were addressed by Mr Tsouderos, Crown Prince Paul ofGreece, Sofoclis Venizelos, son of the famous Cretan politicianEleftherios Venizelos who had played a leading role in the politicalfortunes of modern Greece, and Panayiotis Kanellopoulos Minister forWar. After the naval mutiny in the port of Alexandria AdmiralVoulgaris spoke to the officers and naval ratings of the Greek RoyalNavy."
Eliascos described in detail the negotiations of the Lebanon Conference which resulted in the appointment of George Papandreou (father of Andreas Papandreou who was recently Prime Minister), as the new Prime Minister of the Coalition government in exile. He can be seen at the famous R.C.A velocity microphone type 44BX which was used throughout World War II and many years after. This ribbon type microphone had a very large and heavy permanent magnet embodied in the design and must have weighed about 1,000 times more than a modern electret lapel microphone.
"I must explain that these war-time broadcasts were carried out in the presence of a Switch Censor who sat on the other side of the news reader's desk and was able to turn off the microphone in a split second if it ever became necessary. During the three and a half years of the broadcasts this was done only on one special occasion and certainly not because the newsreader had gone berserk or something like that. The Chief Censor was Professor Eric Sloman who had been the first Director of the Police Academy in Kerkyra (Corfu). Then there were censors for the eleven languages used in these broadcasts. The censor for the Polish broadcasts was the Countess Walevska, grand-daughter of Napoleon's lady friend. The Countess was a rather large lumbering woman who always came into the studio carrying lots of parcels. One evening she came in and sat in an armchair on the other side of the studio to wait her turn for the Polish broadcast which followed the Greek. As I was reading the news bulletin I suddenly became conscious of a regular ticking noise in the headphones I was wearing. I made a sign to Mr Joly who was acting as switch censor at the time, and he got up and walked over to the Countess. He whispered in her ear and asked her what was in her hand bag. The Countess blushed and replied that she had just collected her alarm clock from the watchmaker. I don't know if any sharp-eared listener had heard the ticking and thought that we had a time bomb in the studio.
"Having mentioned my good friend Mr Norman Joly I must record that he was the technical supervisor for the foreign language broadcasts, handling such things as wavelengths for the short wave relays, training the newsreaders (of whom there must have been over 30) and acting as studio manager and switch censor for some of the languages which he knew.
"A regular broadcaster in our studio was Francis Noel-Baker who later became a Labour member of Parliament in the British House of Commons, like his father. The Noel-Baker family are well-known in Greece because for several generations they have owned a large property on the island of Euboea (Evia in Greek). Francis speaks fluent Greek, and his mother was related to Lord Byron. In recent years he has switched his allegiance to the Conservative Party led by his personal friend Margaret Thatcher.
"Major Patrick Leigh-Fermor the writer who had kidnapped Major-General Heinrich Kreipe in Crete and spirited him away to Allied headquarters in Cairo, came to our studio and described how this audacious operation had been carried out by him and Captain William Stanley Moss, ex-Coldstream Guards, with the considerable assistance of the Cretan resistance movement partisans.
"Purely by coincidence, it was the Greek news bulletin from Cairo which first announced to the world General Montgomery's victory over General Rommel at Alamein. I must explain that during a broadcast the two doors leading into the studio were kept closed and an armed officer of the Military Police sat outside (in civilian clothes) to prevent anyone from entering for any reason whatsoever. I was in the middle of reading the news when suddenly, without warning, the inner door opened and a young despatch-rider, still wearing his crash helmet, walked in waving a piece of paper. Mr Joly immediately switched off the microphone and asked the young man what he thought he was doing. 'Most Immediate sir', he said. (This is the army's highest priority classification.) 'To be broadcast at once.'
"Mr Joly handed the document to me and I saw it was written in English. Taking a deep breath I began translating the text into Greek, with some excitement and trepidation owing to the difference in syntax between the two languages. Forty-six years later Mr Joly gave me the identical sheet of paper, which he had kept as a souvenir. It is printed here in full. At the Editorial offices, where they were monitoring the newscast, they thought I had gone out of my mind, because the communique had not reached them yet. When they tuned in to the short wave service of the B.B.C. they heard the communique read out more than an hour after our Greek broadcast. A world scoop, if ever there was one. Years later when I returned to Athens, many of my friends told me they had heard the first broadcast of the thrilling bulletin and they could still remember the excitement in my voice.
"The Greek section was the first to inaugurate the transmission of personal messages. Many people were escaping from occupied Greece in sailing boats across to the shores of Asia Minor, ending up in the Middle East, mostly in Cairo. They had no means of advising their relatives and friends in Greece that they had survived the perilous journey. We used to broadcast pre-arranged messages like 'John informs Mary that he has arrived at the village'.
"As I mentioned above, George Papandreou came to our studio and spoke to the people in Greece about the formation of the government of National Unity, which had been agreed by all parties meeting in the Lebanon, including the representatives of the Partisans operating in the mountains of Greece. Papandreou and the government in exile moved to Naples in Italy for a short period and then returned to Athens on October 12th 1944 for the Liberation.
"Finally, I would like to say that in the dark days before Montgomery's breakthrough at Alamein, when it was quite on the cards that General Rommel might take Cairo, Mr Joly and I were sent to Jerusalem to make arrangements for the foreign language broadcasts to be continued from there. Fortunately the situation changed and we were recalled to Cairo, where we arrived just in time for me to broadcast the historic communique announcing the victory at Alamein, which marked the turning point of the war in the Middle East.
1. The first broadcasting stations of the world.
Speech was first transmitted for reception by the general public from Washington D.C. in 1915 when Europe was still at war. During 1916 the first 'broadcasting' station in the world began regular transmissions from a New York suburb.
In 1919 Dr. Frank Conrad, then Assistant Chief Engineer of the Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company, set up, in his own garage in Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania, a 75-watt transmitter (8XK) from which he broadcast musical entertainment for other radio enthusiasts. This was the first continued scheduled broadcasting in history. The Westinghouse Company realised the potential value of Conrad's work and built KDKA, the first regular commercial broadcasting station in the world, which began its career by announcing the results of the Harding-Cox election returns on the November 2nd 1920.
The first broadcasting station in Europe was PCGG which began transmitting on November 6th 1919 from the Hague in Holland. Hanso Steringa Idzerda, a 35 year old engineer, obtained the first licence granted in Europe for the transmission of music and speech for general reception, as opposed to the wireless telegraphy stations which had been operating point to point services. From the end of 1919 to 1924 this station transmitted a series of musical programmes three times a week called 'The Hague Concerts'. The original wavelength of 670 metres was later changed to 1,150 metres.
At that time most of the people who heard these concerts would have been using headphones and they would not have been very critical about the quality of the sounds they were hearing compared to the magical novelty of snatching voices and music apparently out of thin air. This historic transmitter can be seen in the museum of the Dutch Postal Services in the Hague.
The first transmissions of speech and music in England were made from Chelmsford, Essex, when a 15kW transmitter of the Marconi Company began regular transmissions in February of 1920.
In the summer of 1924 the world's greatest radio companies—British Marconi, German Telefunken, French Radio Telegraphie and American R.C.A.—met in London to discuss transatlantic communications. The learned gentlemen all agreed that the Atlantic could only be spanned by ultra-long waves of 10,000 to 20,000 metres, which would require the use of hundreds of kilowatts of power and receivers as large as a trunk, not to speak of antennas more than a mile long. Dr. Frank Conrad, who was also present at the conference, had brought with him a small short wave receiver less than a foot square. When he connected it to a curtain rod as an antenna the faint but clear voices of his assistants in the U.S.A. were heard from nearly four thousand miles away. With this spectacular demonstration he administered the deathblow to all plans for high power ultra-long-wavelength transmitters, and from then on the commercial companies concentrated their efforts on developing equipment for international communications on the short waves.
With present-day electronic news gathering and world-wide satellite links, the problems faced by broadcasting organisations fifty years ago when transmitting programmes which did not originate in a studio were thought to be very complex. In the B.B.C. Handbook for 1928 there was an article entitled 'Outside Broadcast Problems' which said,
"Work outside the studio is often the most difficult that the broadcast engineer can be asked to undertake; not so much from a technical as from a practical point of view. Very often he has to take his apparatus to some place he has never seen before, set up his amplifiers in most awkward positions, test his lines to the studio, decide on his microphone placings and run out the wiring in the space of an hour or so, with little previous experience to guide him. It is in fairly echoey halls, theatres and churches that the majority of outside broadcasts take place. For example, a sermon preached in a church would be intelligible probably to the whole of the congregation. But to render it intelligibly on a loud-speaker, the microphone would have to be, say, not more than ten feet from the speaker. In broadcasting a play from a theatre, when the speakers are moving about, the only way of dealing with the problem is to use several microphones and a mixing device which enables the engineer to change silently from one microphone to another, or to combine them in varying proportions. Some rapid switching may sometimes be necessary.
"Even with good microphones and amplifiers the engineer in the field may often experience difficulties with the lines connecting the outside point to the studio. The majority of such lines do not transmit the higher frequencies adequately, especially the longer ones. The problems become immense when European simultaneous broadcasts are attempted. Experiments on the continental wireless link have done no more than reveal its unreliability. The undersea telephone line, however, does not give either good or even intelligible quality of speech if it is longer than a couple of hundred miles, and it is quite unusable for the transmission of a musical programme.
"The B.B.C. has been the first in the world to exploit Simultaneous Broadcasting to its fullest advantage for a national system, and thanks to the co-operation of the Post Office engineers, it is possible to pick up a programme wherever it may take place within the British Isles and radiate it simultaneously from all distribution centres.
"Looking ahead still further and assuming that the wireless will supplement the wire line link, there is no reason why a simultaneous broadcast of something of fundamental importance to the whole civilised world should not take place some time in the future."
In a book entitled "Radio Goes to War" published by Faber & Faber in 1943, Charles J. Rolo wrote,
"Radio went to war on five continents shortly after the Nazi Party came to power in Germany. In nine years it has been streamlined from a crude propaganda bludgeon into the most powerful single instrument of political warfare the world has ever known. Spreading with the speed of light, it carries the human voice seven times round the globe in one second. When Hitler makes a speech in the Kroll Opera House in Berlin, listeners in America and the whole world hear his words by short wave even before his own immediate audience hears them. Radio speaks in all tongues to all classes. All pervasive, it penetrates beyond national frontiers, spans the walls of censorship that bar the way to the written word, and seeps through the fine net of the Gestapo. It reaches the illiterate and the informed, the young and the old, the civilian and the soldier in the front line, the policy makers and the inarticulate masses. So great is the importance of radio to-day that the seizure of a defeated nation's transmitters has become one of the primary spoils of war."
In Greece, broadcasting was started in the northern city ofThessaloniki (Salonica) by the pioneer of Balkan broadcasting ChristosTsingeridis, in 1928. A museum in that city tells the full story ofthe first broadcasting station in the whole of the Balkans.
Broadcasting in the capital, Athens, started on March 25th 1938 when a second-hand 15 kW Telefunken transmitter was put into operation in the suburb of Liosia. The centre-fed T antenna was supported between two pylons of 85 metres (279 feet). In 1944 when the German army was pulling out of Athens they tried to blow the the pylons up but one of them remained standing at a crazy angle, because one of the explosive charges had been placed incorrectly.
2. Avlis 'The Voice of Hellas'.
The 5th Programme of the Greek broadcasting service (Elliniki Radiophonia) is transmitted from the short wave transmitting centre at Avlis, about 70 kilometres north of Athens. The station was put into service in 1972 and has two 100KW Marconi short wave transmitters and a veritable forest of antennas covering 1,100 acres, arranged in three lines to cover the desired directions, as can be seen on the great circle map. The pylons supporting the 6 MHz arrays are truly impressive at 328 feet. Each line has eight separate antennas for the 6, 7, 9, 11, 15, 17 and 21 MHz broadcasting bands.
Each antenna consists of two curtains with a total of 8 horizontal dipoles. The dipoles are all fed by open wire feeders which can be remotely switched to enable radiation in two directions 180 degrees apart. There are also three curtains for the 11 metre band (26 MHz) which may be put into service during sunspot cycle 22 if the M.U.F. allows it.
For transmissions to neighbouring countries like Cyprus, Turkey, the Balkans and the countries of the Middle East, there are two rotatable log periodic antennas with a high angle of vertical radiation (45 degrees) and a wide angle of 32 degrees in the horizontal plane.
The remotely controlled switching centre allows each of the two transmitters to be connected to any one of the 23 antennas. Electromechanical protection circuits ensure that a transmitter can only be connected to an antenna that is tuned to the same frequency. The change of antennas and transmitting frequencies is made during the ten-minute interval between programmes, which always begin on the hour, preceded by the now familiar signature tune of a shepherd playing his flute with the tinkling of sheep-bells in the background, recorded in 1936, followed by the Greek National Anthem.
The special programmes of news and features originate in the broadcasting headquarters in Athens and go on the air throughout the 24 hours of the day in Greek, English and many foreign languages. Reports of reception are welcome and should be addressed to K.E.B.A., Avlis, Greece. (The Greek initials stand for short wave transmitting centre.)
But Avlis was 'in the news' long before the Greek broadcasting service decided to install its short wave transmitters there. In ancient times a great fleet of ships had been assembled in the harbour there, ready to set sail for Troy, following the abduction of the beautiful Helen of Sparta by Paris, the young Prince of Troy. But there had been no wind for many weeks, and the sea was dead calm.
Agamemnon, the King of Mycenae, who had himself contributed over 100 ships to the fleet, decided to consult his Seer. As was the custom, the Seer slaughtered a young lamb and scrutinised its entrails. He then announced that the wind would come up if Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia on the Altar of Sacrifice. King Agamemnon despatched a messenger to Mycenae (no VHF repeater being available in those days) to tell his wife Queen Klitemnestra to send their daughter Iphigenia to Avlis (Aulis). The King said he was planning to marry her off to Achilles, the most eligible bachelor of the day. When poor Iphigenia arrived she was quickly placed on the Sacrificial Altar—and had her pretty throat slit.
However, there seems to be another version to the end of the story. Just before the human sacrifice was due to be made Artemis (Diana, the famous Goddess of Hunting) sent a small deer which was placed on the altar instead of the girl. Iphigenia was secretly spirited away to Taurida, in northern Greece, and put in charge of Diana's temple there.
(This story is the subject of a well-known classical Greek play.)
Historical note on the Marconi-Stille steel tape recording machine.
At the beginning of the century Professor Poulsen, one of radio's earliest pioneers, discovered that a magnetic impression could be made on a moving length of wire which remained on the wire even after it had been rolled up. He used his machine to record the Morse code only, that is magnetism 'on' and 'off'. In 1924 Dr. Stille in Germany made a machine which could record sounds. The B.B.C. sent two engineers to Berlin, and after a demonstration they offered to buy the machine, but in the end they returned to England empty-handed.
In 1931 Mr Louis Blattner managed to buy a machine and bring it to England. He called it the Blattnerphone. By this time Dr. Stille had replaced Poulsen's wire with a flat steel tape 6 mm wide. Each reel of tape could only accommodate 20 minutes of recording. There was a constant and heavy background hiss, due to the inherent quality of the steel tape itself.
Stille Inventions Ltd. joined forces with Marconi's Wireless Telegraph Co. Ltd. to produce, with the close co-operation of the B.B.C. Research Department, the Marconi-Stille machine which was put into use in 1934. The tape width was reduced to 3 mm and the thickness to only 0.08 of a millimetre. In order to secure the reproduction of the higher audio frequencies, it was found necessary to run the tape at a rate of 90 metres per minute past the recording and reproducing heads. This meant that the length of tape required for a half-hour's programme was nearly 3 kilometres!
4. Brief description of the ribbon or velocity microphone.
George Papandreou, Greek Prime Minister of the war-time government of National Unity in exile, is seen with the famous ribbon microphone developed by the B.B.C. in 1934. This microphone (R.C.A. designation 44BX) consists of a ribbon of corrugated aluminium foil only 0.0002 of an inch thick suspended vertically in a very intense but narrow magnetic field. When sounds vibrate the ribbon extremely low alternating voltages are developed at the ends of the ribbon, which has a very low impedance of only 0.15 ohm, necessitating the use of a step-up transformer of 1:45 turns ratio very close to it. The frequency response is 20 to 16,000 Hz. A drawback is that the ribbon can be blown out of the magnetic gap by sudden puffs of air when a speaker gets too close to the microphone, so the casing is lined with several layers of chiffon which let in the sounds but not the air. Without its base the ribbon microphone weighs 4 kilograms, nearly 9 lbs.
5. An outstanding antenna system designed by Rex G4JUJ for Phase III amateur satellite communication.
The up-link section comprises four 88-element Jaybeam multi-beamswhich provide a power gain of 225.
The two down-link 8 element yagis are each fitted with a small D.C. motor directly coupled to a 9 inch length of M5 brass studding rotating inside a block of PTFE linked to a push rod which can move the antennas 75 degrees both sides of the vertical position, either in unison or in opposite directions. This system provides infinitely variable polarisation which optimises the down-link signal at any instant.
6. The saga of H.H.M.S. ADRIAS
While fighting in the area of the Dodecanese Islands on the night of the 22nd October 1943 the destroyer ADRIAS (L67) was seriously damaged by a mine but refused to sink.
Under the command of Commander John Toumbas the ship covered a distance of approximately 700 nautical miles, reaching the port of Alexandria in Egypt on the eve of the feast of Saint Nicholas, the patron saint of all seamen.
The Greek Minister of the Navy Sofoclis Venizelos, and the British Admiral in command of the Royal Navy in the Eastern Mediterranean, provided an honorary escort for the brave little ship that had refused to die. A few months later the snub-nosed L67 joined the fleet of 100 vessels of all sorts which sailed to Greece for the Liberation.
The photographs were taken by the author (with the exception of the damaged L67) who travelled back to Greece on H.H.M.S. AVEROF in the same convoy. The photograph of L84, a similar type destroyer to ADRIAS shows how much of her bows was blown off by the collision with the mine.
(H.H.M.S. stands for His Hellenic Majesty's Ship.)
7. German sabotage at the Cable & Wireless station at Pallini, Greece, in World War II.
As the German army was pulling out of Greece in October 1944 its engineers carried out extensive sabotage to installations of a strategic value. At Pallini, not far from Athens, an attempt was made to destroy the transmitter hall by dropping one of the antenna towers onto it, but the equipment was not damaged.
They were more successful at the Royal Navy transmitting site at Votanikos. Here they tried to destroy six 300 foot tubular masts. One remained standing and also the lower part of another. All the test gear in the lab was thrown out of a second floor window and burnt. I was acting as official photographer for my unit at the time. When I walked into a small store room I saw all the equipment had been thrown off the shelves on to the floor, but appeared to be intact. I spotted a box of brand new packed German navy morse keys and decided the time had come for me to acquire a small war trophy of my own. As I bent down to pick up a key, I was horrified to see two large sticks of gelignite perched perilously on the edge of a shelf. The explosive was tied with white ribbon, with a weight attached to the other end. I froze to the spot. Gingerly I lifted my trophy out of the box and began to walk slowly backwards, being very careful not to knock anything over. I breathed a sigh of relief when I was out of the room and immediately alerted the engineers who came and defused the booby trap. So this book might never have been written thanks to the German army.
At the Athens broadcasting station transmitter site at Liosia my unit erected a small temporary 'T' antenna which allowed the station to come on the air again, but a short time later, when the ELAS guerrillas overran the area they began using the transmitter to broadcast their own view of events. We provided the broadcasting authority with a BC 610 mobile transmitter installed next to the Parliament building in the centre of town, using the same frequency of 610 KHz. Listeners in Cairo couldn't understand what was going on when one moment they heard an official government announcement and a little later a war communique issued by the Communist guerrillas.
8. Over-the-horizon or Ionospheric HF Radar—OTHR
As mentioned briefly in Chapter 1, it was in April 1976 that the then Soviet Union first unleashed a diabolical noise on the HF bands which caused widespread interference to all broadcasting and telecommunication services between 6 and 20 MHz. On the first day the "knock-knock-knock" went on continuously for over ten hours. Radio amateurs, who were among the services that suffered from the interference, soon came to call this noise "the woodpecker". By rotating their beams when tuned to the 14 MHz band they established that the transmissions appeared to originate from the vicinity of the town of Gomel in the U.S.S.R.
The governments of many countries world-wide immediately protested to Moscow, and all they got in reply was a brief statement that the U.S.S.R. was carrying out "an experiment".
The reason for the very strong on/off pulses was probably because, at first, the Russians were using existing radar antennas which permit the transmitting and receiving functions to share the same antenna. Modern OTHR installations have different transmitting and receiving sites, often located many miles apart.
From the early 1950s pulsed oblique ionosphere sounders had shown that the normal ionosphere is much more stable than had previously been thought to be. The physical reason for this is that the incredibly tenuous ionized gas which does the reflecting has a molasses-like viscosity. Of course, there are daily and seasonal changes, but over limited periods of half an hour or so, the F layer at a given location is actually quite well-behaved. It bounces back signals in a nearly constant direction and with nearly constant amplitude—just what is required for good radar performance.
Over-the-horizon HF radars use the ionosphere as a kind of mirror to "see" around the curvature of the earth. They have a variety of uses, both military and civilian. And they have the advantage over line-of-sight microwave radars of being able to cover enormous areas with much less power and at a fraction of the cost of the latter.
A "relocatable" OTHR system can track aircraft targets right down to ground level. In an early experiment operators were puzzled by the sudden disappearance from their screen of an aircraft they had been tracking as it taxied along the ground. They found out later that the reason for the disappearance was that the aircraft had gone into a metal hangar which did not show on the screen because it was not in motion, as explained below.
In 1979 the United States Air Force began experimenting with an OTHR system at a site near Bangor, Maine. Because HF frequencies were being used the power was kept very low to minimize interference to other services during the early tests. At the time of writing (1989) it is believed that a full-power relocatable OTHR system situated in Virginia is being used in the anti-drug war.
As can be seen from the map this ROTHR can cover a vast area of 1.6 million nautical miles, straddling the whole Caribbean. The scan area stretches from the coast of Colombia in South America up through Nicaragua and Honduras to Florida (on its west boundary) and then southwards through Puerto Rico, to Trinidad & Tobago and the northern coast of Venezuela.
But this vast area is not covered continuously; the system operator can provide surveillance in a number of sectors known as DIRs (dwell information regions). Each one of the 176 DIRs can be "illuminated" for only a few seconds at a time. Small aircraft and small vessels can be detected by an ingenious method, only when they move. This is how it is done:
At the receiving site of the ROTHR system a very large antenna stretches out over a distance of 8,400 feet. It consists of 372 dual-monopole vertical elements each 19 feet high, backed by a huge reflector screen which makes the antenna substantially unidirectional. Each pair of vertical elements has its own receiver which digitizes the incoming signals. All the digitized signals are then fed through a fibre-optic link to a master signal processor. The main receiver can be programmed to pass on "returns" from one particular region while eliminating most of the other returns as unwanted noise or clutter. But because the wanted target is moving, while the clutter is not, a filtering system based on the Doppler Shift principle (even when the echo is only one or two Hertz different) will lock on to it and track it as long as it stays in motion.
Furthermore, the ROTHR system has its own built-in automatic management & assessment function and does not have to depend on external sounding data. It measures the ionosphere height continuously and instantly selects the most appropriate frequency to use to scan the target area, ideally in one hop.
This automatic function uses a quasi-vertical incidence sounder (QVI) to measure the height of the ionosphere near the transmitting and receiving sites, which as mentioned earlier can be miles apart, and a radar backscatter sounder to measure the height of the ionosphere downrange 500 to 1,800 nautical miles away. The incoming real-time data from these soundings are compared with data stored in computer memory. Once real-time data are matched to a model of the ionosphere, the model can be used to operate the system for the best results, based on the prevailing propagation conditions. The data for the ionospheric models take up more than 200 megabytes of computer storage space. Operators thus know when and where to expect degraded performance. Of course, strong solar activity can virtually make over-the-horizon HF radar unusable.
A Spectrum Analyser display shows all the frequencies between 5 and 28 MHz. In order to avoid possible interference to other services, those frequencies which are known to be permanently allocated to fixed broadcasting and telecommunication stations are locked out, as well as frequencies which happen to be used at any instant so that they can also be avoided by the OTHR transmitter.
GLOSSARY for non-technical readers.
A.M. A mode of modulation (amplitude).A.R.R.L. Amateur Radio Relay League (U.S.A.).Beacon Transmitter radiating identification signal.C.Q. General call, to any station.C.R.T. Cathode ray tube (like TV screen).C.W. Continuous wave (mode of sending telegraphy).Callsign Station identification (letters & numbers).Coherer A device for making radio frequencies audible.DE Morse abbreviation for 'from' (French).DX Communication over a long distance.Detector Any device for making radio frequencies audible.Doppler shift Change in pitch (of sound) or frequency of a (radio) waveE.D.E.S. Initials of a war-time Greek guerrilla organisation.E.E.R. Equivalent Greek initials for R.A.A.G. (q.v.)E.L.A.S. Initials of a war-time Greek guerrilla organisation.E.L.F. Extremely Low Frequency.E.M.E. Earth-moon-earth. Also Moonbounce q.v.H.H.M.S. His Hellenic Majesty's Ship.Gasfet A type of transistor.KHz Kilohertz—international unit for kilocycle.M.U.F. Maximum usable frequency.MHz Megahertz—international unit for megacycle.Moonbounce Communication by reflection from the moon.OTHR Over-the-horizon radar.Q code Abbreviations used when communicating by telegraphy.Q1 Unreadable.Q2 Barely readable—only some words.Q3 Readable with considerable difficulty.Q4 Readable with practically no difficulty.Q5 Perfectly readable.QRO High power.QRP Low power.QRT "Stop sending". Frequently used for "shut up".QSO Two-way communication.QST Call to all stations. Also title of journal of the A.R.R.L.QTH Location or address of a station.R.A.A.G. Radio Amateur Association of Greece.R.F. Radio frequency.R.S.G.B. Radio Society of Great Britain.RST System of reporting readability, strength & tone of a signal.RX Receiver.S unit Unit for reporting strength of received signal.S.I. unit International system of definitions.SSB Single side-band—a mode of modulation.SWL Room where radio equipment is set up.Shack Room where radio equipment is set up.Silent key Deceased radio amateur.Sporadic E. Propagation via the E layer of the ionosphere.T.E.P. Transequatorial propagation.TX Transmitter.Troposcatter Propagation via the troposphere.U.H.F. Ultra high frequency.V.H.F. Very high frequency.W.A.C. Worked (contacted) all continents.XYL Wife of a radio amateur.YL Young lady operator.73 Morse abbreviation for "best regards".Yagi A type of antenna designed by a Japanese of that name.