[Lowfer] Lovely Aurora Down South

[Ed Phillips]

riese-k3djc@juno.com wrote:
> 
> At any rate, I know one rather respectable consulting engineer who
> doesn't
> believe Marconi could have received his famous letter S on 12 December
> '01,
> on fairly plausible technical grounds;
> 
> Propagation at that time would have made the thing happen on a
> harmonic fer sure. Dont think the frequency he was shooting for
> would have. It was some years later that Sintony (SP) or using tuned
> circuits came in to general use ( thanks Tesla ) which was a big
> improvement in Radio
> 
> hard to believe kids using spark coils directly feeding antennas of some
> sort actually worked across town
> 
> wild
> 
> As much fun as watching WM     HAR
> 
> Bob  K3DJC

	The word referring to tuned systems was Syntony.  I have an excellent
book on early "wireless" history called "Syntony and Spark", by Aitken. 
Another excellent source is "The Development of Radio to 1920", edited
by Shiers.  Includes reprints of a lot of classic papers by authors
whose names are now well known.  Whether or not Marconi received
anything that day (probably neither he or anyone else really knew)
within a couple of years he had a system working more or less reliably. 
As to kids with spark coils working across town, a very very long time
ago (somewhat before Pearl Harbor) I lived across a small town (maybe 2
miles) from a friend.  We used to communicate (to the extent we didn't
really know the code) with spark transmitters consisting of a neon sign
transformer with one side tied to ground, the other to the antenna, and
a spark gap in between.  We could hear each other pretty well using very
very simple crystal sets, which also picked up the local AM station at
the same time.  We were too ignorant to know that the center tap of the
NST was tied to the case so were probably working with 1/2 of the
secondary shorted out.  I still have the transformer I used back then
but both sides are more or less shorted out.  Used it with a small Tesla
coil before I moved on to bigger and better ones.

Ed