[Milsurplus] Re: [armyradios] OT: Foxhole Electronics

[Richard Brunner]

Re:
 .................... I read somewhere that- besides "whistlers" and 
'spherics heard on the WWI field telephone lines- that, in places where the 
trenches were close together, the combatants could cuss each other via 
inductive crosstalk, and that this was the genesis of the inductive 
"wireless" sets fielded late in the war..............

I don't know about the field telephones, but the Germans heard them in their 
apparatus.  They had probes in the ground several hundred feet apart feeding 
the new vacuum tube amplifiers to hear allied telephone communications, 
which worked very well.  The operators reported hearing strange descending 
tones, sometimes quite strongly.  This was reported by Barkhausen in 
Zeitschrift für Physik, XX, 1919, pp 401-403, "Zwei neue Erscheinungen." 
(Two new Phenomena)
"Pfeiftöne aus der Erde," (Whistling Tones out of the Earth) The other 
effect reported is noise generated during demagnetization of iron in an iron 
wire, now known as the Barkhausen Effect.

Richard, AA1P