Читать книгу The Radio Boys with the Iceberg Patrol; Or, Making safe the ocean lanes онлайн

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None of the others had noticed the item, but as they were all radio fans of the thirty-third degree, they were interested at once.

“Tell us about it,” urged Joe, echoed by the others.

“You see,” explained Bob to his eager auditors, “the post-office department has been having a lot of trouble communicating from the ground to the mail planes and from the mail planes to the ground. In order to have the planes carry as little weight as possible, the radio apparatus they’ve carried has been of reduced size and the antenna facilities have had to be limited, too, so that the range of the aerial set hasn’t been great enough to bring about the best results.

“Then, too, it’s been hard to reach the speeding plane from the ground. This has been due to the noise of the engine and the local interference picked up by the receiver from the ignition and other electrical circuits of the motor.

“But now they’ve established at the Omaha field a one-thousand-watt transmitter, especially designed for the postal authorities, that has a range of from three hundred to five hundred miles in the day time and up to one thousand miles at night. And as none of the flying fields is more than five hundred miles from another, the field superintendents are able to keep in touch with the planes at almost any moment they are in flight.”