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with another piece of wire on that tower. (You do not need hookup wires on this one.)
So, two 150-foot towers, two 40-meter long hunks of wire, suspended in the air, and lots of rope. If
you want to use 1.7 MHz (160 meters) instead of the 3.5 MHz we designed this for, double all the
numbers above. (Well, you can keep the tower height the same, but taller is better.)
Repeat this, as often as necessary to build a beam pointing at each city you want to talk to. A big central
diplomatic radio installation will have a cluster of these beams pointing in a variety of directions and will
require a clear level space a quarter of a mile on a side.
You begin the see the problem...
As the characters in the series approach 1640, the electronic situation in the atmosphere worsens. The
MUF drops towards 1.7 MHz, and the antennas and such get bigger as above, and harder to build. It's
not fun. That's why Gayle and Jeff kept muttering about the bad timing of the radio situation in1633 .
From the perspective of a Ham, they were dropped straight into hell.
What can be done about it? Several things:
1) You use a lot of power to overcome the fact that not much bounces.
2) You experiment to find the best frequencies available and use them.
3) You build good antennas.
4) You send your messages at the right time of day (generally a window about four hours long starting at
sunset called the "gray line").
5) You set up relays, i.e., you send the message as far as you can, and then relay it. Thus, in1633 the
mission in Amsterdam relays to London and to Scotland.
6) You maximize the use of the power you have, by using CW (Morse code) instead of voice. Voice
requiresfar better signals than CW does.
Very awkward, yes. But that's the situation until the newly emerging society can get satellites back up,
which will be a long time yet in fact, at least as long as the year 1700, which is about the same time that
the short-wave bands will reopen.
In short, no matter how you slice it, long-distance radio communications will be a very different thing in
the 1632 universe than what we've experienced in our own timeline. And as tube production comes on
line, and high power radios go into production around the world, bandwidth for long distance
communications will be a precious and rare resource. The pressure to build cables across the ocean will
be even higher in the 1632 universe than it is in ours.
The Physical Resources
In addition to the physical world around them, the radio situation in Grantville is shaped by the
technological world they brought with them. What radio technology does Grantville posses? What just
won't work? Let's examine each of the common up-time radio technologies and consider its place in
Grantville after the Ring of Fire. When Eric began writing1632 he did a very clever thing. He decided that
with a few exceptions which he has carefully limited, Grantville is based on the real-world town of
Mannington, West Virginia. In general, and with a few specific exceptions (the main one being the power
plant), it's safe to assume that if something was in Mannington in late 1999 or early 2000, it's in
Grantville; and if something was not in Mannington then, it is not in Grantville. That presumption drives
the following discussion.
Stores
 There is not a Radio Shack store in town, there is no electronics store, there is no radio dealer of any
kind. Some CB radios will be available at a few stores. There is one TV repair shop.
Cell Phones
Sadly, while there was a cell phone antenna and cell in both Mannington and thus, in Grantville (an
analogue one no CDMA or TDMA digital cells were operating in Mannington in late '99 or early '00),
the cell was not linked to the local phone switch. It was operated by a different company. And while one
of the short stories from theRing of Fire anthology (coming out in January, 2004) explains that there is an
excellent phone tech in town, he's not a cell phone guy. It may be possible eventually to cross connect
that cell to the phone system, but in the first two years, no one has had any success at it. The manuals for
the cell weren't in town, no one knows the computer passwords, and the cell was not set up for [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]