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 in 1633. 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, in 1633 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 requires far 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 writing 1632 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 the Ring 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 autonomous operation. The cell phones themselves are useless without the cell being attached to a billing and authorization computer system and to a phone switch. For all practical purposes, you may regard cell phones as a source for small high energy density rechargeable batteries and other electronics parts, but not as radios.