Radios have been assigned to the mission headed for Venice also, but as of the time this article was written those stories had not been published and a discussion of their capabilities would give away story elements currently not for publication.
Meanwhile, as of 1633, large antenna installations are in place in Grantville, Magdeburg and Luebeck with up-time designed and built “Ham” radios for long-distance use. Due to the Maunder Minimum and the sunspot issues, long distance communications is done via Morse code at 3.5 MHz, and sometimes at 1.2 MHz.
Grantville will be building more “Ham” style radios for use by the army, the diplomatic corps, and the banking system. Using recycled parts, and arranging a relay network, Grantville can build between one hundred and several hundred CW (Morse code) radios for this purpose until they get tubes on-line.
It is expected that Grantville can start tube production sometime in the late 1630s or early 1640s. (Radio tubes are very hard to make. The characters will have to reinvent a few industries to make tubes. Radio tubes are not light bulbs. They are much harder to make than light bulbs.)
Using these down-time-built but up-time-parts radios, Grantville and the USE can have world-wide communications as soon as they can train operators and send them out. The limiting factor on building down-time-built radios is the availability of high power transistors and tubes salvaged from radios and old TVs. It is unclear how many such high-power parts will be available. Transistors have a “top frequency” beyond which they become mostly useless. In order to build high-powered radio transmitters, the techs will need high-power high-frequency transistors and/or tubes. The salvaging of power supplies of dead equipment will be a booming business for a while. Every tube will be cherished.
If Grantville was really good at putting its junk into the dump—which, alas, was not within the Ring of Fire and remained behind in the old universe—then there will be substantially fewer high-power radios built, and spark-gap radios will become far more important than is described here.
Strategic radio, long-distance diplomatic and military communications will be CW-only (Morse code). This is due to the Maunder Minimum.
Additionally, it is presumed that we are not transmitting CW in clear, and that either one-time-pad ciphers generated off the computer screens, or reasonably sophisticated codes beyond manual cracking will be used.
However, the number of up-time parts is limited. What can they do, until they get to building down-time tubes, to make new down-time radios?
The obvious answer is “spark” radios. Spark existed long before tubes did, and they can and will build spark transmitters and crystal radios.
Details about the design and operation of spark transmitters and crystal radios will have to wait for another article. Spark transmitters and crystal radio receivers can be built with 17th century (“down-time”) resources.
Broadcast Radio & TV
1632 and 1633 depict the existence of TV in Grantville. No commercial radio or TV broadcast facility existed in Mannington in 1999/2000, so it does not exist in Grantville at the time of the RoF. The high school had a TV production studio, but no transmitter. No one had a commercial TV or radio transmitter.
The TV “broadcasts” that Rebecca Stearns gave in 1632, and which continue in 1633, are not “over the air” but are rather “cablecast.” A link was made from the TV studio in the high school to the “head end” of the cable TV system in Grantville, and shows and movies were distributed over the cable system. There was no “transmitter,” no tower, and no antennas were needed.
The people participating in the 1632 Tech Manual conference in Baen’s Bar discussed for a long time how to resolve the lack of a commercial radio station in Grantville. The FCC antenna tower database made it clear that no appropriate towers existed in Grantville for an AM radio station. While it would have been possible to build an FM radio station simply enough, you can not hear an FM station on a crystal radio. Since the authors of the 1632 series wanted a supply of down-time radios to be available to listen to the broadcasts of the Voice of America, it was necessary to figure out how to build a radio station.