Grantville Gazette Part 34

In late 1999, there were eighteen amateur radio operators in Mannington, and thus in Grantville. There are three Extra cla.s.s (the highest), two Advanced cla.s.s Hams, five General cla.s.s and one Tech-plus. All those have shown Morse code proficiency. There are five Technician cla.s.s Hams who have shown general cla.s.s knowledge of radio operation and design. There are two Novices. One of the Extra cla.s.s Hams is female.

The FCC database does not give information on original date of issue of licenses, but a number of those licensed have licenses dating back ten years, which is the expiration period. Two of the three "extras" must have studied and tested together, because their call signs are sequential.

These individuals-not them, of course, but the characters who reflect their skills in the 1632 universe-have a large variety of radios available. Several of those have been sent out with the various diplomatic missions along with antennas and antenna parts to London, to Amsterdam, and (in the upcoming novel 1634: The Galileo Affair) to Venice. As follows:

Julie and Alex Mackay have a portable Radio Shack DX-398 and a supply of six-volt lantern batteries to power it.

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Gayle Mason has three FRS handhelds described above, a Radio Shack DX-394 receiver,

and a hand-built CW transmitter and amplifier powered by a set of Traeger pedals. She has an isotron 80b antenna which she hangs out the window of the tower to use.

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Rebecca Sterns and her mission were supplied with the best radios of any team in 1633, which makes sense, as she is Mike Stearn's wife. (And, leaving aside nepotism, her Holland mission is likely to bear the brunt of the relaying work for all the diplomatic missions.)

Becky has a Kenwood TS520 transceiver. It is simple to operate, plug and play, 12 V ready, 160M to 10M all band transmitter, SSB, CW, AM capable of operating at either 20Watts or 100Watts. It will "punch through" to Grantville with no problem. In the same box integrated is an excellent receiver, better than the one sent with Gayle for our purposes. Original cost was around $600. Good stuff, two revisions back from the current state of the art. It's bulletproof. It pulls 20 amps at 12V for power, exactly on target for our power budget. It was chosen from the radios available in Grantville because its tube finals will tolerate poorly matched antennas better than an all-solid-state radio would. The Holland team also has an isotron 80b antenna and wire to make a big "beam" antenna if they get a place and the time.

Radios have been a.s.signed 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 partic.i.p.ating 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.

Gayle Mason's Ham radio station could be rebuilt to provide a modestly powered AM radio transmitter, but what to use for an antenna? A natural antenna for an AM radio station is 140 feet tall. The folks in Grantville did not have such a tower, nor did they have the free steel to build one. The available steel was going into the ironclad ships and into railroad track.

Additionally, the government of the new U.S. wished to conceal its ability to talk to its remote diplomatic staff as long as possible. After months of discussion on Baen's Bar by the "Barflies," the concept of the Great Stone Radio Tower was born. Many European cathedral towers exceeded the height needed for the Voice of America transmitter tower. By building a stone antenna tower (and running copper wires down the outside to act as the active antenna elements), Grantville solved both the technical problem of building the tower, and the political problem of distracting the French and the English from the ability of Grantville to talk to its diplomats. Somehow the idea that long-distance radio requires huge ma.s.sive antennas became commonplace.

By early 1634, the Voice of America will be on the air with a transmitter rebuilt from Gayle Mason's high powered Ham radio transmitter, and the Great Stone Radio Tower.

The Barflies have long discussed, but no "official" author has yet mentioned, the idea that Gustavus Adolphus will not be satisfied with the Voice of America and will push for a second AM broadcast radio station to promote the concord of his nation and his faith. The Barflies refer to Gustav's station as the Voice of Luther.

The Voice of Luther will go on the air in late 1634 or early 1635 using an all-down-time built transmitter using the same style transmitter as the first broadcast AM radio station. The details of the construction of a Fessenden Alternator are beyond the scope of this article, but suffice it to say that operating this station will involve speaking into a microphone directly inserted into the feed line from the transmitter to the antenna while it is carrying up to 10,000 watts of power. This is very dangerous. Operating broadcast radio stations in 1632 is not for the faint of heart. A wrong move will result in a fried DJ.

Acknowledgement and personal note:

The technical and historic background in the 1632 series is the result of the work of a huge number of partic.i.p.ants in the 1632 Tech Manual at the Baen Books web site

This article attempts to summarize information from two sources: the background briefing doc.u.ments prepared for Eric Flint and David Weber, and the collective wisdom of the Baen Barflies.

The combination of people, material, and environment presented by 1632 results in a rich playing field for people who want to work on alternate history. Certainly I have enjoyed the experience. I strongly invite any of you interested to join us. There is still a lot of work to do.

Rick Boatright

THEY'VE GOT BREAD MOLD,.

SO WHY CAN'T THEY MAKE PENICILLIN?.

by

Bob Gottlieb

The above is one of the more common questions asked by readers following the 1632 series, especially those who are interested in the subject of disease and medicine. Unfortunately, there is no simple answer to the question. There are thousands and thousands of different kinds of mold. True, a few of them produce various effective medicines, like penicillin. But many are useless, even leaving aside those which produce hallucinogens like LSD, or which are outright poisons. The process of isolating a specific mold that produces an antibiotic is expensive, time consuming, and severely constrained by the availability of resources.

The purpose of this article is to give readers who lack technical education in the subject a general overview of the problem. Let's begin by reviewing the major diseases which the characters in the 1632 series have to deal with.