| period of the Antenna could be reduced enough to work properly,—so that if one expects to obtain good results and keep within the law, it would be better to shorten the Antenna. In the event of shortening the Antenna, it becomes necessary to add more wires to give an effective capacity to take care of the current to be radiated. For instance: Supposing the Antenna to be 100 feet long, 4 wires spaced 3 feet apart and it is to be shortened to 50 feet. Good results in sending will be obtained if there are 8 wires spaced 18 inches apart. The Antenna must be considered in the light of a Condenser, similarly to the condenser charged by the transformer, good work can- | not be expected if it does not take care of the charge imposed upon it.
|
TAKING AN EXAMINATION
By Little Willie
| LISTEN, while I tell you how they made me buck the goat the other day, when I went up against it for a First Grade Comm.
There were three of us. We borrowed a semi-broken down omnigraph, and we listened to this running at anywhere from twenty-five to fifty-five words a minute, running frontward and backward until we had it all down pat, and could write it left handed whether the machine was running or not. I think it was successful in one particular only. It taught me The exclamation mark. I never knew it before. There were not enough records for this omnigraph, but nevertheless we thought we ought to use it because they told us the Radio inspector would pull one on us when we went up for our exams. As an omnigraph sounds altogether different from the phones, we thought we ought to get used to the ’graf. With the phones, and nobody around, and if the pencil is sharp and nice and soft, we |
can handle twenty easy, especially if we know what is coming. The latter makes a lot of difference. But when a half dozen disinterested and wholly unsympathetic critics stand around and watch you, and you have no idea as to what the stuff is that is going to come, and you also have a feeling down in your midst that you are almighty likely to flunk anyway, it is some job getting twenty, or even eighteen. At least that is the way the writer of these lines feels about it.
When the awful clay came and we found the office of the Radio inspector in the Custom house, we were just a little bit shaky. I wondered if I had overtrained. They say that you can do this in football and boat racing, and I don’t see why one could not also do it in wireless. The office, when we timidly edged in the door, had a lot of other goats with scared looks on their faces sitting down at tables |
