28 September 2007

High Density

The Three Sisters Radio Towers, Arlington, Virginia, with Fort Myer Cavalry

They lopped off the BBC last week, dragged it to Baltimore and placed it near the Bromo Seltzer Tower, trapped in the Local National Public Radio outlet. The station there has the wattage to cover the inner harbor, and maybe bounce a signal off Fell's Point. The mellow voice of Dan Damon used to start my working day with the words: “It's 10 o'clock in London, 5 on America's East Coast.”

Today, they only reverberated off the hull of the old submarine near the National Aquarium, and there   was no echo of his voice in the back bedroom at Big Pink. The radio played only some inane American voices talking about things American.

I listened, since there was no adult alternative. Inane as the voices are, they tell stories that are better than Elliot in the Morning or Imus In Exile. Thank God they have put Howard Stern on the satellite, and I hope he stays there. If I need a quick Lesbian Midget Wrestler update, I have a satellite receiver that I pay money for to use in the car. I used to live in the car, and I still shudder to think about thetime I spent commuting down to Arlington from out in the County.

They say the average commute around here is a couple hours a day. I saw a former colleague the other day. He lives in Annapolis, on a nice piece of property he purchased at the top of the real estate bubble. He is chained to that house more tightly than Tantulus is to his rock for financial reasons, and in the same sort of pickle. His company was bought out, and he now has to commute from the Chesapeake to Chantilly each day.

That is three hours in the car, Monday to Friday, fifteen hours a week. I shuddered in sympathy.

The radio is really key to survival, since it enables us to multi-task, glancing occasionally from our cell phone conversations to the road. I listen to the BBC because stories start the day with America on the edge of dawn, and not smack in the middle of it. There is plenty of time for that later.

For whatever reason, Management at NPR has decided to run Morning Edition three times, laid end to end. It took me a while to figure out. At first I thought it was a plan to drive my former colleague mad on his drive around the Beltway. Then I realized there was subtle difference in the shows, adding new connections to the same stories, and the show was tailored for drive time as it rolled over DC and New York, then Chicago, and finally into the traffic mess in LA.

Meanwhile, management at WAMU, the BBC kidnappers, said everything was fine. While the venerable Beeb was physically broadcasting from London, the signal had been routed from the satellite, passing Howard Stern, direct to Baltimore. Although the signal was impossible to get here in Arlington, they said it was available in streaming audio on my computer. I looked on the web, and there was a strange animated figure- one of those cut-up real photos where the jaw moves up and down in an otherwise static presentation. The figure asked me for money. I tired to Google something while the voice droned on, and the link broke. I realized I could spend the morning trying to make my computer into a tinny radio, or I could take decisive action.

I sighed and clicked onto Amazon and sent away for a High Density radio, which is the only other way to listen to the BBC, which Public radio has cleverly concealed on a mystery channel not available to ordinary radios, of which I have about twenty. It came in the mail yesterday, and now it sits next to my computer.

I prefer things real. Radio is supposed to be free, and between the fund drives on the two Public Radio stations I am shamed into donating to, and the satellite radio decoder, I am paying hundreds of dollars a year for something that didn't cost anything. I cannot take on another charity case in Baltimore.

I talked to Leo the Engineer about raising an antenna on Big Pink's roof, eight stories above the parking lot on the high ground of the Arlington Ridge. He told me “No dice, Amigo. “It's prime property. We already rented the roof to the Verizon Company for their cell repeaters.”

They know their real estate. They are the successor company to part of the old AT&T, and they had built the Three Sisters for the Navy just down the road at the junction of Columbia Pike and Courthouse Roads near Fort Myer. The towers were the technological wonder of a century past, and the first platforms to hurl the human voice across the oceans.

On their completion in 1913, the Arlington Towers were the second largest manmade structure in the world, behind only the Eiffel Tower. The tallest of the three was a full 45 feet higher than the Washington Monument. They were up on the bluff, too, not down on the Mall, so the Sisters dominated the skyline.

The towers were built to launch the Navy's effort to establish a worldwide communications network. In 1915, using the call letters NAA, the towers provided the means for the first long distance radio conversation to Hawaii, via San Francisco, and then to a French station broadcasting from the Eiffel Tower. The French were a bit districted by the Germans just to the east at the time, and had little time to chat. NAA mostly broadcast time signals to ships at sea who needed them for accurate navigation.

The Navy was very proud of the new technology. In 1915, department Secretary Josephus Daniels announced:

 "Transatlantic wireless telephony is an accomplished fact. Observers listening at the Eiffel Tower in Paris have heard speech sent out by engineers of the American Telephone & Telegraph Co. from apparatus developed by that company and the Western Electric Co. and installed at Arlington, Va. The equipment used was that employed a few weeks ago in talking 4,900 miles by wireless telephony to San Francisco and Honolulu."

The Secretary might as well have told me to go with the High Density radio. Technology marches on. In the darkness this morning, I puzzled over the controls on the new radio. Drivers were already gridlocked on the Beltway, and there was a roll-over accident on the Columbia Pike. I finally got the signal to synchronize and clicked tentatively on the signal from the District, seeking the digital side-lobes here the BBC had been hidden.

One precise “click,” and Dan Damon was there, just finishing the World Update show across the Atlantic.

The towers were taken down in 1941, since with the opening of what is now Reagan National Airport, they were a distinct hazard to navigation. They stood less than thirty years, which is an eternity in communications technology.

Today, the site at Columbia Pike and Courthouse road is occupied by the sprawl of the Defense Communication Agency, which specializes in making perfectly good things obsolete. They pioneered high density radio, incidentally, which just made all the radios at Big Pink useless for trans-oceanic reception, except one.   

Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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