Radio Equipment

[Robert T. Paige]

Parks-

Thanks very much for your explanation(s).

#2- Something like a T/R tube on a radar ? (I'm thinking WWII-Korea vintage search radars.)

Rest of the questions (#1 and #3) were results in thinking from being infected in the disease known as "Ham Radio". LOL.

73,
Robert

 

[Robert T. Paige]

I see this thread has been a bit inactive for a while.....sooo.

Question #1- (May have been answered on another post...couldn't find it.) Would it have been possible to hear Titanic's signals at other locations. I "invented" sort of a sci-fi story in which a teen-age Ben Calvert (Rose's future hubby)
picks up Titanic's CQD/SOS in Cedar Rapids,Iowa. Would his have been possible ?

Question #2: In ANTR and other "Titanic" movies Bride tells Phillips that "power is going" and a scene shows the meter needle going down. There was, I believe, emergency battery power provision for the Marconi transmitter ? Could transmissions have been continued in that manner ?...Or maybe they considered Titanic was too far gone to try that anyway ?

I notice that some of the more amateur questions such as these get some rather curt answers from the experts, so I am prepared to receive same and will not consider them as insults, so you may fire when ready, Gridley ! LOL.

 

[Robert T. Paige]

(Re:Question #2)- Considering the Marconi Magnetic Detector was more or less a passive device and did not require power (other than winding the detector)it would seem that receiving could have continued after power was lost to the transmitter until the antenna or its connections broke or went under water ? Is this a correct assumption ?

 

[Samuel Halpern]

Hi Robert.

1. If its fiction don't worry about such details as Cedar Rapids being too far away. By the way, that story about David Sarnoff picking up the Titanic signals from atop Warnamaker's department store in NY city is a bit of creative story telling. He was not on duty the night Titanic went down and the earliest documented message he received was on April 16 from the Carpathia on her way back to NY. Most of what was written about him and the Titanic disaster is mythology.

2. As I understand it, there was a battery operated emergency set on board but there was no need to use it. By time they left the wireless cabin the ship had only a few more minutes left.

3. The mag detector was a passive device and would have worked independent of transmitter power as long as it was wound up. You can build your own passive AM radio detector today if you care to. That's all you need is a tunable coil with a long attached wire and an alligator clip to clip onto an electrical ground (like a metal screw of an electrical outlet), a capacitor, a diode, and an earpiece. When I was kid I built one, and was able to listen to Yankee baseball games at night during school nights while pretending to be asleep in bed. Living in the Bronx some the radio station signals at night were quite good, but depended on how far away the transmitting towers were from where you actually lived.

 

[Robert T. Paige]

Hi Sam-

1.I've heard the same debunking of the Sarnoff myth too. I was going to work in Arthur Collins in the story, but checking his biography found he was born in 1909....that would have been a bit of creative story telling...a real child prodigy of three years old building a radio and knowing Morse Code ! LOL. However, the fictional "Ben Calvert" (of "Titanic" 1997) would have probably been about the right age, interest group and location for the story.

2. Just guessing...probably Phillips and Bride had the word that Carpathia was the only ship on the way, and that any further efforts would have been useless anyway ?

3. I built many a "crystal set" in my younger days, with varying results of success. I graduated from "cat's whiskers" to 1N34A's for the diode detector. There were some plans for a "foxhole radio" that used a razor blade and a safety pin for a detector, but I never could make it work.

Of all the "Worst Titanic Movies" ever made, that miniature transmitter in one of the other versions is the most ridiculous. IMHO, that is.

Regards,
Robert

PS- Thanks for the kindness to us rank amateurs.
Well....at least I do have a license from the FCC to prove that I am an amateur. LOL.

 

[Robert T. Paige]

Hi Again, Sam-

At least in my experiences you never really know what to expect from the radio waves, so receiving Titanic's CQD/SOS in Cedar Rapids wouldn't be too far fetched.. due to the time difference it would also have been on a Sunday afternoon.:

When I was a young boy, I once built a crystal set (Quaker Oats box for the coil of course !) and had it connected to a "long wire" antenna - probably only about 50 feet long and about 10 feet off the ground. It worked very well on the broadcast band,but I often received a "ham" in Pilot Point, Texas , about 60 miles north of Dallas coming in loud and clear...and he was transmitting on the 75 meter amateur band. Too bad I wasn't in to SWL cards at the time since I don't remember the call letters. Most curious !

73 es vy best dx ,
Robert

 

[Robert T. Paige]

>>Of all the "Worst Titanic Movies" ever made, that miniature transmitter in one of the other versions is the most ridiculous. IMHO, that is.<<

I believe that was actually in the Britannic TV series.

 

[Robert T. Paige]

Just refreshing this post. It seems this this thread was last active in 2008.

Just wondering why the detector was spring wound and then had to be manually rewound ? Not being an expert or even a novice on the situation, wondering why the detector couldn't have been electrically powered by a small electric motor or even some sort of electric rewind mechanism so reception would be "live" at all times ?

The story I have heard (and there are so many "Titanic Myths") was that the reason that Officer Groves (when he dropped in to the Marconi Room on Californian while Evans was sleeping) didn't hear the Titanic's SOS when he picked up the earphones was not that the sending was so fast he couldn't make it out (as depicted in "A Night To Remember") but rather that he heard nothing since he either didn't know how to wind the detector or he failed to do so.

 

[Robert T. Paige]

I found the old post about the Titanic-Cedar Rapids connection. The fiction was that "Ben Calvert", "Rose's" future husband was sort a "wireless" enthusiast of the timr and picked up the Titanics CQD in Cedar Rapids.