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Show Will Stratovision Arrive? They're Working on It Now By BAUKIIAGE Newt Analyst and Commentator. WASHINGTON. "Is television here to stay?" That has been the favorite crack in AM (regular broadcasting) broad-casting) circles for some time. Now it's been displaced by another: "Will stratovision arrive?" If it doesn't, say th enthusiastic stratospheric promoters, millions of people in rural areas will be unable to receive television programs for years. If ever. What is "it"7 "Tlie stratovision system simply puts the antennae and television -4Af transmitter in an airplane flying In lazy circles above the earth," they explain, "and the shortwave sent out from this airborne antennae blankets the earth's surface sur-face like a great inverted ice cream cone and covers an area approximately approxi-mately 500 miles across." Since television s culations formulae, logarithms and assorted humorous material which an electronic engineer toys with instead in-stead of reciting limeiicks to himself him-self to pass away the time, he suddenly sud-denly thought: "If I onlj had a television transmitter with me, and my folks had a set, and If I had some other planes for relays, they could get the same television televi-sion programs New York does." "I suppose long hours of intense work on military radar had so crowded my mind with details of its operation that I looked for radar possibilities in everything I saw," the young stratovision creator said afterward. "Radio already had proven its adaptability and value for airplane communications and in navigational aids, including blind flying. Turning these facts over mentally, I concluded that Westing-house Westing-house already had at hand basic engineering information which seemed to justify the ambitious plan." He sold the idea to Westinghouse and Glenn Martin and they went ahead and backed his extensive, not ' i V' )-' f ittehaa -v. nrM -Tinrf- iniis.li f i BAUKIIAGE waves traveI ln a straight line and not in high, leaping loops like longwave long-wave radio, their range is limited, Just as human sight is limited. You can't see nearly as far on a level city street as you can from the top of a mountain. That parallel isn't an exact one, but it's a good rough comparison. So television waves have to travel on a special cable underneath the ground (co-axial cable), or else leap from one high tower to another an-other (microwave relay). And the farthest they can travel is some 35 to 50 miles. But stratovision waves come from a transmitter as high as the plane carrying the transmit-ir transmit-ir cnn fly, 30,000 feet, we'll say. What about storms? Well the stratospherites say they miss most of them at that height, and anyhow, they can use more than one equipped plane, so they can shift the point of transmission of a program Irom one to the other and thus dodge the storm. They insist that they have already al-ready demonstrated that this is possible, that they can deliver. I haven't seen any of the recent lests so I don't know. Naturally the oldtimers (although the oldest oldtimers in television are still pretty pret-ty new) rre skeptical. After a test held recently in Zanesville, Ohio, for the benefit of newspaper and radio ra-dio folk, many were still skeptical. It was admitted that conditions on the test day were not ideal by any means and it was claimed that there was interference from other stations which would be eliminated. Variety magazine's correspondent,-a correspondent,-a keen observer of radio, said: "Demonstration proved that the higher the altitude, the clearer and more extensive the pick-up. For all practical purposes, though, the specific, spe-cific, physical certainty of the underground un-derground co-axial or the thru-the-ir, microwave relay would seem to have the networking edge for the time being." ("Be not the first by whom the new is tried. . . .") The backers of the new system, Westinghouse Radio Stations, Incorporated, In-corporated, think differently. Their C. E. Nobles, originator of the stratovision airborne television system, is shown at the twin video monitoring boards in the experimental experi-mental stratovision plane. to say expensive, experimentation. I caught some of the enthusiasm which I know "Chili" must radiate from the young man who sat across the table from me explaining the drawings. "Think of what stratovision would mean to the readers of your column," col-umn," he said. "We only asked for a license for one station but with more we could link up the Pacific and Atlantic coasts so that we could pick up Hollywood and New York studios (I don't know why he left out Chicago) Chi-cago) with only eight planes flying 400 miles apart. By adding six planes to the system to cover the Northwest and Southeast we could serve 78 per cent of the population!" popula-tion!" And once we got the rural televisers looking, I thought, what a lot of new material would be put into the telecasts to say nothing of the greatly broadened market for television sets and advertising which would be created. The first stratovision experiments established the surprising fact that there were lots of television sets in areas which could not possibly be reached ordinarily (by co-axial cable ca-ble or microwave). At the first call for response to the test programs pro-grams many letters came from such areas. Probably amateurs who had built their own sets, and perhaps erected their own antennae anten-nae on some high elevation. It would seem that the country is willing to try the Nobles experiment experi-ment if it gets the chance. The Russians, after claiming that not Marconi but a Russian invented wireless telegraphy, now are saying say-ing that the electric bulb, the flashlight, flash-light, the transformer and electric welding all started in Russia. Next thing you know they'll claim an invention in-vention of the one thing which could make Ananias turn in his grave. To get the most fun and enjoyment enjoy-ment from bicycling, it is well to know a few simple things about buying one, says the bicycle information in-formation bureau. One thing it might be well to know is whether you have enough money to pay for it ... The biggest microscope can't see the cold germ but you can hear a couple of thousand coming in a sneeze. The garden-type apartment is the latest thing in "tenant convenience," says the Urban Land Institute. About the only thing I was ever able to plant in an apartment was an electric light bulb but any Washington Wash-ington flat-dweller can raise quite a herd of buffalo moths. This is the experimental stratovision strato-vision station a modified B-29, flying at an altitude of 25,000 feet. request for a commercial license was turned down by the FCC last month but they expect requirements require-ments to be altered. Glenn Martin, whose aircraft company thought enough of the idea to work out the developments of the aviation end said: "Flying the transmitter is one of the greatest single advances ad-vances in the history of television." televi-sion." I talked with one of the very earnest young men who are attempting at-tempting to convert the skeptics. He seemed to have no doubts that the method equalled any other. In fact he thought that competitors would fight it because it was so good. The whole thing is a young man's idea. He is C. E. (Chili) Nobles, 30-year-old radar expert whose work in that field was a valuable wartime war-time contribution. He is a Texan (hence the- nickname, I suppose) and the story is that the idea first struck him when he was flying a plane high above his home. As he ran over the various figures fig-ures which were in the back of his mind, the number of miles his home was from the nearest big city, the altitude and the various other cal- |