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Now, more channels, plummeting prices for new backyard satellite-TV antennas

Better quality, easier-to-use features, and affordable do-it-yourself kits make home Earth stations practical

By SUSAN RENNER-SMITH

The view from my hotel room was so incongruous that I burst out laughing. A score of gleaming dish antennas squatted in the parking lot below me, facing the southern sky. It looked as if a giant mushroom crop had sprouted in the starlight. Then I saw the glowing TV set near one dish. People crouched around it watching, I knew, a program broadcast by some far-off satellite. Read the rest of this entry »

Nickel Buys a Tune and a Phone Chat with a Girl as Well

COIN PHONOGRAPHS, or “juke boxes,” widely used in taverns and restaurants, now are sometimes installed in a new form. Operated by telephone from central offices, they permit a selection of 300 or more tunes, as opposed to the 12 or 20 available on ordinary coin phonographs. Read the rest of this entry »

Now “Flying Stenographers” span the sea!

You are familiar with teleprinter service which delivers a typed message, by wire, at high speed. Now this useful service takes to the air on a person-to-person basis, and is spanning the Atlantic Ocean by radio!

This new achievement, called TEX, was developed by RCA engineers and European experts. Its heart is an amazing machine that thinks in code, detects errors which may have come from fading or static —and automatically insists on a correction!
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Telephone booths on prowl

This mobile telephone truck, equipped with six pay phones and a coin changer, can speed to any spot in Washington, D.C., where emergency phone service is needed in a hurry. Its crew just hooks it into existing wires.

While waiting for emergencies to call it into service, the Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone Co. uses the unit to collect dimes from stationary booths.

HERE IT IS
THE AMAZING NEW Man-From-Mars RADIO HAT

COMPLETE 2-TUBE RADIO BUILT INTO A HAT

Here’s the famous two-tube topper you’ve read about in LIFE. TIME, POPULAR SCIENCE, BUSINESS WEEK, and many other magazines and newspapers, coast-to-coast. Now, you too can own this wonderful “dream-come-true” radio hat. A perfect gift idea! Study these amazing features…. Read the rest of this entry »

Radio Store Provides Free Clubroom for Wireless Amateurs

IN the back of a retail electrical store located in the skyscraper section of New York City, there is a unique club-room for radio amateurs. A full set of radio receiving equipment has been installed with an aerial on the roof. Apparatus can be tested out in actual practice, and the visiting amateur is given the privilege of taking any piece of apparatus from stock to connect up and use as he sees fit. Read the rest of this entry »

The device on the second page is interesting. It’s sort of like a mechanical version of an LCD screen.

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Life Size Radio Movies Are Coming

C. Francis Jenkins is inventor of the original movie camera and holder of more than 400 patents, many of them in the field of radiovision. He predicts for the near future life size radio movies and radiovision of news events which may be projected on theater screens at the actual instant they happen. Jenkins describes the present status of television and the lines along which he is working.

by C. FRANCIS JENKINS Famous Inventor

WITHIN a short time, possibly within a year, I expect to see movie screens showing life size pictures of news events as they are happening. We are working now on that problem. We may not be first to solve it, but it is only a question of time until some one does, and it is quite possible that we may be first.
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Meanwhile, in more modern times, the iPhone in my pocket has a six-axis gyroscope that is smaller than a grain of rice.

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What’s What in Radio Today

by Jay Earle Miller

What is the screen grid tube? What does it do? What are the advantages of the condenser speaker? These are a few of the questions that occur to folk trying to keep abreast of developments. Mr. Miller, who attended the Chicago radio shows, here gives the answers.

I WENT to a furniture show the other day and saw some clever new adaptations of radio to home decorating.

And then I went to a radio show and saw the finest furniture exhibit in Chicago. Read the rest of this entry »

THE SMALLER THE BETTER: NEW DIMENSIONS IN CONVERSATION

In the eye of a needle above is a transistor switch that can turn on or off in ten billionths of a second. It is an example of the micro-miniature devices that Western Electric makes today for the new Electronic Switching Systems now being put into service in the Bell telephone network. Read the rest of this entry »

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Eight Ring Radio Circus

TO AM and FM a new kind of broadcasting has been added—PTM, pulse time modulation. By transmitting eight or more different programs at one time on one frequency, it may help solve the traffic problem in the radio spectrum.

PTM was developed to meet the need for crowding more broadcasts into the ultra-high-frequency range between 300 and 3,000 megacycles. These microwaves are relatively immune to fading and static, but travel only along a line of sight, limiting reception to the horizon of the transmitter. Read the rest of this entry »

Pushbutton calling

Tired of dialing calls? Here’s an add-on that converts an ordinary dial phone for pushbutton signaling. The 5-1/4-inch sphere also has a memory for 10 frequently used numbers you can call with two buttons. Busy number? Just wait and push one button to repeat your call. Made by Pye in England.

Memory phone

Push one of Touch-a-matic’s 32 buttons and it places prerecorded phone numbers for you. An integrated-circuit memory (foreground) containing 15,000 transistors does the job. To store numbers, you push a “record” button, then the digits. Developed at Bell Labs, the new phones will appear in 1974.

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Home Newspapers by Radio

Your Home a Silent “Press Room” . . . Automatic Facsimile Reproduction . . . Latest News by Breakfast Time . . . Bulletins Are Now Being Broadcast

A PRIVATE newspaper with any spot in your home as the press room, the world’s best editors and reporters on your staff, is available today to anyone in the United States possessing an ordinary radio receiving set. No thundering press will deafen you while your newspaper is being printed; instead, equipment contained in a small attractive box will silently print your “latest edition” while you sleep, completing it in time for reading at breakfast.
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