In article , Al Dykes wrote:
I'm looking for some reading material about radio from the earliest
days up to the end of WWI and how it was used during the war.

I've just reading a history of the Russian-Japanese war (1904). It was
entirely a naval war, Russia sent it's entire fleet from the Baltic
Sea to the Pacific Russian coast. Radio played a roll but the book
didn't give me an idea of range or any of the equipment. Radio was
always described as unreliable.

Okay, the transmitter here is a broadband noise source, going into some
tuned circuits that produce a peak roughly in the 200 to 500 Khz range.
For a kilowatt input power, there would be a couple watts out on channel,
and the channel was pretty wide.

Combine that with a receiver that was usually a coherer, which used
electrostatic attraction between particles to detect an RF source,
which took substantial power at the antenna to detect any signal.

On top of that, we're working at really long wavelengths where
skip propagation is poor, onboard ships where the antenna size is
limited by the small size of the vessel.

It got me to wondering about WWI. Can anyone recommend a book
or a web site?

I believe there is a book by the US Army Center for Military History
that should be available from the GPO, on communication in WWI. It
talks very little about radio, because radio wasn't really very useful
although there were attempts to transmit field orders and to communicate
with aircraft-borne observers.

Although by the time WWI came along, the technology had advanced
considerably since that of 1904, there were still no power tubes and
still no use of short waves yet, although improved detectors helped
a lot.

The first serious use of radio in combat wasn't until the Italo-Ethiopian
war of 1936, where Mussolini equipped units with field radios and operators.
Selassie's troops would open up a hole in the line, take in a bunch of
Italian troops and cut them off with a pincer movement as worked so well
for Marechal Foch in WWI. Unfortunately, troops that were cut off
physically still maintained communication by radio and the effect was not so
effective.
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."