Re: Qualtiy of wartime voice communications?

hancock4@xxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
> In reading a history of Bell Labs History ("Service in War and Peace")
> there was a discussion of voice quality over telephone lines and radio
> circuits.
>
> In laymen's terms, it appears that due to wartime shortages, quality
> was sacrificed to the bare minimum to handle more calls.
>
> In technical terms, for telephone communications, they narrowed the
> bandwidth normally available for voice calls from 3 KHz to 2 KHz. This
> enabled them to squeeze more calls over a single line.
> I don't think local calls would've been affected, but long distance
> calls over a great distance would've been of poor quality. (How much
> so I can't say. The history said the frequency that was cut out was
> the least important for voice calls.)
>
> Of course, in those years long distance telephone was quite expensive
> and infrequently used by everyday people. Servicemen did splurge on
> one last call home before shipping out and business people and govt
> made calls for war contracts. Despite the expense, long distance lines
> were jammed during the war and the Bell System ran frequent
> advertisements asking people NOT to make long distance calls and to
> keep them short. Operators would break into long conversations and ask
> the parties to end the call.
>
> In military radio communications, they also made the bands narrow and
> squeezed them close together. This required that the components of
> radio transmitters and receivers had to be much better than in the past
> (tighter performance tolerances) so that the narrow frequencies would
> be properly accessed. Manufacturing the radio sets proved to be a
> challenge because performance tolerances were so high.
>
> I wonder how well the radios worked in the field.

My only experience was with walkie-talkies. They were terribly unreliable. I took a
one-day course on how to "fix" them in the field. The most common problem was that a
jumper plug at the bottom of the radio kept coming loose. The plug connected the battery
pack to the radio proper; you would think they could find a fix for it. It was inside the
canvas bag, which made the "repair" a bit harder to do. And the battery life was too
short. On our last maneuvers before we shipped out to the Pacific theater, we were
supposed to be defending a beach on the California coast, north of San Diego. I was
assigned to patrol the beach at the base of a cliff. When the tide came in, there was no
beach, only shallow water. And the walkie-talkie I was supposed to report in with never
worked. I just kept wading and hoped that somebody would come down to see why I wasn't
calling in, which didn't happen. Oh well, it was only a game.

On the battle field, telephone wires laid down on the ground were a main communication
mode. The other was backpack radios, which were more reliable but also the person wearing
it was easy for the enemy to spot.

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