Dr. A. Hoyt Taylor: "Shark River Inlet"

System of wires buried in Shark River inlet to improve reception

When I arrived at Belmar, reception was being carried on with a few small elevated antennas, but we immediately started installation of a system of buried wires laid in the Shark River inlet, pointed away from the receiving station towards the northern part of Europe. The receiving house was located on the verge of the Shark River, which was a broad estuary at that point, only a few miles from the ocean, and very shallow. This was just right for our underwater wires, because the water was fairly salty. If the wires had been put at a much greater depth than two feet, the signals would have been too weak to receive, even with considerable amplification. We ran into this very difficulty at Chatham, because there we had to lay the wires cut to the sea, and when a four foot tide came in, the signals got so weak that they were unusable.

The layout in the rugged country around Bar Harbor Station was not suitable for ground wires so reception there was usually most satisfactory with some form of loop antenna. Radio Gunner Raymond Cole did some remarkably good work with loop antennae combined with elevated antennae. A number of other antennae, some of them long low wires, were also in effective use at Chatham and Bar Harbor.

These stations were connected by leased wire to Belmar, so that whenever we had difficulty in receiving from France or Italy, we would call on Chatham, and particularly on Bar Harbor, for help in the reception. Bar Harbor not only had the advantage of being several hundred miles nearer to Europe, but due to high latitude, was much freer from atmospheric disturbances (static). Bar Harbor location was for years most valuable for handling European long wave signals.

Too much credit cannot be given to Lieutenant Fabri and his aides for developing this station and especially to Fabri for contributing, out of his own pocket, many things which added to the efficiency of the operators at this place. His principal aide was Warrant Officer (we called them Radio Gunners in those days) Raymond Cole. He is now a commander in the Navy, has had a long and distinguished career in radio, and has done magnificent work as the Head of the Radio and Radar School at the Naval Research Laboratory, which work has been recognized by his receipt of the Legion of Merit medal.

In addition to taking the French and Italian code messages, we had to run continuous intercept on the high power German alternator station at Nauen. This station spent most of its time broadcasting propaganda in English, much of it undoubtedly designed to influence the German population of the United States and stir up trouble in Mexico. It usually transmitted on a wavelength of 12,600 meters, (about 24 K.C.) but at certain periods of the day, for about twenty minutes, it would suddenly go off the air. We often wondered what the Germans did during this interval, so I ordered a receiver man to go on search and explore all possible bands to see if he came upon any other frequency, and particularly to look for the double frequency, which would be at 6300 meters, or somewhat less than 48 K.C. Sure enough, we found Nauen broadcasting a very queer four letter code for twenty minutes during these intervals. There was no question but that this was a special code directing the operation of submarines. We copied thousands of code words and forwarded them to Washington, but I am of the impression that this particular code was never broken, although other German codes certainly were.

The fact that we had to copy so many messages in a very difficult code meant that we had to have extremely high accuracy on the part of our receiving operators. True, we could call on Chatham and Bar Harbor for cor-rections, and occasionally on Tuckerton and Sayville, when they were not busy transmitting and could stand receiver watch, but this took time. The result was that we picked our operators with great care. We had our choice of the best men from each graduating class of the Harvard Radio School. Men who weren’t careful and didn't show signs of speed and accuracy were promptly transferred, either to sea or to the armed guard, at New York. To insure copy on especially important messages, at times when the static was heavy, we usually doubled the operators on a given watch.

One very great advantage of the buried wire system of reception is that wires thus buried will not resonate, but rather are aperiodic and can be simultaneously used on a great many different frequencies. Thus for the first. time the Navy had multiple reception. We were able to put as many different receivers, on as many different frequencies as we wished, on one of those underground or underwater wires. A further advantage lay in the fact that we had no fear of making copy during violent local thunder storms, whereas the elevated antenna would usually have to be grounded and cut off from the receiving set to prevent injury to set or to personnel. In fact, the local thunder storms never caused us any serious interruption.
Page updated December 30, 2003  page created September 02, 2000