“And how does this finally overcome greed?”
“Well, greed is all about ourselves; it’s about desire that is completely selfish. At its most extreme, greed is about the death of all love except self love. And when real love shows up, greed begins to retract and wither. So in the end, the orcs who are completely greedy have nothing left but all the stuff they’ve taken. None of their own kind even trust them anymore, much less love them. And they don’t trust each other. So they all shut themselves up in their towers of jewelry and junk and die there, miserable and alone, and in the dark—because they’re too stingy to burn a candle.”
Frank looked up and saw an expression on Gia’s face that he had never seen before: it was so grave and yet so passionate that, for a moment, he was almost a bit fearful. Then she nodded, “And so they turned their face from the light, from hope. And they died. Because, you know, your parable is only superficially about love, Frank.”
“It is?” he squawked.
She nodded slowly. “Why do we love? Why do women do this?” She caressed her increasingly round belly. “Oh, there are animal drives in us, to be certain. But even a miserable flea-ridden alley cat loves her kittens, and gives them to the world as a statement of hope, hope in the persistence of her own kind. And women must love more than that, for unlike the beasts of the field, we know full well the dangers of birth. And we know it so much better now, than in your time.
“Think on this, Frank: what purely selfish woman would ever consent to having a child? Why would they bear that risk, even if they were resolved to take no responsibility for the infant, to consign it to the hands of servants and wet nurses? Perhaps noblewomen of great houses have sufficient reason: they are driven to it by the need to cement alliances with comingled blood. But these are but a very few of the many millions of women who embrace new life in their own bodies. And why? For what?”
She came and sat next to him. He suddenly felt like a boy in the presence of a prophet—except Frank seriously doubted that there had ever been any prophet as sexy as his Giovanna. “I will tell you why we do it, Frank Stone, my husband. In the short-term, we do it to celebrate love, but from deep in our souls, we do it to embrace hope. And that is why your story will be read by, and leave its mark upon, millions of people.”
“It will?”
“Yes, Frank, and do you know why?”
“Uh…no. Not at all.”
She smiled. “Because women will understand it. Oh, men will read it and make speeches about how it reveals the moral bankruptcy of the Spanish and all the rest. But women will read—or, sadly, mostly hear—it as well, and they will know what it really means: that you have touched the cores of good and evil and laid them bare for us to see in this allegory of our current situation. And, hearing its message of hope, they will spread news of this book, will keep it in their husbands’ and childrens’ ears.” She smiled. “Men may believe they rule households, but women determine most of what moves through them, including the traffic of ideas. Once they embrace something, it will always be present there. And they will embrace this book, Frank.”
She stood, a little imperious again. “And many will want to embrace you as well, I’m sure. I suppose I must provide you with sufficient incentives to resist those temptations—in addition to leaving you uncastrated, that is.” Even though she smiled as she said it, Frank felt his scrotum contract and make a reasonable effort at ascending back into his body.
She put her arms around him very gently and held him tightly. “You know I am joking, my love, except in this regard: you are soon to become a very famous man, I think. And there will be many women who will want you in their beds, in their lives.”
Frank scoffed. “Well, that’s too bad for them—since there is only one woman whose life and bed I want to be in.”
She looked at him gravely. “Yes. I know. That is why I can joke about these things at all.”
He touched her face. “Thank you, Giovanna.”
“You thank me? For what?”
“For being the real genius behind the book.”
She smiled and shook her head. “No, Frank. I am no artist. I am not even a great thinker. You are both, and you have written a wonderful book. I simply told you what it was really about.” She laughed. “You have an up-time saying, ‘you cannot see the forest because you are too close to the trees?’ Each word you put on these pages was as if you were planting another tree in the forest that is your book. How could you also be expected to see the entirety of your creation when you are so very close to it?”
1636: Marine Radio in the Mediterranean by Jack Carroll
In "Marine Radio in the 1632 Universe" (GG 52) we took a broad look at what would be possible in the way of long-distance radio communication during the seventeenth century's prolonged deprivation of high-frequency ionospheric skip. Much of the focus in that article was on northern Europe and the Atlantic.
Now our fictional universe has moved on to 1636, and the governments of the USE, Austria, Venice, and other potentially friendly powers can see trouble looming from the Ottoman Empire. Military services plan for foreseeable contingencies, and we authors and fans should do likewise. It's time to take a more focused look at radio propagation in the Mediterranean region, and what would be feasible with equipment we can expect to be available from Grantville's electronics industry by 1636.
The USE Navy could very well find it necessary to operate in the Adriatic. To begin with, seventeenth-century conditions favor seaborne logistics, which are always a concern to navies. The Adriatic, in particular, gives access to ports all along the Italian and Balkan states, and depending on Ottoman objectives, it could be a route to attack Venice or Venetian commerce. Then there are the implications for land campaigns. Trieste became important to the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the late nineteenth century, because there's a fairly reasonable route between Trieste and Vienna that doesn't cross high mountain passes. OTL Austria used it to build a railroad, and turned Trieste into the empire's one real seaport. Even developed as a wagon road, either side in the coming struggle could find logistic uses for that route or want to deny it to the other.
The Aegean is a less likely theatre of operations, but not beyond the bounds of possibility. A naval threat to the Dardanelles could compel the Ottomans to pull back significant forces to guard the capital's logistic lifeline, in the same way that the Doolittle bombing raid on Tokyo in 1942 did little actual damage, but forced the Japanese to bring some of their forces home.
The rest of the Mediterranean is the thoroughfare by which naval forces from the USE and possible allied powers would travel to their destinations and be supplied, and so itself could become a scene of conflict.
As we've seen in past novels and stories, radio is essential to the USE Navy's effectiveness and is rapidly becoming so for the Kalmar powers and the Dutch. It's time, then, to work out an estimate of what the capabilities and limitations of the navy's radio communications might be, given the nature of the geography, the propagation modes available in the region, and the equipment and operator skills available as the time for action approaches. We also need to think about how far advanced the Venetians might be in radio by this date.
The military services and commercial interests are mostly interested in message-handling, so that's what we'll focus on. AM broadcasting uses the same propagation modes we'll discuss here, but requires much more power, both because of the greater bandwidth of a voice signal and hence the more natural noise that will get through the receiver, and because a much better signal-to-noise ratio is needed to make out the subtle modulation of voices and music than to hear the full-on, full-off swings of Morse Code. But where communication stations lead the way, broadcasting will eventually follow.
So let's look at what what might be possible in the Mediterranean region within the constraints of radio propagation physics and the Grantville electronics industry's growing capabilities as the time for action approaches.
Communication routes and p
ropagation modes
The Adriatic is a particularly likely place for naval conflict to occur; therefore it's particularly relevant to run the numbers on what's physically possible there, and what equipment and antennas would be needed for fleet communications and ship-to-shore work. As we shall see, the shape of the sea and the distances make it well-suited to ground wave propagation across salt water. That's very fortunate, because ground wave at sea is only modestly affected by season, time of day, and weather.
The Aegean, being considerably smaller than the Adriatic, is even more favorable for regional ground wave communication.
Communication between the fleet (or a friendly shore station on Venetian territory) and the USE's industrial base at home is a very different problem. That route crosses a considerable stretch of land. Ground wave losses are much higher across land than across salt water, especially across poorly conductive European land. That greatly limits ground wave's range, and as we'll see, the numbers don't work for ground wave at this NTL date.
Communication direct from the USE or Venice to the Aegean is a similar problem. Either path would have to cross too much land, making ground wave an impractical proposition.
Ground wave isn't the only propagation mode that's useful across land, of course. Knife-edge diffraction is a major workhorse for land mobile communication. It works by bending a small portion of a signal's power over the tops of mountain ranges. But it, too, has practical distance limitations, and Grantville's electronics industry may not be making the high-frequency tubes it requires in time for the Ottoman attacks.
Of course, limited-range stations can be sited to form relay networks. Relaying over the Alps, however, would be a formidable problem at this period, both politically and logistically.
And that leaves us with skywave, available in quiet-sun years only on frequencies below the AM broadcast band, and mostly at night―the place in mid-hop where it bounces off the ionosphere needs to be in darkness for an hour or two before the path will open.
Published data shows a nightly opening lasting up to 8 hours. A single hop typically covers up to 2000 km with sufficient power; longer distances generally require multiple hops. When the intermediate ground reflection is off seawater, the losses are low enough to support paths of two or three hops in these medium- and low-frequency bands. Unfortunately, none of the routes we're contemplating have large bodies of seawater in the right place to launch a second hop, so we'll do only single-hop calculations.
To achieve high efficiency, these low frequencies require tall transmitting antennas and large radial ground wire arrays, which are expensive and time-consuming to erect and impractical to relocate. All this makes skywave good for logistic support and strategic communication, but not for operational command in real time. Battles will be commanded from the theatre of action, not from navy headquarters back home.
Onward to the numbers
The previous Marine Radio article covered a good deal of background information, terminology, and basic antenna math, which we won't repeat here. We'll just proceed to the noise, path loss, and power requirement calculations for our Mediterranean routes. As in the previous article, we'll assume that the mission requirement is to handle Code message traffic reliably at 25 words per minute at any time of day or night, though not without making the radio operators work hard to hear the signal when the atmospheric noise is at its summertime worst.
Frequency bands
At the distances we're concerned with, there's no need to consider the lowest radio bands, where full-size antennas are impractical even on land, and the less efficient shortened antennas are required. We'll examine only the popular marine radio bands at 500 KHz, 2 MHz, and 4 MHz.
Atmospheric noise
Electromagnetic noise is what a radio signal has to overcome. At the frequencies we're examining, the earth's atmosphere is the dominant RF noise source. The noise is generated mainly by thunderstorms, primarily in the tropics and in some continental interiors. The lightning bolt is both the RF source and the transmitting antenna, a miles-tall filament of ionized air powered by megavolts and kiloamps.
The noise level is reasonably uniform across the Mediterranean region, about 2 db stronger than in northern Europe, so that correspondingly more power is necessary to cover the same distance. (Strong local thunderstorms can blanket any man-made signal for a few hours; that could be a plot device.)
As before, for our purposes we're concerned with the noise the receiving antenna will pick up in a 100 Hz bandwidth. That assumes a nearly ideal filter just wide enough to pass the signal, with a flat top and steep skirts. Can Grantville's electronics industry produce that kind of an audio filter for the navy in time for the campaign? Maybe. If not, more noise will get through, and correspondingly more power will be required. But this gives us a theoretical limit.
From the noise level table in the previous article:
Basic transmitting antennas
The basic full-size vertical antenna at 500 KHz and up is a quarter of a wavelength tall, centered on a ground plane of quarter-wavelength radial wires. At 500 KHz it would be 150 meters tall, which is just about the practical limit for an affordable wood lattice tower. That won't fit on a ship, so a ship has to transmit on this band with a less efficient shortened vertical, with a wire top hat strung between the mastheads. But a quarter wave vertical at 2 MHz would be 37.5 meters high, and just under 19 meters at 4 MHz; a full-size ship's mast can be lofty enough to support the former, and even a Wild-class courier schooner has masts tall enough for the latter.
The highest gain achievable in a one-piece vertical antenna occurs at a height of 0.64 wavelength. This is conventionally called a 5/8 wave vertical. A 5/8 wave antenna would be 96 meters high at 2 MHz, or 48 meters high at 4 MHz. These are certainly feasible on land.
For this analysis we're ignoring sophisticated antenna arrays. It's early days, and single-tower vertical antennas are what we can expect the industrial base to be able to build and get working properly.
Basic receiving antennas
The simplest thing to do is use the transmitting antenna for receiving. Ships almost always do this, except when using a direction-finding loop antenna for navigation purposes. At these frequencies, almost any antenna will pick up more noise from the atmosphere than the receiver generates. Antenna directivity will increase the received signal strength with little effect on the noise, however, assuming uniform spatial distribution of the noise.
Well-funded commercial and government shore stations can afford the space for large directional receiving antennas. In this article, however, we'll assume that the shore stations we're concerned with are temporary or recently established, and haven't had time to build the complex antenna farms of mature split-site coastal stations.
Required signal-to-noise ratio
The Radio Propagation Handbook contains a table of signal-to-noise ratios relative to the noise in a 1 Hz bandwidth, recommended for different grades of service with several types of modulation used in commercial service. We'll confine our analysis to Morse code, because that requires much less bandwidth than any form of voice communication and so demands much less transmitter power than any alternative available in the first decade of the NTL. For hand-sent Morse code the handbook gives +36 db for "operator-to-operator" service. But commercial Morse code at 25 WPM implies a typical receiver bandwidth of roughly 100 Hz, not 1 Hz, so the noise power passing through the filter is 100 times greater, or 20 db stronger. Hence, the signal-to-noise ratio in the actual bandwidth needed to achieve that grade of service is +16 db. A good operator could copy through a somewhat worse signal-to-noise ratio, but it would be tiring and probably result in errors and dropouts.
The same table recommends +45 db above the noise in a 1 Hz bandwidth for "good commercial service," which would be +25 db above the noise in a 100 Hz channel.
We'll use +16 db as the criterion for our basic power / path loss / antenna gain calculations.
Baseline case: MF/HF ground wave be
tween fixed stations across salt water
The calculations underlying the following table are based on the following conditions:
On the 500 KHz band, shore stations transmit with a quarter-wave vertical.
On the 2 MHz and 4 MHz bands, shore stations transmit with a 5/8 wave vertical.
The transmitting antennas are used for receiving.
The criterion for successful communication is a +16 db signal-to-noise ratio in a 100 Hz bandwidth at the receiver terminals, after all gains and losses are accounted for.
Since the published propagation curves show the signal strength in terms of db relative to 1 microvolt per meter versus distance from a 1 KW transmitter using a short vertical antenna, we must first correct for the gain of the assumed transmitting antenna, then refer to the curves for converting field strength to the power an isotropic antenna will pick up at that wavelength, and correct for the gain of the receiving antenna. We can then compare the received signal power to the received noise power.
For each path we will show signal strength taken from the curves, then the power received at that wavelength taking into account the transmitting and receiving antenna gains, followed by the noise level, the resulting signal-to-noise ratio at that location, and finally the power needed to achieve a signal-to-noise ratio of just +16 db during the hours of highest noise.
We use the straight saltwater path from Venice to Corfu to represent the longest ground wave distance in the Adriatic. We don't consider ground wave from Venice beyond that point, because the signal would run onto the Greek land mass, which weakens the signal rapidly. We also do the numbers for the short path across the Adriatic, which would be of interest for radio navigation using coastal beacons or direction-finding stations; a typical distance for that would be about 1.5 times the width of the sea.
Grantville Gazette, Volume 66 Page 18
