Re: Market Garden Radios
If I can add my tuppence worth, for which I have no links btw. As Martin correctly said, radio was still very much in it's infancy in WW2. Scientists on both sides were concerned at the amount of interference experienced on the mainly AM bands in those days. Enemy action was blamed, but on further investigation it was realised that the Sun might be to blame.
Without boring you too much with the science bit, solar cycles run in approx. 11 year periods. The number of sun spots visible influences radio frquencies, but at the end of a cycle the numbers die away contacts are very much localised. When the next one starts the numbers build up over a fairly short period; at the cycle's height, the wavebands can be total chaos. The solar cycle in 1947 was regarded as 'phenomenal' due to the way it enabled long distance contacts on frequencies where these wouldn't usually be expected, and until fairly recently was the benchmark against which the latest cycle would be measured.
I have no idea when this 1947 cycle started without looking it up later, but is it possible that Arnhem coincided with the end of the previous solar cycle and this exacerbated the geological problems JC mentioned?
I could be totally wrong of course, but it just occurred to me.
edit: Solar cycle 17 lasted from Sept. 1933 - Feb. 1944. Cycle 18 lasted from Feb.1944 to Feb. 1954. Sunspot numbers probably wouldn't have reached a significant level until late 1945. So Arnhem coincided with a natural 'dead' period in radio terms which might have exacerbated any technical/local geological problems IMHO.
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