Word: beacons
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Four dashes, repeated for one minute every three minutes, is the radio beacon signal of the lightship that guards dread Nantucket Shoals. The first lightship was stationed off the shoals in 1854. Three years ago Lightship No. 117, a 132-ft. craft equipped with every device science could think of to protect transatlantic shipping, was launched at Charleston, S. C. and took up its rough and lonely post 40 mi. southeast of Nantucket Island...
...morning last week fog curled in thick shrouds around the little vessel. Useless was the 16,000 candlepower electric light glaring on her masthead. Every 15 seconds her fog whistle emitted a mournful blast. The beacon signal, sounded by a motor-driven key controlled by clockwork, went out continuously instead of on the fair weather schedule of 15 min. every hour. The submarine oscillograph, synchronized with the beacon, throbbed cyclic warnings through the water...
...incoming liner steering for a light-ship finds its direction by rotating the loop antenna of the radiocompass. The beacon is strongest when the loop is parallel to the direction of the signals, weakest when it is at right angles. Since sound travels much more slowly through water than radio waves through air, the distance of the lightship can be computed by noting the time between reception of the beacon and oscillograph signals...
...ship is unable to stop in time to prevent a collision she is going too fast for the conditions, yet in this unique instance there are many extenuating circumstances. The "Olympic" which had navigated form Liverpool by dead reckoning until she was able to ascertain her position from radio beacons on this coast, was proceeding toward the Nantucket Lightship guided by its radio beacon, planning to alter course as soon as she passed the light. The usual procedure in such cases is to determine the proximity of the light by the increasing strength of the radio and submarine signals...
...road, but neither heard the other until immediately before the collisions although in normal circumstances their whistles would carry two or three miles. That the radio operators of the "Olympic" were efficiently alert is evidenced by the fact that the ship followed the course of the radio beacon accurately--top accurately; at the same time these very operators were keeping a sharp look-out for any change of strength of signals, which was not detected. The combination of the unfavorable atmospheric conditions and the extreme difficulty of discorning any change of strength in radio signals with in half a mile...