It actually took a bit of time to get the radio station to the point where broadcasts could successfully occur. The first hurdle I had to clear was tuning the entire circuit. I had to create and tune larger voltmeters and ammeters to handle the higher voltage coming from the power plant. The reason for needing the higher strength measuring equipment was so that I could use my tuning equations to match the antenna size to the eventual circuit components. That whole process took just under a month totaling 26 days.

When the time came to actually attempt the first broadcast, I decided to limit the initial testing to our island for ease of scheduling since there was a decent chance I'd have to do some fine tuning on all the receivers. That ultimately ended up being the right call, as the first broadcast failed on all but the nearest receiver, which was situated on the summit. It's possible that the other receivers might have picked up a faint signal if they were perfectly tuned, but going to each would have been a waste, based on what I figured out. This test occurred two days after everything had been set up.

It took another four days before I really got things dialed in. Despite my best efforts, it seems I hadn't quite tuned the circuit right for the antenna, leading to poor power conversion to radio waves. During the tuning period, I utilized the closest receiver as a guide, adjusting both circuits to match a little at a time until the signal became far louder on the receiver, indicating that the antenna was converting electricity to radio waves more effectively.

Using the new tuning parameters, I took another day going around the island to all the receivers and tuned them in to the new frequency. The next day, I ran a follow up test, which worked as well as I could hope for. All the receivers were able to pick up and hear what I was saying over the speakers. The content was mundane, I mostly counted and then would say preset phrases that the demons stationed at the receivers were to record and relay to me afterwards to determine if they heard everything or not. There was some amount of quality to be desired at all locations, but this likely came down to the quality of the various electronic components, including the microphone and speakers. This is yet another area that will likely benefit from research from the academy.

We've scheduled for a receiver to be delivered to the trade city on the mainland, as well as having two receivers moved to each island, one on the near side, and one on the far side. In thirteen days, I'll be doing a continuous broadcast for 24 hours, part of which will occur during the monthly eclipse which should be overhead. We'll then do a second 24 hour transmission four days later, to compare the results. While I considered including tests on ships, I have pushed that off until a later date. We're already having to dedicate multiple ships to this project as is to transport all the transmitters to the different islands and the mainland. If we hadn't lost multiple ships to leviathans during the final stages of the war, then we probably would have planned to do those tests in parallel.

For the second set of tests, rather than relying on memory of the demons running the receivers, I had to draft a handful of the demons who knew how to write to go along. We still have quite low literacy rates, so I ended pulling people from quite a few different jobs, with a few ministers even being recruited as part of the effort. This mostly came down to the fact that we were going to have two 24 hour broadcasts, which would be far too long for anyone to remember all the details of the transmissions.

Unlike the previous shorter tests, for this one, I set myself up a clock, and deliberately kept to a strict schedule, broadcasting different phrases every half hour, which purposefully covered most of the phonetic sounds in the demon language. I had just under two weeks to come up with enough phrases and sentences to utilize for this, which ultimately was plenty of time.

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

The first remote tests began at the first day of the month, the second set of tests occurred on the fourth, and the results finally all made it back to the island on the eleventh for me to review. We gained a lot of valuable information from the test results which, to me at least, justified the amount of valuable personnel we had to dedicate to it.

It was clear that quality decayed with distance. Thanks to volume controls on the amplifier circuit, they were able to at least adjust volume to be audible, but the more they had to amplify the signal, the rougher it became. The far side of the two further islands in our chain had a rough time recording anything, with only a few sounds being audible through static. Even the near side of the furthest island had some trouble with a lot of the transmissions during the day.

At night, transmissions seemed a little clearer based on the data we collected. There were two really interesting findings though. First, while at night transmission quality was a little better, it didn't seem like we got that much extra transmission distance. That could be for a number of reasons, but regardless, we didn't observe any noticeable bouncing of the signal further from the source. Second, though very exceptionally faint, during the eclipse, we could pick up a tiny amount of the transmission at the trade city on the mainland, and the far side of the islands had minor but noticeable quality improvements.

In theory, if we built a counterpart antenna in the trade city, it might be able to detect the signal enough to be usable. In theory, we could use each antenna as a receiver as well if we established set times for each to be a broadcaster and receiver. That would allow two way communications multiple times a day, rather than having to wait the handful of days for a message to be transmitted on a ship. In practice though, that would require a lot of infrastructure for something that may not work. Perhaps in the future, if we start using more radio on our own islands, and the technology develops more, then it could become practical.

The next plan is to do a handful of marine tests with radio to determine if we should put them on our ships or not. After that, we'll probably relegate it to emergency military broadcasts for a time. There are a lot of potential uses for the technology, but right now the main one is military communications. While we plan when to do marine tests, I'm going to be working on our own version of a phonetic alphabet based on the demon language. That way we can relay important information more clearly, even if the radio signal quality is poor. It will probably take a while to develop, as it requires a bit of linguistic analysis based on what sounds came through more clearly than others, and also making sure that each word is distinct enough that they isn't ambiguity in their sounds.

I ended up doing three different naval tests over the course of a month. The first ones gave somewhat similar results to the island tests, though there was a noticeable drop in quality of signal a bit sooner than the islands themselves. This likely had to do with how signal was actually reaching the receiver when line of sight was broken. So the following two tests involved using new antennas integrated onto the ships themselves, with the final of the tests involving fine tuned designs from the second set. That ultimately led to the ships having a bit better range than the standalone receivers with smaller antennas. At the very least now, our ships can receive radio transmissions from Kembora anywhere within our territorial waters.

I've also finished the phonetic alphabet, which should make communications clearer when necessary. I plan on working on retrofitting all our ships with the new radio antennas and circuits, and then also installing receivers in all our military locations. After that, I'll have to evaluate what project would be best for me to work on next. In all likelihood, it's going to be industry related. We're still a long ways from the academy being functional, so the next best thing for me to do might be to go to our trade city for a bit to work on rail systems and setting up the kinds of factories that would be useful for us to have on the mainland.

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.