Talk:Wireless Set Number 10

The Mark II units shifted this to 4480 and 4840
This seems to refer to the receiver band, in which case it is narrowed not shifted. Alternatively, if it refers to the transmitter frequencies, then that needs to be made clearer. These frequencies are not given in the cited source (WW). Nice article though! catslash (talk) 23:42, 9 August 2021 (UTC)

Testing WS10
My father was involved in the development and testing of WS10 during WW2. He was a Captain in the Royal Signals and a physics graduate from Imperial College where he had studied what passed for digital electronics in those days under Wynn-Williams (C. E. Wynn-Williams).

While he was still alive, he told me that he was sent to Northern Ireland, to Lough Neagh in particular, to test a new kind of radio system that was being developed to support the invasion.

He didn't explain why Lough Neagh was important, but as we now understand what was expected of WS10, testing its operation over water but far enough from coastlines and possible detection would provide an explanation.

(as this is personal testimony, not a reference to a primary source, it is only posted here on the talk page)

Wrighrp (talk) 22:47, 20 February 2022 (UTC)

Not PCM
There are several references to this device using pulse code modulation, PCM. First, this is unlikely, since microwaves or radio waves in general can't transmit PCM directly, since it's inherently a digital or other symbol-based encoding (implied by the "C" in PCM). Second, historical accounts I find on the internet say it transmitted by pulse width modulation, PWM, which can be readily transmitted, and was a common method at the time. If it were sent using PWM, an analog method, there would be no reason for it to be PCM at any stage.

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/491812 echos this in discussing Alec Reeves PCM invention: "The inventor of PCM, Alec H. Reeves, was seeking a modulation technique which could match the capabilities, and the limitations, of the newly-developed microwave channels. By a deep irony of technological history, PCM in its basic form turned out to be ill-adapted to the microwave channels which emerged from pioneer investigations into practical use." This is at odds with the article, which states that PCM "offered a simple way to encode the signals on a magnetron".

From http://www.r-type.org/articles/art-289.htm, based on a Wireless World article from 1946: "Signalling Equipment No. 10 which forms part of the Army Wireless Set No. 10, was described under the title ' Pulse Width Modulation ' in the June issue of Wireless World. It was explained how eight audio-frequency channels were made to modulate in width a series of rectangular pulses in the pulser or sending section of the equipment and how the separator recovered the audio channels from the received width-modulated pulses. The width modulated pulses produced by the pulser are used to modulate a magnetron UHF sender working at a frequency of about 4.5 GHz. The receiver is of the super-heterodyne type and the pulses in its output are passed to the separator section of the Signalling Equipment No. 10." Codehead1 (talk) 16:41, 4 September 2023 (UTC)