Talk:Wireless Set Number 10

A fact from Wireless Set Number 10 appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 9 August 2021 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that although the Germans boasted that they captured British radio traffic with ease, the Wireless Set Number 10 was so secure that they never even knew of its existence?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2021/August. The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Wireless Set, Number 10.

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Did you know nomination

The following is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was: promoted by Kingsif (talk) 21:39, 4 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

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Article history

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Wireless Set No. 10

... that the British Army's Wireless Set No. 10 (pictured) was the first microwave relay, forwarding telephone signals across Europe? Source: Cambrook
- ALT1:... that although the Germans boasted they captured British radio traffic with ease, the Wireless Set No. 10 (pictured) was so secure they never even knew it existed? Source: WW1945b
- ALT2:... that Bernard Montgomery lauded the Wireless Set No. 10 microwave relay (pictured), saying its value "cannot be overestimated"? Source: SDRE2002

Comment: open to more hooky hooks

Created by Maury Markowitz (talk). Self-nominated at 11:41, 17 July 2021 (UTC).[reply]

Taking a look... Girth Summit _(blether) 15:57, 18 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]
The article is new enough, plenty long enough, free from copyright issues that I can detect (I cannot access the offline sources, but the only hit that Earwig picked up was the attributed quote), the image is PD and appropriately tagged. The content is well-referenced. The hooks are interesting, and are cited within the article. Overall, I'd be willing to pass this, but for a few issues with the content which I think should be addressed before moving forward. Specifically:

The first sentence of the lead kind of drives a coach and horses through MOS:SOB. I wonder whether this could be mitigated by a rewording.
Since this is a British army device, would it make sense to use BrEng per MOS:ENGVAR? 'Meters' rather than 'metres' jumped out at me, there may be other things that need changing.
There were a couple of sentences that didn't quite work for me. I wonder whether the text could do with one more read-through and copy edit.
A long-distance telephone conversation might make due with as little as 4 kHz of bandwidth... Make due with? Was 'make do with' intended? Perhaps a bit informal if so?

It was just as the magnetron was being created, a solution to the modulation problem arrived. Change the beginning, or replace the comma with the word 'that'.

If these were addressed I'd be in good-to-go territory. Girth Summit _(blether) 16:21, 18 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Girth Summit: all should be fixed now. Nice proofing! Maury Markowitz (talk) 17:16, 19 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Maury Markowitz I made a couple of further slight tweaks, please revert if you disagree. The first sentence of the lead still has the slight issue of having multiple adjacent wikilinks, but that's not a show-stopper for DYK. Happy to AGF on the offline sources and pass this. Girth Summit _(blether) 12:12, 20 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

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)[reply]

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)[reply]

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)[reply]