20 



along a straight course meanwhile, the ship's track provides a baseline for tri- 

 angulation and ranging. These possibilities are being looked into at Woods 

 Hole. 



Beyond the problems of design of any radio telemetering system is the 

 purely administrative problem of obtaining a suitable radio frequency alloca- 

 tion. According to present views, this should lie in the 1 to 3 megacycle range 

 to provide some overlap of groundwave and skywave transmissions. Thus if a 

 buoy drifts out of the groundwave reception area it may still be heard on sky- 

 waves. It seems improbable that pulsed signals would be permitted in this 

 crowded range of radio frequencies because of the bandwidth requirements. 

 Certain channels may be available, however, for continuous wave transmissions 

 at low power. As radio telemetering systems are envisioned at the moment, 

 the fraction of time on the air would be small but since the transmitters in the 

 buoys would be unattended and scheduled either automatically or by interroga- 

 tion from a ship, provision should be made for shutting them down in case of 

 failure of the transmitter scheduling system. With the increasing use of air- 

 craft in support of oceanographic ships, receivers aloft may prove useful if 

 ranges become extreme or frequency allocations prove to be too high for suc- 

 cessful surface reception. 



Since such drifting apparatus is but an amplification of the ordinary cur- 

 rent pole or current cross, and an ocean station is equivalent to an anchored 

 ship, nothing very new is being tried. Yet, by adding radio to these otherwise 

 time-honored methods, we may shift our point of observation almost at will. 



