Arctic Radio

For several weeks no receiving station in North America was able to pick up messages from Donald Mix, radio operator of the Bowdoin, Dr. Donald B. MacMillan's boat now in the Arctic (TIME, Sept. 10). Fin- ally an amateur operator at Prince Rupert, B. C., 2,200 miles from Greenland, and later the station of the Calgary (Alberta) Herald, caught faint and fragmentary messages in Morse, reporting the Bowdoin frozen solid in the ice floes of Smith Sound, at about 79° latitude, some 706 miles from the Pole. This is the strait separating northwest Greenland from the large group of islands called Ellesmere Land. Captain MacMillan is not seeking to reach the Pole but will stay in the Arctic zone two years for scientific observations. Winter is now upon the expedition, with its several months of continuous darkness.

Radio experts are of the opinion that the cause of the prolonged difficulty in communicating with the MacMillan party was the long Arctic Summer. Not all amateurs realize that the sun's rays affect detrimentally radio transmission in daylight by expanding the atmosphere and partly disintegrating it (a process called ionization).