Television: On the Bounce

Like scaled stones skittering atop a lake, radio and TV signals ricochet from the electrically charged ionosphere. Some fall to earth in unpredictable patterns that baffle scientists. Because of the ionosphere's quirks, the man with the world's widest range of TV viewing may well be an English electronics engineer named George F. Cole. His address: Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia, thousands of miles from Europe's transmitters.

Cole started to fiddle with complex antennas in 1955, was soon picking up a babble of languages but no picture. Then he set up a great rhombic aerial, a "V" that spread over 80 ft. of ground. In came a ghostly television image from London, 5,200 miles away. When he tried for continental stations, he had even better luck with a standard German TV set and a simple suburban-type aerial. Across his 17-in. screen nickered the Pope celebrating Easter Mass at St. Peter's in Rome, tennis at Wimbledon, opera from Bremen.

This week Engineer Cole is anxiously awaiting delivery of a 90-ft. steel TV aerial mast, which he plans to plant in his garden. Cole already gets plenty of sound from Los Angeles and Boston and an unidentified U.S. town where the air is full of messages for a company called Alexander's Radio Call Service. With his new equipment he hopes to unscramble the zebra-striped images he gets from U.S. TV stations.