Jessie called Amy, and they went up into the little wireless room behind the wheelhouse where everything about the plant but the batteries were in place. This was a very different outfit from that in the great station at the old lighthouse on Station Island, which they had visited several days before.
“If we only knew as much as that operator does about wireless,” sighed Jessie to her chum, “there might be some hope of our untangling all this and finding out the trouble.”
“He said he had been five years at it and didn’t know so very much,” Amy reminded her dryly.
“Oh, there will always be something new to learn about radio, of course,” her chum agreed. “But if we had his training in the fundamentals of radio, we would be equipped to handle such a mess as this. To tell you the truth, Amy, I think these two boys have made a cat’s cradle of this thing.”
“And Darry spent more than a year aboard a destroyer and was trained to ‘listen in’ for submarines and all that!”
“An entirely different thing from knowing how to rig wireless,” commented Jessie, getting down on her knees to look under the shelf to which the posts were screwed. “Oh, dear!” she added, as she bumped her head. “I wish this boat wouldn’t pitch so.”
“So say we all of us. What can I do, Jess?”
“Not a thing—for a moment. Let me see: The general rules of radio are easily remembered. The incoming oscillations that have been intercepted by the antenna above the roof of the house are applied across the grid and filament of the detector tube——”
“That’s this jigger here,” put in Amy, as Jessie struggled up again.
“Yes. That is the tube. Through the relay action of the tube, an amplified current flows through the plate circuit—here. Now,” added Jessie thoughtfully, “if we couple this plate circuit back—No! This is a simple circuit. It is like our old one, Amy. We can’t get much action out of this set. It is not like the new one we are putting in the bungalow.“