On four different occasions, while listening upon his own set at Warley, he became convinced that some new station had been set up in Moscow for the deliberate purpose of circulating the most glaring untruths concerning events in Ireland. The text of all the messages was now much more bitter than before.
Time after time he sat back in his chair, utterly puzzled.
Here was a dastardly and insidious attack being made upon the country by disseminating false news by wireless, and yet nobody was able to suppress it.
One day, being up in London, he was re-entering Marconi House by the back way in Aldwych, and waiting for the lift, when suddenly an idea crossed his brain. It was only a vague suggestion, yet that night in the rural quiet of his home at Warley he listened in for Moscow, and succeeded in determining the wave-length accurately. It was neither the five thousand mètre “spark” transmission, nor the seven thousand six hundred mètre, but lower—four thousand seven hundred, to be exact.
Evidently Lenin had established an entirely new lie-factory for Britain only.
Night after night Falconer, after his return from the works, listened for Moscow—at seven o’clock and at nine-thirty on “spark,” and at ten-fifteen on continuous-wave. The latter was, however, absent. It had apparently been cut off, and the new anti-British station substituted.
Though Geoffrey saw Sylvia constantly, he said nothing to her regarding the problem. Often when up at Marconi House he met her at half-past five and they had tea at the Savoy or the Carlton, after which he caught his train back into Essex, there to spend the evening in calculating and devising all sorts of new “gadgets,” with the object of improving wireless telephony—the science which must, in the near future, revolutionise commercial communication.
The difference in the strength of signals from the new station of Soviet Russia, as heard in his telephones, puzzled him intensely. As an expert he felt that there was something unusual—hence, to an experimenter, of outstanding interest.
Therefore, he set to work to determine, if possible, the exact location of Lenin’s latest wireless station. With that object he one evening travelled to Lowestoft, and at the direction-finding wireless station there beside the sea, had a long chat with the engineer-in-charge. The station is normally used by aircraft to locate their position if in any difficulty with fog while passing between the terminal aerodrome at Croydon to Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, or other Continental cities. The two direction-finding stations worked in conjunction, one at Chelmsford and one at Pevensey, on the marshes between Eastbourne and Hastings—a triangle between which the sources of a wireless call can be plotted, and exactly determined.
For an hour Geoffrey discussed the problem with Mr. Finlay, the engineer, who at once volunteered to assist. Then Falconer left, and two days later arrived at the Pevensey station, down upon the pebbly beach. Here, too, the engineer-in-charge was eager to render assistance.