Further Atlantic transmissions

While Marconi genuinely believed that he had heard the radio signals from Poldu, they were so weak that it would not have been possible to send a full message across the Atlantic. Unfortunately Marconi was not allowed to repeat the experiment because the local telegraph company exerted its rights to a monopoly and forced him to close his station there.Again Marconi had to move, and this time he set up a new radio communications station on Cape Breton Island. When the station entered service it was difficult to assess its performance because propagation conditions were varying so widely. However it was found that increasing the wavelength improved the performance. As the wavelengths were already of the order of 2000 metres this meant that even larger radio antennas were necessary.The transatlantic project was costing the company vast sums of money, and despite the problems it was decided that it was necessary to use it to bring in some finance. To achieve this, a news transmission service was introduced in conjunction with the Times newspaper. Messages were sent across the Atlantic and it meant that news could be received more quickly than by other methods. However this service only lasted for nine days as the aerial on Cape Breton Island collapsed.

Accordingly Marconi returned to his idea of providing services to ships to gain some revenue, and instigated a service to provide news to liners crossing he Atlantic.To try to resolve the problem with antennas, Marconi experimented with new antennas at Poldhu. Whilst he was doing this he noticed that a wire on the ground pointing towards Glace Bay gave a stronger signal than his other antennas. Further development resulted in the inverted L antenna used to this day.With the introduction of this antenna it was possible to maintain a better level of service even if it was still painstakingly slow to send messages across the Atlantic without errors.