YESTERDAYS


Wireless Telegraphy Acts 1904-1926 Certificate


This is to certify that the


wireless telegraph apparatus comprising: a Private Business Wireless sending and receiving set


to which this certificate is attached is a station for which a licence was


issued by the Postmaster General to


Camtax Ltd.,


3-6 Downing Street, Cambridge


On the 15th day of August 1947 Reg No


Cert No 1


The Call Signal to be used With this station is


“Camtax Headquarters”


Incidentally, Camtax was first established in 1931, and is still going strong.


The innovation of radio dispatch really started to gain momentum in the industry in the 1950s, with the activity of taxi (and increasingly, those upstart private hire) fleets monitored and controlled by a cen- tral office, providing dispatching, accounting, and human resources services to one or more companies. Owners and drivers usually communicated with the dis- patch office through a two-way radio. When a customer called for a taxi, a trip was dispatched by radio to the most suit- able vehicle: this would either be the one closest to the pick-up address or the one that was the first to book in to the plot sur- rounding the pickup address.


In offices using radio dispatch, taxi loca- tions were (and still are, in some cases) tracked using magnetic markers on a “board”- a metal sheet with an engraved map of regional zones blocked off within the district. Of course these systems are still in widespread use today with taxi firms and many others using them for communication.


Because the antenna may be mounted on a high tower, coverage may extend up to distances of fifty kilometres. This is helpful


OCTOBER 2015


especially when there is no signal in a GSM mobile phone.


Licences are allocated for operation on a particular channel or channels. The user can then have use of these channels to contact the mobile stations in their fleet. For those users with their own licences they naturally have to pay for the licence and the cost of purchase and mainte- nance of that equipment. This is where the Radiocommunications Agency (Ofcom) comes in: there were, and still are, stiff penalties to be incurred by any radio oper- ator who doesn’t maintain such a licence – and there are many transport providers who still maintain a radio system, or a par- tially integrated system incorporating all the modern computerised GPS signalling and so on.


BLAH BLAH BLAH


Whilst the use of two-way radios was innovative, commercially successful and widespread in the industry, it did have its drawbacks – not least of which was the noise level! NPHA General Secretary Bryan Roland recalls that, in his early days in the trade in the seventies, he worked for a private hire firm with a fleet of 100 cars; typically they would take 1,000 calls before midnight and 1,000 calls after midnight on Friday and Satur- day nights.


The company had a full complement of telephonists fielding the calls, and two controllers with a radio each: one for incoming messages and the other to dis- patch the work. Apart from bits of paper flying about with the jobs written down on them (which just occasionally would get misplaced), the sheer number of jobs being booked and dispatched, and the sheer volume of voice commands being sent down the wires, left everyone feel- ing like a basket case at the end of shift. This was typical of most sizeable fleets prior to the advent of computerised booking and dispatch systems, and the development of voiceless PDAs in the vehicles, GPS tracking, and all the other wonders of our modern cloud-based systems.


Industry-wide, with radio usage just occa- sionally (!) you’d come across the odd transmission blips, especially in the early days when operator error meant the button wasn’t being pressed down and half the message was missed… or a lady would


pick up a taxi booking transmission through her Hoover in the lounge… or quite commonly, crossed signals would result in missed pickups.


On a more serious note, one of the draw- backs of voice transmission down the radio was that the passenger could hear the driver’s message, and such message about Mr & Mrs So-and-So going to the airport would often result in a burglary of their house, as they were quite obviously going on holiday and would be away.


Then you had to consider the scenario of favouritism/cherry picking on the part of the controller, whose audible dispatch of the latest long-distance airport job to his cousin Joe could be heard by 17 other drivers on the circuit. Not best…


However, for the most part it is agreed that two-way radios were the backbone of the majority of private hire firms in particular for over five decades – and still are, with quite a large number of firms around the world.


So what might Mr Marconi, as a keen visionary, have thought of radio today? Satellite communication would have impressed him, live pictures from the moon would have amazed him. Cell- phones might have delighted him with their huge range – and no aerial in sight! On the business front, he would have been pleased to see so much employment gen- erated by “the wireless”. He would be impressed that interference had been min- imised and well regulated.


As the ‘powers that be’ celebrated 100 years of radio in 2001, the following obser-


vations were made: “Radio is an integral part of life today; it was only suspended for two minutes over history, and that was to mark Marconi’s death in 1937. Since then, it has grown and grown. The spectrum may be limited, but more and more can be squeezed into it. Radio is part of our heritage and those who work in it now – as previously – are privileged to follow Marconi’s example.”


Stay tuned for the next instalment, when we look into Mr Alexander Gra- ham Bell’s innovative voice-carrier the telephone, and how that became the other mainstay of our industry for even longer than the radio.


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