Jul 3

Written by:
7/3/2011 7:02 PM 

I work for a broadcast ministry.  Most of the ministry's activity revolves around the production and delivery of radio and television programs.  Our message is the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  Even today, the Internet is not the sole medium for our content: our broadcasts go up through massive dish antennas to the big communication satellites, and are then distributed locally worldwide, through digital and analog channels that use all kinds of antennas to transmit the radiant energy encoded with The Good News.

A long time ago I was an air jock for what we fondly called a progressive rock FM radio station: we were very proud of ourselves because we did not play Top 40 music, but played the good stuff instead (you know, the good stuff: Jefferson Airplane, Small Faces, Cream, The Mothers of Invention, Canned Heat...).  This was so long ago that the talent (so called) actually selected the music, rather than some consulting company or computer.  We had 50,000 watts on the other end of our turntables and tape decks and microphones. All those watts were dissipated through a set of three big antennas on top of 500-foot towers on the outskirts of town.

When I was a kid, I had first a crystal radio, followed by what were called transistor radios, and eventually walkie-talkies that broadcast in amplitude modulation at a mighty 100 milliwatts (1/10 watt) on "Citizen's Band," a range of frequencies around 27 MHz.  I tried many techniques to increase the reception sensitivity and broadcast power of those radios, mostly making antennas out of long straight wires and coat hangers and copper pipes and things.  Most of my antennas failed to achieve their design goals, especially for transmitting.

More recently, when WiFi was young there was a pastime called wardriving.  The idea was to drive around with a laptop looking for unsecured wireless access points, and to feel smug when you found one, so you could use somebody else's Internet bandwidth without paying for it.  There was even a graphic language used to create chalk signage to show other wardrivers that there was an access point nearby.  The design and construction of antennas to support effective wardriving was an important part of the hobby: I still have my "cantenna" made out of a 40-ounce bean can.  It still works nicely, delivering 6 dB gain or thereabouts.

All of this background is meant to convince you that I have had an interest in antennas for a very long time, as human times go.  There is a point.

Wikipedia tells us that our current use of the word antenna, to mean the thing on a radio that channels radio waves into and out of the circuitry into the wider world, was an invention of Guglielmo Marconi, who is also generally credited with inventing radio (and naming it too), although others were working on the technology at the same time.  According to the the article on "antenna," Marconi might have been thinking about tent poles, but in any case took the Italian word for "pole" and used it in its current technological sense.  The name stuck, all around the world.

Long ago in Latin, the linguistic ancestor of Italian, antenna had another interesting usage:

 

(The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah by Alfred Edersheim, excerpt from Google Books)

The Life and Times is a very long book indeed, even longer than this blog post, and it has taken me almost a year to get to page 1003, where this excerpt appears in my edition.

But this paragraph alone was worth the wait and the effort: it is very strong stuff, and to today's point, how astonishing that one of the physical parts of the Cross of Christ shares its name with the business end of a broadcast transmitter—some antenna!

The Cross is the point in spacetime that radiates the salvation of God into our miserable world.  The antenna that held the arms of Jesus the Christ outstretched is central to the most important broadcast that has been or ever could be produced: the Kerygma, the Gospel, the Good News, God emptying Himself to transform the ruined, the broadcast that signed on one Levantine Easter morning and thunders around the world to this moment, that will reverberate until time is not.  

The power source behind this antenna is the same One Who said "Let there be light."

The best part is that we have the opportunity of ourselves becoming part of the transmission, bringing the message of this universe's Creator to our own neighborhoods on this poor planet, joining God's own broadcast network.

There's not another job in media that comes close in privilege, power, and influence.  He's taking applications I hear.
  

Copyright ©2011 Mike Donnellan