XIV. Electrical tests over a range of frequencies

PARTLY at the request of the Navy Department, during 1942 the Bell Telephone Laboratories became actively involved in a program of measurement of electric-transmission characteristics of radio-frequency cables. There was greatest interest in improvement of the precision of attenuation measurements. At that time, the state of the art was such that spot measurements had been made at various isolated frequencies, but little if any wide-range data had been obtained on any one cable sample. Since the resistance of a cable braid and the power factor of the dielectric were almost always in doubt, we had no adequate check of the precision of specific measurements on a specific set.