Let me clarify. It was actually Guglielmo Marconi, an Italian inventor and Electrical Engineer, who transmitted the first radio signal over the Atlantic Ocean (2200 miles) in 1901.
The BBC actually was the first to begin national broadcasting of a radio program in 1922.
So the point is that satellites are not needed to broadcast a signal long distances and on a flat earth this is how it is done. Otherwise why are there still large antennas all over the world if there are supposedly 20,000+ satellites in orbit.
This one statement shows just how ignorant you are of radio. Marconi used very low frequencies for his transatlantic broadcasts, way down in the ELF range, about 45 kHz. They were little more than spark transmitters, for which the broadcast frequency is determined by the resonant mean frequency of the antenna system. His early experiments were conducted in the vhf/uhf range, (60 to 600 Mhz). This has a wavelength (and therefore a full wave antenna length) of a half to one metre. He found that the range of his broadcasts were only line of sight because at that frequency,
the signal cannot travel around the curvature of the earth.By the time he established communications across the Channel in 1899 he would have been using lower frequencies (and therefore longer antenna systems, but in order to try transatlantic communications, the required aerial length had to be increased dramatically. His initial station at Table Head, Glace Bay, Nova Scotia was a massive structure comprising 400 wires suspended from four 61 metre wooden towers, with down leads brought together in an inverted cone at the point of entry into the building. The frequency was 182 kHz. By 1904 his English antenna had become a pyramidal monopole with umbrella wires, and the frequency was 70 kHz. In 1905 his Canadian antenna, moved to Marconi Towers, Glace Bay was a capacitive top-loaded structure, with 200 horizontal radial wires each 305 metres long, at a height of 55 metres, and the frequency was 82 kHz. By late in 1907 he was using a frequency of 45 kHz - that translated to a full wavelength of over 6½ kilometres!!!
The whole point if this is to make you realise that VHF communications such as terrestrial TV and FM Radio does not work over long distances. If you tune into your FM Radio and identify the location of every station you can hear, they will all be within just a few kilometres of where you are located. There are over 44,000 FM stations world wide, but only around 100 channels in the FM band, so on average each channel is shared by around 440 stations If the earth were flat, your FM radio would pick up every radio station in the world - the band would be a cacophony of unintelligible noise on every channel where there wasn't a station really close to you - the only way that FM band sharing works is because the curvature of the earth separates their signals.
