Remark on the completeness of an exponential type sequence (Q452851)

\textit{B.~J.~Birch} [Proc. Camb. Philos. Soc. 55, 370--373 (1959; Zbl 0093.05003)] proved the following result, which confirms a conjecture of P.~Erdős. For any coprime integers \(p,q>1\) there exists a number \(N(p,q)\) such that every positive integer \(n> N(p,q)\) can be written as a sum of the form \[ n = p^{a_1}q^{b_1} + p^{a_2}q^{b_2} + \ldots + p^{a_k}q^{b_k}, \] where \((a_i, b_i)\) (\(1\leq i\leq k\)) are distinct pairs of nonnegative integers. Here the exponents \(b_i\) can be bounded in terms of \(p\) and \(q\). \textit{N.~Hegyvári} [Acta Math. Hung. 86, 127--135 (2000; Zbl 0952.11003)] gave an effective version of this bound. In the present paper the latter bound is improved.