I used to love picking up interstate stations here in Australia, and their news broadcasts to see how the rest of the world lived. I was nuts about radio, so much that when I went to live overseas with my dad for a couple of years, dad told me the base had it's own radion station. So started as a record librarian and when the next course came, I did that, passed and did a bit of relief on air work. Then on return to Australia, my dad was posted to the base near where I live here, no radio station around till a few years later when an airforce wife told us she was involved with a local station going through an AM community radio station to get our first FM licence. All that excitement. Our signal went through the telephone line hookup. A year later our station got it's FM licence, and having passed the course, I was at it again on air, not just relief but my own program. I've not been on air for years now, due to having a family, being a new daddy..lol..priorities they tell me...but have been bugged by others, who I used to be on air with years ago, to get back into it. I just don't have the time, unfortunately, my music takes so much of it. But there is so much broadcasting knowledge to learn now, compared to when I started years ago. What you can and can't say, thanks to damned political correctness. Working the panel is easy. I haven't lost that art, having a sound system in my home, and used it for my band. Its just all the legal crap one has to learn.
I remember the first time when I heard the voice from the local AM station through a simple radio with only one diode, one transistor made by myself, it was the most beautiful sound I have ever heard!😊
I went to college in Memphis, TN, and remember being able to listen to WLW in Memphis. Being from NY I appreciated being able to hear WCBS, then a clear channel station, quite well. It allowed me to then listen live, to Yankee Baseball games!
Forgot to mention, Dad helped me build my own crystal set...loud enough to use headsets instead of the usual earplug. I hoped for a heavy side layer to recieve the interstate stations, some nights I had to turn the volume down it was so loud, you could swear the interstate station was in Sydney, when it was actually in Melbourne, or sometimes Adelaide. Aaaaahhhh...today's kids would never understand the fun I had. And shortwave on dad's old mantle radion was another fave listening hobby. Listening to our own Radio Australia, here in Australia, and then going overseas and picking up Radio Australia in Malaysia, and also listening to VOA, and other nation's national stations. Like I said, today's kids with all their electronic gadgets, listening to the radion on their phones etc, would never understand the fun I had. It would be prehistoric in their minds.
I'm old enough to remember building a $6 crystal radio kit from Bernstein-Appleby, winding my own coils to listen to the radio all night long thru crystal headphones. I made coils to cover 300 KHz to 2MHz, and I'd listen to pre-Castro Cuban radio, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, WHY in Chicago and much more. In about 1962, XIXI "de Vox de Monterrey" signed on playing US rock-n-roll with an all-night DJ known as "Wolfman Jack" on 1110 Khz AM with one million watts. The station was owned by some California investors who wanted a "dark-to-dawn" radio station to cover all of the US. AM radio in the 1000 Khz range travels MUCH further than when the Sun is shining (atmospheric noise). I kept up-grading my crystal-set with more "stages" to improve adjacent channel rejection. I loved to listen to Chicago's AM Clasical station, and I went to school with the son of the Chief Broadcast engineer of "Oklahoma's Own" KVOO 1170 50,000 watt clear channel station. I got to visit their oooold transmitter and antenna farm east of Tulsa, and their Brookside studios, when they STILL used 8 telephone lines to get the signal to the transmitter "shack". BTW, Bob Wills and his Texas PLOUGHBOYS (named for their sponsor, Ploughboy Flour of Floydada, TX) never performed at CAIN's Ballroom. The group wouldn't fit onto the stage!!! They performed from the Studios of KVOO in the Cimarron Ballroom (the Shriner's Temple) at 4th and S. Cheyenne Ave. torn-down in the late 1960's.
Thank you and yes I agree. Not sure who narrated this but found it in our archives the other day and was surprised it had not been made available to the public.
Well done video based on excellent research, visualization, writing, and narrating. I never worked in AM broadcasting but did in UHF TV broadcasting where 1.5 metre tall klystron tubes, two for visual, one for aural, were vapour phase cooled. Megawatts to the masses; well, at least to the radio horizon ;-) .
At the age of 14 I was given a radio for my birthday. WLW, WLS and others were such a joy to listen to at night. The crowded radio dial of today is a horrible joke compared to days gone by. It’s hard to find music at night on AM. Talk radio and sports has consumed the broadcast band. Back in the day when transmitters were built to one specification but usually put out far more, there were “medium “ power stations that could be heard much farther than expected. One could cross many states listening to the same station. But for some reason AM is on the chopping block. It has a long coverage, everyone has an AM radio. It’s the only band you can easily built a receiver that uses no power supply. We depend on the personnel cell phone for everything. Most AM people would point out it is a huge mistake. Time will certainly tell.
All true here in the USA. The last I counted VOA still operates about 12 high power medium wave AM stations globally. Most at 100 kw and a few at 1/2 MW. I believe these are the active ones: Afghanistan, Bangkok Thailand, Botswana Africa, Burkina Faso Africa, Djibouti Africa, Munich Germany, Greenville, NC - Site B, Kuwait, Mariana islands, São Tomé and Príncipe, South Korea, Tajikistan, Tinang Philippines and Woofferton England. And yes, every weekend we have museum visitors listen to a crystal radio set receiving raw energy from the airwaves.
Having moved to south Eastern Europe 17 years ago, one of the first things I did was to scan the AM dial for any stations. Sadly there were none to be heard other than massive amounts of electrical interference from the archaic electrical grid. While walking around the neighborhood on cool damp mornings I could hear the hiss of electrical arcing along the high voltage insulators, a common problem when living within a mile of the ocean. It’s even worse today with interference caused by cheap Chinese switch mode power supplies found in most everyday appliances in homes. It makes working certain HF Ham bands near impossible to use let alone for the once active short wave listeners can no longer hear what few SW stations exist in most of the world.
7:17 I have the same upper piece antenna mount insulator as in this picture, only mine is about six inches in diameter - That one looks like about three feet in diameter!
One day we will regret taking all the AM and Shortwave stations off the air... Want need that much power by then either since when needed there will be way less QRM...
Yes. It was a certain specified distance from the main tower, correlated to the wavelength of the carrier frequency. They had also shortened the main tower to change the skywave. See if you can find Jim Hawkins' WLW pages. Very detailed tour of the facility.
I knew the W8XO story, but not that it actually operated under its normal ID at that power for awhile. Also this video is extremely america-centric, since while that power level was abandoned in the USA and Canada, there were lots of countries that kept operating high-power AM stations. RTL famously operated at over twice this power for decades at 1440khz. Though if I recall, the 500kw rating in WLW's case was only the carrier power, not including the sidebands, so they were probably more closely matched than that. The real big thing that made this station special though was, back in the 1930s there was basically no electrical noise, and so even even low power signals would go hundreds and hundreds of miles and people could still hear them. 500kw (or a million, whatever) in the 1930s was nuts.
