I have come upon two of these units in very good shape:
Otari MTR10 1/4 inch 2 track reel to reel machine
Once upon a time, these were top of the line units. I don’t know how much they cost new, but I’d imagine it is somewhere north of $3K in 1985.
Both machines work mechanically and electrically. One machine has some slight grooves in the record and playback heads and looks a little more worn. The other does not. I will entertain all offers. If a person would want the machine to be gone through and aligned, I’d charge three to four hundred dollars for my time.
Cause the STL receiver to unlock. A quick peak at the thermometer this morning showed -12° F outside. Meanwhile, out on the island, the WICC TFT STL receiver decided that it was just too cold to continue and gave up the ghost. Weak sister. This created quite a bit of hiss on the WICC signal until about 11 AM, when the program director finally called me to tell me of the situation.
Via remote control, we switched over to the backup analog 8 KHz 15 KHz TELCO line, which sounds fine, given the talk radio program material.
Unfortunately, vehicle access to the transmitter site is now gone. I have the option of taking the Bridgeport harbor master boat over to the dock and walking .9 miles, or driving to the Long Beach parking lot and walking 1.3 miles in order to repair it. This will likely be tomorrow, as the weather is supposed to be better, 36°F and light snow. Well, it is what I get paid to do.
Pleasure Beach, Bridgeport, CT
Regarding the analog 8 KHz TELCO line, that is an anomaly. These analog circuits where used to wire the country together, once delivering all of the network programming to affiliate stations before the widespread use of satellites. They require unloaded dry pairs and normally have an equalizer on the Z (far) end. Nowadays everything is digital, try and find a tech to repair one of these circuits when it goes down. Fortunately, this is a short distance circuit.
This is an excellent data base of LW and MW worldwide: www.mwlist.org
WGY 810 KHz, Schenectady, NY
According to the website:
This is a radio station database of all Longwave (LW), Medium wave (MW) and Tropical bands stations worldwide. You can browse frequency and location lists, search for stations, and get technical information. If you register, you can use a online logbook, create bandscans, and provide update information to the database editors. This is a free, open and non-commercial hobby project which depends on the cooperation of many individuals.
For LW/MW DXer’s this is a good information source.
File under: You can find the darnest things at the transmitter site. Near as I can tell, this computer dates from about 1985 or so, it looks remarkably like my Apple IIe of the same vintage. We used an earlier model TRS-80 in high school, that model had a cassette deck as the data storage device. These have 5 1/4 inch floppy disks. I used my Apple IIe as a gloried type writer, mostly for college papers. I did manage to write some basic programs, no doubt copied from somewhere else.
For the day though, saving something for later editing, even to a floppy drive, was an order of magnitude over the single spaced type written page.
Tandy TRS-80 Model 4D computer
There are actually two of these computers, serial numbers 7086 and 7128. I have no idea whether they work. I’d donate them to a museum if there were one that was interested. Otherwise, they may sit in the corner for another twenty years or so.
