I found this in one of the file cabinets at the transmitter site. It was apparently used as scrap paper because there is what looks like connection information for a remote control system scrawled on the back. I thought it was interesting as it shows a 6 a.m. sign-on and the type of programming, source, and exact times each element ran. For Origins, YN = Yankee Network, BPT = Local Studio (Bridgeport), and NBC = NBC. Program logs for later years (1943) show the Alarm Clock Salute was received via FM from W43B (Paxon, MA) on 49.3 MHz.
Sign-off was at midnight. It must have been cold in that little house out on the island in February.
Anyway, I’ll save these in my radio station history files.
The WICC transmitter site, Pleasure Beach in Bridgeport, has been cut off from normal access since the bridge to the island burned in 1996. Since that time, access has been by boat with a 0.93-mile walk from the dock to the transmitter building.
Last summer, LVI Construction, under contract from the Town of Stratford, put in a temporary road and began removing the burned out cottages. While that road is in place, the radio station has been able to access the site and get many important things accomplished. These include:
Removing several decades worth of stored crap, garbage, obsolete and unused equipment
Repair the electrical service to the building
Replace the generator transfer switch
Repair the Sonitrol building alarm
Replace the old Onan Generator
Have the power company replace the 3-phase circuit from the point where the underwater cables come ashore to the transmitter building.
All of these projects should greatly improve the reliability of the station. This should make Bill, happy, who appears to have a WICC chip implanted in his brain because every time the carrier is interrupted he posts about it on the radio-info.com website.
The biggest issue with the site was the utility feed from the shore to the transmitter building. The original circuit was installed in 1936 when the station moved to the island. It was old and the poles were all rotting and had horizontal cross arms. Ospreys especially liked the horizontal cross arms as they made good nesting spots. That is, until the nest shorts out one of the phases catches on fire and burns the top of the pole off. This has happened several times over the years causing many hours of off-air time.
WICC new utility service
United Illuminating, the local utility company, was very cooperative and installed new utility poles, wires, breakers, and transformers, this time with a vertical phase arrangement, which should keep the Ospreys off of them. Additionally, the cottage removal project included installing Osprey nesting poles.
Pleasure beach cottages removed
With almost all of the cottages now removed, the area looks much better than before. Actually, it should be a nice nature preserve, and hopefully, the absence of the buildings might reduce the number of vandals in the area. The work is almost done, so the road is about to be taken up. This means we need to wrap up the work out there, so the final push is on.
WICC transmitter building
In the last three weeks, 10 truckloads of junk have been hauled out of the transmitter building and generator shack. Over 1,500 pounds of scrap steel, 640 pounds of insulated wire, 2,000 pounds of particle board furniture, old t-shirts, and hats (something called “Taste of Bridgeport” which, if anyone knows what that was let me know), old propane tanks, batteries, etc. We also managed to fix the fence and gate in front of the building and cut down the overgrown yew bushes and bittersweet vines.
Transfer Switch
The old Kolher transfer switch was also an issue. There was no place to mount a new switch inside and mounting one outside is out of the question, so the guts from the Kohler switch were removed and replaced with an ASCO unit. This was done in the summer of 2009. The breaker on the right side is the main service disconnect for the building, which was installed in September.
Onan 12 KW 12JC 4R air cooled generator, removed from service
Today, it was time to replace the Onan propane generator. The old generator is an Onan 12JC-4R air-cooled propane unit which was installed on April 4, 1969, at a cost of $1,545.00. For many years, this unit gave reliable service, but it has many, many hours on it and it lacks the fault/self-control circuits needed for remote (read desolate) operation. Several times over the last few years, the generator would run out of gas or the propane tank would freeze up and the starter would crank until it burned out.
It was cold out on the island, with temperatures in the twenties and a bitter west wind blowing right into the generator shack. All of this conspired to make working conditions difficult. Wind chill readings were in the single digits all day long, and in spite of long johns and extra layers, by 3 pm I was shivering and even several hours after coming inside, I still felt cold.
Using tractor to move new generator
The new generator is a Cummins/Onan 20GGMA which is rated for 20 KW. We used a John Deere bucket tractor to move the generator from the flatbed truck to the generator building, and then push it inside. The old generator wiring to the transfer switch was reused, but a piece of flex was used to connect to the generator instead of the solid conduit. The building fan was also wired up so that it would run whenever the generator was running.
The generator load with all possible things switched on and the transmitter running at full power is about 12,000 watts, but this would mean the air conditioner and tower lights were on during the daytime. More likely, the transmitter will be at low power when the tower lights are on and the AC will be intermittent on/off at night. At full load, this generator uses slightly less than 2 gallons of propane per hour. At half load, I’d estimate that to be 1.4 or so gallons.
Cummins Onan generator in new home100 pound propane gas tanks
HOCON gas came out and connected six 100-pound propane tanks in series, which should prevent tank icing. Propane weighs about 4.11 pounds per gallon, therefore the fuel supply should last about 100 hours, or 4.5 days, give or take. Why 100-pound tanks? Because we will have to shuffle them back and forth between the dock and the generator shed, a journey of about one mile, in a cart. Anything larger would be impossible to deal with. Even so, refilling the propane will be a 2 person job and will likely take all day.
Shortwave broadcasting is often overlooked as a domestic news outlet. This is by design and is a throwback to the Cold War era when shortwave broadcasting was seen as an international propagation outlet, mainly used by the VOA. In fact, according to the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948, the Voice of America is forbidden to broadcast directly to American citizens. The intent of the legislation is to protect the American public from propaganda actions by its own government. Nice, huh?
WRMI corner reflector
The way the FCC rules governing shortwave (AKA HF) broadcasting are written, the station needs to be designed and configured to transmit signals to areas outside of the US. Any coverage within the US is considered incidental. See also CFR 47 73 part F.
WRMI signal 50 KW 9950 KHz
That being said, many of the non-VOA HF broadcasters are well-received in the US. There is nothing that is preventing a shortwave station on the west coast from beaming its signal across the North American continent to Europe, or over the poles, etc. These stations’ call signs start with a K or W much the same as FM and AM broadcasting stations. Most of them are religious broadcasters, however, there are a few that offer non-religious programming or a mixture of both.
As Clear Channel lays off more staff and becomes a computer-automated shell, I am beginning to think that traditional AM and FM broadcasting is on the way out. Television news and the 24-hour news cycle have blurred the line between journalism and opinion. Newspapers have filled the role of government watchdogs and general information sources since this country was founded. Newspapers have fallen on hard times with many cutting investigative reporters, general reporters and or going out of business. The internet has become the de facto information source for many people, which is fine so long as users understand its limits.
The big problem with all of this is the internet is a fragile thing, controlled by a few very large companies. A few keystrokes and a router table are re-written to exclude a site that might have detrimental information. Distributed Denial of Service attacks have taken down Wikileaks for days. Collateral Wikileaks-related damage occurred to Amazon.com, Visa, Mastercard and Paypal. A few “persuasive” calls from an important government agency or official to an ISP or server company can easily take a site or multiple sites offline. Search results can be skewed by search engines, or by large companies like BP did during the Gulf oil spill.
The FCC debates on so-called “net neutrality” have yet to produce any meaningful framework to avoid corporate and search engine censorship. This also assumes that the government can justly regulate the internet, which, in this day and age is a stretch of the imagination.
All of this is leaving an information void. As the saying goes, nature abhors a vacuum.
Enter Shortwave Radio. Now, I’ll be the first to admit, there are a lot of strange things that can be heard in the shortwave broadcast band. However, it one can separate the wheat from the chaff, some rewarding entertainment can be had. Most of the non-government shortwave stations in the US are religious broadcasters. There are at least three stations that offer time-brokered programs, some religious and some not. WBCQ is always a good bet. WRMI is offering more and more non-religious programming. WWCR also has some general programming. While government broadcasters like the BBC, CBC, and others have greatly curtailed their broadcasts to North America, this is not necessarily a bad thing, as other smaller broadcasters can be heard where the giants once roamed.
As solar cycle 24 heats up, the programming selections on any given day can vary widely. Radio Australia (ABC) has been booming in on 6020 KHz in the mornings around here. They have an excellent country music program and I have been introduced to several songs and musicians that I would not have otherwise heard. Today I heard a great show on Radio Australia Today about New Orleans, Ray Nagin, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and lots of things that aren’t normally heard here in the US.
The key to shortwave listening is the receive antenna. One particular MF/HF receive antenna is the K9AY loop. I have had very good luck with that antenna on both standard and international broadcasts. I have to say, I am finding fewer and fewer things to listen to on the AM band. I have taken the opportunity to make a few circuit boards with a 10-12 dB preamp for controlling the pair of loops used in a K9AY array. The preamp is based on a common base Norton design, which has low noise and moderate gain. I use the preamp sparingly, the main reason for it is the 4 way hybrid splitter, which adds 6.2 dB of loss to the antenna output. Still, I have noticed, especially on narrow bandwidth digital signals, that the preamp can mean the difference between decoding a signal or not.
I am making extras, K9AY antenna systems, preamps, receiver splitters, and other general shortwave receive systems, which I plan to offer for sale at a later date. As they say, stay tuned.
I found this fuse in an old electrical panel that we were removing from the WICC generator shed. This was the original service entrance for the site as it was built in 1932 or so. The generator shed had a manual three pole two position transfer switch, which was fine back when a licensed transmitter engineer was on site whenever the station was on the air. The generator, according to the old records I could find, was an upright 2-cylinder slow-speed engine with a belt-driven generator. They were mounted on concrete pads about 5 feet apart. The motor had a big flywheel that was hand-cranked with the compression off. Once a good head of speed was built up with the hand crank, the compression lever was thrown and the engine would start. Alternatively, the procedure was tried again.
That was all replaced in 1971 when the transmitter site underwent a major upgrade. The old electrical service was bypassed and abandoned in place when a new meter and panel were installed in the transmitter building. The old service seems to have been frozen in time, untouched for forty years.
Kirkman Engineering renewable fuse
This fuse is a Kirkman Engineering Company and has a manufacture date stamp of January 1945. It is a replaceable link AKA “renewable” fuse. It has “peak lag” links, which I think would be called “slow blow” today. Peak lag may also indicate a large inductive load, which would lower the power factor. What I find interesting is that someone, once upon a time, placed two 100 amp links in parallel, then crossed the 100 AMP label out and wrote “200” on the fuse body.
Kirkman Engineering fuse links
The problem with this setup is that the panel and wiring were all rated for 100 amps. The wiring is #4 copper, and the transfer panel and switch are clearly labeled “100 amp, 3 pole.” It would appear that the finger stock holding the upper blade in place was loose, causing the fuse body to overheat. In fact, it became so heated that the case and the wood fiber holder were charred and missing.
Fortunately, there was never a fire.
The reason why we use properly sized fuses and breakers.
