On November 6th, 2010, WA2XMN will once again take to the airwaves from Alpine, NJ on 42.8 MHz. Beginning at 12 noon, EDT, the station will rebroadcast the 2005 commemorative broadcast. WA2XMN holds an experimental license which expires in 2015 for the purpose of recreating Armstrong’s original Yankee Network.
I am not sure if they will be using the GE Phasitron transmitter or not.
Armstrong Tower, Alpine, NJ
The Armstrong Tower is located just off of the Palisades Interstate Parkway, on a bluff west of the Hudson River. After the World Trade Center site was lost on 9/11, all of the NY City TV stations relocated there until permanent facilities could be build at the Empire State Building. Empire had always been the home to most of the NYC FM’s except public station WNYC, which was also on WTC #1.
It was early evening when most people were sitting down to enjoy the latest edition ofMercury Theater on the Air on CBS. After a brief narration by Orson Wells, which is set a year ahead of the actual date, there was a flash forward and brief weather forecast. It then seemed that the show was not going to be on as Ramon Raquello and is orchestra were performing dance music when the music faded down and the announcer came on the air slightly out of breath:
Ladies and Gentlemen, we interrupt our program of dance music to bring you this special bulletin from the intercontinental radio news…
It was a great piece of theater, too realistic for many, others tuned in late and panic ensued. People raced out of their houses, went to confession, and didn’t pay for gas. There were reports of long alien ships landing in New Jersey and incinerating crowds with heat rays. Then the black poison gas, oh, the black poison gas.
The day after, New York Times reported that up to 1.2 million people felt they were in grave danger and the world was ending. It is hard to imagine how they came to that number, especially overnight for printing the next day.
Naturally, those commie federal regulators were having none of it, and the FCC proclaimed that broadcast hoaxes would not be tolerated, even promulgating a rule, 73.1217, stating, in part:
No licensee or permittee of any broadcast station shall broadcast false information concerning a crime or a catastrophe if: (a) The licensee knows this information is false; (b) It is forseeable that broadcast of the information will cause substantial public harm, and (c) Broadcast of the information does in fact directly cause substantial public harm.
There are some radio stations that still broadcast this show every Halloween, with the appropriate disclaimers, of course. For those that want to hear the War of the Worlds, go to Radio Heard Here. It is really a great show.
Happy Halloween!
Update: Occasional reader Sandy sends along this link to the WKBW 1968 version, which was purported to be every bit as real as the 1938 version. The station was deluged with phone calls. In fact, legend has it that when the broadcast ended a little after midnight, show producer Jeff Kayne slipped his resignation letter under the General Manager’s door.
An oldie, but a goodie, February 20, 1971, WOWO gets an EAN via AP teletype and follows the procedure:
Back in the days of EBS, there were weekly closed-circuit tests via AP and UPI teletype. In the event of a real Emergency Action Notification (EAN) there was a red envelope that contained a set of code words for each month. The test code words were on the outside of the envelope. If an EAN was received, the envelope would be torn open and the actual code words would be matched against the code words in the message. If it were authenticated, then the station would do just what WOWO did right then, send the two-tone EBS alert for 25 seconds and break into programming.
It is amazing that this did not happen more often, especially on a Saturday morning with a sleepy Airman in Colorado pulling the wrong message tape off the rack at the message center responsible for the whole system.
It happened more recently when an EAS message was sent to evacuate the entire state of Connecticut. An EAN was sent in Chicago warning of a national attack when state officials were testing their new system. I am sure that others have been sent as well.
I suppose the emergency notification has always left something to be desired.
This is not really apropos radio broadcasting, but it is about radio and it has a lot to do with engineering. Back in the day, as a young man out to do whatever it was, I ended up being stationed on Guam, working at the Coast Guard radio station there. That was interesting work, to be sure, but every morning and evening, either on my way to or from work, I would drive by this, which looked very interesting:
AN FRD-10 NAVCAMSWESTPAC, Guam
I had to lift the photo from a Navy Radio history site. Back in my day, aiming or even possessing a camera around this area or building would likely inflict the extreme ire of the Marines, who attentively observed the area and were ready to call down a painful lesson to all not obeying the “NO PHOTOGRAPHY ALLOWED” signs.
Nicknamed “The Elephant Cage” it is a Wullenweber antenna used for high-frequency direction finding (HFDF) and was part of a system called “Classic Bullseye.” There were several of these systems across the Pacific Ocean, and they all worked together using a teletype network. The Army-Air Force version was called a AN FLR-9, which was slightly larger.
AN/FRD-10 antenna layout
There were two concentric rings of antennas, the tallest being the closest to the center building and used for the lowest frequencies. It covered from about 1.5 to 30 MHz. The rings consisted of several individual antennas, all coupled to a Goniometer with coaxial cables cut to identical lengths. The outer ring had 120 vertical-sleeved dipole antennas, and the inner ring consisted of 40 sleeved dipole antennas. The inner ring of towers also contained a shielding screen to prevent the antennas on the other side of the array from picking up signals from the back of the antenna. A radio wave traveling over the array was evaluated and the Goniometer determined the first antenna that received the signal by comparing phase relationships. The ground system was extensive. Immediately under the antennas was a mesh copper ground screen. From the edge of the copper mesh, buried copper radials and extended out 1,440 feet from the building.
The effective range for accurate DF bearings was about 3,200 nautical miles, which equates to about two ionospheric hops with the angle theta between 30 to 60 degrees referenced to the ground.
It was quite effective, it only took a couple of seconds to get a good bearing. If the other stations on the network were attentive, a position could be worked out in less than 10-15 seconds.
AN FRD-10 ground diagram
It is a little hard to read, but this is the ground layout of the AN FRD-10 CDAA. The transmission lines to each antenna are shown, along with the ground screen and building in the center of the array.
We Coast Guard types used this mainly for Search and Rescue (SAR) and the occasional Law Enforcement (LE) function. I believe we actually saved a few lives with this thing. I found the Navy operators to be very helpful, I think some of them enjoyed the change of targets from their normal net tripping.
The Navy operated AN FRD-10s at the following locations in the Pacific:
Imperial Beach, CA (south of San Diego)
Skaggs Island, CA (northeast of San Francisco)
Hanza (Okinawa) Japan
Waihawa, HI
Finegayan, Guam
Adak, AK
Marietta, WA
The Air Force/Army installed AN FLR-9’s in the following Pacific Locations:
Missawa AB, Japan
Clark AB, Philippines
Elmandorf AFB, AK
Basically, there was no corner of the Pacific Ocean that could not be listened to and DF’d. Some people look back nostagically at the cold war when we “knew who the enemy was,” so to speak. I am not one of those. They either didn’t really know the enemy or have conveniently forgotten some of the less endearing qualities of the Soviet Union.
I believe all of these systems have been decommissioned and most have been taken down and scrapped. The National Park Service studied the Waihawa, HI system as a part of their Historical American Building Survey (HABS HI-552-B2) (large .pdf file) before it was torn down. Good technical description and building pictures. Near the end of the report, it is cryptically noted that:
Beginning in the mid-1990s the NSG (ed: Naval Security Group), noting the absence of Soviet targets and wanting to cut costs and change the focus of its SIGINT collection, began closing FRD-10 sites… Undoubtedly, since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, listening posts have gained importance and most likely increased in number and sophistication. The FRD-10 CDAA at NCTAMS Wahiawa ceased listening in August 2004; it can only be assumed the closure occurred because there was a better way to do it.
Indeed.
The Guam site has been stripped out and abandoned, the latest photo I can find is from 2008:
