Amplitude Modulation
I found these old drawings in the filing cabinet and thought they were kind of cool. They look like they were drawn sometime in the 50s for the WPTR studio at 1860 Central Avenue in the Town of Colonie.
It looks like there was a lot of Neon, including a speller, which I take to mean the sign would spell “W-P-T-R 1540” and then turn off again.
This was the sign for the entrance to the studio building
I think this is a take-off on the old KHJ sign in Los Angeles.
So, I spent wasted several hours on this SDR website over the holiday weekend:
This is a web-based SDR hosted by the University of Twente in Enschede, Netherlands. I enjoyed listening to the European medium-wave and short-wave stations available. Something that is always fun to check out: UVB-76 on 4625 KHz.
Have fun!
PS: A special thanks to all those who have donated to the cause via the donate button on the upper right sidebar. I had enough money to buy a FUNcube dongle SDR. I think I have all the other necessary hardware to launch one of these sites myself. If or when that happens, I will post a link here.
Let’s get started:
It does not look like much, however, that is about $5,500.00 worth of damage. What you don’t see is the mashed oil cooler and radiator. This happened on my way from one place to another during the early morning hours. I was traveling at about 55 MPH when a deer bolted from the woods and entered the roadway from the right. I did not have time to a break.
A momentary lapse of attention causes a loss of $80.00. I think I was adjusting the defroster as I was driving down the road when suddenly, I felt the car tilt over to an alarming degree. You can see the tow truck getting ready to pull it out. Fortunately, there was no damage to the vehicle.
This is on the access road to one of our transmitter sites. The station has a legal right of way through this property, however, the neighbor seems to object. I spoke with him and showed him a copy of our deed, he has since changed plans.
This is the downside of using category cable to make audio connections. The wires are not as rugged as say Belden 8451. This was causing problems because it is at an AM studio/transmitter site.
Three-phase, 30 amp, 240-volt contactor installed in a 480-volt system. Lasted a few years, anyway.
New tenants on one of our towers. This is a white-faced (or bald-faced) hornet’s nest. They are really paper wasps, but that difference aside, these beasts are nasty, aggressive, and have a painful sting. Normally, I am a live-and-let-live kind of person, but in this case, they gotta go.
This is at one of our AM client’s site. Somebody, quite some time ago it seems, made this test load for a 1 KW AM transmitter. It is very nice, with carbon ceramic resistors, 50 ohms, and surprisingly little reactance. Then they attached it to this piece of plywood. As one can surmise, the load gets quite hot under full power and full modulation conditions. We remounted this in a cage-type enclosure and bolted it to the cinder block wall.
The client at this station is complaining of intermittent STL dropouts and low signal strength at the receiving end. Found this Scala PR-950U antenna mounted for vertical polarization, but the antenna element is horizontally mounted. We’ll call it “vorizontal.”
This was discovered during routine maintenance and thankfully not during a power outage. Mice got into the control box of a newish Cummins 135 KW generator and chewed through what looked like a data buss cable. The generator would not run and the cable and control board needed to be replaced.
There are more bulging capacitors removed from flat panel monitors.
And so on…
Remember way back when, perhaps in high school or college, you met this really cool person who seemed to be wonderful in every way? Yeah, then you got to know them a little better, and, well, those first impressions changed a little bit.
The Crossed Field Antenna (CFA) sort of reminds me of my first prom date. There was a lot of promise there, but plans fell through.
From a 1999 Radio World article:
Imagine an AM antenna one–fiftieth of a wavelength long, that needs no radial ground system, occupies a small parcel of land, produces little or no RFI (Radio Frequency Interference), has great bandwidth and performs better than a full–sized vertical radiator.
This potential new antenna was all the rage during the early 00s or whatever you call that decade. I remember thinking to myself; I will believe it when I see the test results. At one point, there was a battery of tests run in the installation in Egypt and China. The test results are spotty at best, however, none of these installations performed up to expectations. While it looks like a cool idea, and it would have been great to see it succeed, it seems that sheer willpower alone will not make a particular system work outside of the laws of physics. There are a few of these still in operation out in the wild, mostly in Egypt.
