Dynagroove

This is scanned from a 1963 compilation of Hank Snow songs. The record was terrible and destined for the circular file. then I saw the magic words in the print on the back:

"To solve these old and obstinate problems in disc recording, highly ingenious computers—"electronic brains"— have been introduced to audio for the first time. These remarkable new electronic devices and processes grew out of an intense research program which produced notable advances in virtually every step of the recording science."

Despite the description they were not recorded to hard drives, they were recorded to tape. What dynagroove did was to modify the audio signal to better conform to a groove the stylus would later have to play back. It was a basic limiter/compressor. A quick listen to hank confirmed that for me the amplitude was pretty constant and the bass and treble clearly being manipulated. Audiophile magazines of the day panned Dynagroove and the process was discontinued in the 1970s.

Fight at the border

The U.S. borders 5 countries if you include maritime boundaries and territories: Canada, Mexico, The Bahamas, Russia, and Cuba. You might say hold on there partner, those are international water there. Not so, after September 28th 1945 we actually have rights extending to the boundaries of our continental shelf. I bring this up because at every boundary two sets of broadcasting laws meet and must reach an accord.In the U.S. we have the FCC and in Canada they have the CRTC. They have tried to work it out but in general there's a don't ask don't tell policy on signal conflicts. They let the stations impotently duke it out. I cite for example the harrowing tale of 99.5 WDCX, in Buffalo, NY.

WDCX was granted a CP back in 1959. Crawford broadcasting was in it's infancy and was building FM stations in Pennsylvania, Michigan, New York and Illinois. After letting the first CP lapse, Crawford re-filed and went on air at WDCX in 1963. They were then just as they are now, a Christian radio station.

In 2003 in Kitchener, Ontario 90 miles away... yes 90... the CRTC licensed a CIKZ to operate at a mere 16,00 watts. Still, 1,600 Kw is more than a local service and it cut into the coverage of WDCX. After a lot of phone calls the reception problems for both stations were ended by CIKZ moving over to 106.7. After that, all was well.Until January of this year. CKKW signed on at 99.5. Despite the problems before, the CRTC licensed the frequency again. The CRTC has been aggressively moving it's AM stations onto the FM band. They (unlike the FCC) is committed to evacuating the noisy AM band. CKKW replaces 1090 CIKV-AM. The CRTC knew there would be interference. But the protected part of the WDCX protected contour ends at the Canadian border. 99.5 is the last FM frequency available in Kitchener, if they are to move to FM at all this is their only option.

There are three important facts to know here:
1. WDCX was on the FM band and serving the metro area first and have changed virtually nothing in almost 50 years.
2. WDCX is one of a handful of FM stations grandfathered in to operate at over 100,000 watts. Their reach is unusually far which somewhat agravates the problem.
3. As 1090 CIKV-AM, CKKW actually signed on in 1959, make of that what you will.

So what's the solution? Last time it was a move, the one option not available. If they fight it out, both stations face revenue loss as coverage loss = listener loss = lower ad rates. My personal feeling is that CKKW certainly has a right to provide local service in a city almost 100 miles deep into a foreign nation. If both stations went directional and reduced power, it would greatly reduce problems. But for WDCX that means sacrificing some of their beloved 401 corridor between them and Toronto and themselves becoming more of a local Buffalo station. But the alternative is probably extinction. As a newcomer CKKW has nothing to lose.

Loomis Radio School

Mary Texanna Loomis was born near Goliad Texas in 1880. Her early life is unknown except that she spoke 4 languages and didn't mind getting dirty. She was a blue-collar gear-head and was all about radio. She wrote the book Radio theory and operating, a student handbook of radio. At the age of 30 she founded one of our first radio schools, the Loomis Radio School in Washington, D.C. Shorpy.com has a great picture of her here. (and check out the shoes)I have found one article, a reprint of a short bio published in the Dearborn Independant 1921.
"Mary Texanna Loomis (8089) was the second child born to Alvin Isaac and Caroline Loomis. Though born on a homestead in Texas on August 18, 1880, by 1883 her parents had returned to Rochester, New York and then on to Buffalo where Alvin became president of a large delivery and storage company." It tells us essentially nothing of what woudl posess this woman to found a radio school.

The Loomis Radio School has it's own experimental license 3YA and was located in Washington, D.C. at 401 Ninth St. N.W. the school taught not just the basics of radio, but also carpentry, drafting and electrical fundamentals. You have to remember in that era, radio components were hard to come by. A would be broadcaster would be building every part of his apparatus from scratch. In 1920 they began offering a course plan toward a commercial radio license and later they moved on to 4-year degrees.

There's a lot of mystery in her tale. We don't know when the school was founded, nor when it closed, only that it operated through most of the 1920s. She died in 1960.

DJs can be felons

It's a fact, our hiring standards can be lax. Radio work does not require a masters degree, a college diploma -not even a GED. We don't do a lot of background checks. Hell, I think most of us have met one or two that were borderline illiterate. So in that mix we do turn up the occasional felon. So today I'd like to revisit a few highlights.
680 WRKO-AM
Thomas Finneran has been doing "Finneran's Forum" for years. The former House speaker quit to become a high-paid lobbyist. In 2007 the well connected Finneran took over the morning drive spot on WRKO. More here. Despite crappy ratings, Entercom extended his contract into 2009. He was charged with perjury and obstruction of justice. He pled out, they dropped perjury he was disbarred, lost his pension, paid a fine and got 18 months probation. More here.

93.3 KMXV
Gregory D. Sage, was busted in 2007 on 5 counts of child pornography. Oooh that hurts the brand. More here. He did afternoons DJ'ing at KMXV starting in 2002 and was promoted to promotions manager in 2006. Sage also worked at KCKC doing a little traffic and promotions.

600 KOGO-AM
Roger Hedgecock had to resign as mayor of San Diego in 1985 over 13 convictions for perjury relating to his failure to failure to report over $360,000 in campaign contributions. He paid a fine and it was reduced to a misdemeanor. He spent a year in custody and was disbarred. He went on to host the Roger Hedgecock Show on KOGO and KSDO-AM in California. He's been on air for 20 years and is nationally syndicated. More here, and here.

770 WABC-AM
Rush Limbaugh, the right-wing pundit has been repeatedly caught with illegal prescription drugs. In 2003 he used his maid toscore 4,350 Oxycontin in one 47-day period. (Normally that many would get you a charge of intent to sell) In 2006 it was Viagra without a prescription in his bag at Palm Beach Airport. Then he was accused of doctor shopping to stock up on Oxycontin, Lorcet, Xanax, and Clonodine. Under Florida State law that's also a felony. For the Oxy he was booked and and had to make a $30,000 payment to the State of Florida. All other charges evaporated. More here.

N6FRV
This is a little more academic... should a felony conviction count against an amateur license? Robert Landis of Atascadero, California, was convicted in 1991 on two felony counts of lewd behavior with a minor. As a result,15 years later while he is still in prison... in August of 2006 the FCC initiated a hearing, in November he got revoked. More here.

97.1 KLSP
You can't beat KLSP, the radio station is in Angola prison, every one of it's air staff are felons. many are multiple felons. Operating since 1986 it operates at 100 watts and reaches about 6,000 people. I don't think any of them are former members of congress. More here.

----------UPDATE 02/25/09-----------

...To drive the point home, there was another conviction just yesterday.
98.1 WTKE & 1400 WTKE-AM
In 2005 "the Ticket" added Charles "Scott" McKinney to their morning show The Morning Wrap. McKinney was sentenced to five years in prison on a conviction for 11 counts of fraud and grand theft. He had been soliciting investments in a front company claiming to be syndicating his program. More here.

Transcription Mystery Disc #118

The disc has no date on it, but was sold to me with A recording of Fred Waring from 1942 on an identical acetate. Phonozoic.net has a similar acetate listed from 1948, which gives us a better idea of when that series of blanks were used.Ben Greenblat is a name unknown to me. The two recordings may not be from the same machine, or even the same region, sometimes used resellers sort by type, pairing unrelated blanks. But the blanks were identical, and one is dated so that data is reliable. It cannot be used however to positively date Mr. Greenblat. Worse yet, the handwriting on each side of my blank is different... leaving the possibility that each side is not just undated, but unrelated. That was not so.. at the very end of Side B is a little information...


While his name is misspelled on the label as GRUEEBLAT, at the end of side B just as deterioration makes tracking almost impossible, an announcer comes on. This was definitely a radio transcription, and also definitely Ben Greenblat. The program is named "Piano Ramblings" and it's presented by the Philadelphia Radio Servicemen's Association.


Best yet, at the end of that is that tell-tale TWANG noise when you record over a previously used disc. In the next segment I hear the same announcer reading an almost identical message but this time enough is left to catch the telephone number WARminster-4. There is a third TWANG but the audio after that is unintelligible... I do find a single corroborating entry confirming the Servicemans' Assoc. It appears in the 1958 & 1959 issues of Radio-Electronics, these note that they have elected a new officers. The group, for which there is no recorded history, no longer exists.

two up, one down and one to go

Fol Chen - Part 1: John Shade, Your Fortune's Made
Abe Vigoda - Reviver

Adam Carolla is out

I'm no big fan of KLSX, but I liked Adam Carolla. Like any morning zoo it could be rude or obnoxious but they were a cut above the rest. Adam was one of those people that belonged in radio. His first radio gig was actually in 1984 as the character Mr. Mirchum on the KROQ morning show. He was friends with Jimmy Kimmel, and that got him the shot. But he proved himself. That gig led to his spot on the radio show Lovelines which was syndicated by Westwood One. That gig lasted 10 years. It went to TV and his time on the tube is probably what made The Man Show possible.

In 2005 he left Lovelines to start his own morning show, The Adam Carolla show. When Howard Stern left for XM Carolla actually got the morning slot in many of those markets. Today he's carried on KUFO, KFRR, KEDJ, WZAN, KSEK, KMRJ, KEGE, KWOD, KNDD, KRZQ, KZZE, It was good, his ratings were strong top 10 and somtimes top 5.

On the 18th infinity announced they would be flipping KLSX to another homogeneous CHR format. Even while the ratings are trending up CBS has to make a had decision about their stock price. Carolla referred to Top 40 as "the nectar of the tards." I couldn't agree more. I was going to post a clip but Carolla put some audio on his own blog that was better. The link is here.

HD-only

America’s first HD-only FM stations? That’s what David Wilson had intended to do with a pair of FM CPs near Cape Hatteras, NC. He won the two-licenses in the 2007 FCC auction. 101.5 WHDZ, 99.9 WHDX are licensed as C3s both at 50,00 watts. Wilson asked the FCC for experimental authority to run them with only HD signals, no analog. That's two 500-watt HD signals, from a 55-foot tower near his home.He stated that he intended to study coverage and consumer acceptance of IBOC. Essentially by foregoing the analog signal, the stations would only have listeners with HD radios. He also intended to examine the both horizontal-only and vertical only polarization of HD signals. the FCC said NO. More here.

In the years since then we learned that HD needs to run at 10x the normally licensed power for cover the same area. That's something I think the FCC already suspected from their own field tests. Effectively the legacy of Kevin Martin is a mandatory digital codec that everyone will have to have. But also one that nobody wants and no one is allowed to actually use. In the end the two stations were downgraded to 110 watt Class A stations with most of their coverage over the Atlantic Ocean. WHDZ runs News talk and WHDX runs travelers information, both in analog.

DTV Transition

This is a public service announcement

The problem is multifaceted. For some of America, analog television is already gone. For other parts of America it only has a few hours to live. And for most of the rest of us... nobody really knows. Until 02.13.09, only a few days ago, the deadline for cessation of analog television broadcasting was assumed to be 11:00 PM EST on February 17th. You may have heard that has changed.

The result is messy. Some parts of the country have already made the conversion. The metro of Wilmington, NC converted at noon on September 8th last year. In Hawaii, the transition already happened at noon on January 15th. Many stations, who had already prepared to flip the switch tonight, appealed to the FCC to stick with today. So far over 120 stations have been given the OK to do so. The FCC [posted a list here. But it's not that simple...

Some border stations have been given special dispensation to have earlier and later dates. KPBS-TV in San Diego is scheduled for March 31st. There are certainly more stations that will drop analog quietly. Gray Television in Atlanta despite the clear and obvious phrasing of the original 11:00 deadline already flipped some of it's stations because their lawyers interpreted the rules to mean they should has analog off the air by the 17th. Which is not what the FCC said at all. But no one advocates they flip back. That'd be even more confusing. To add to the confusion, other sources put that same deadline as 11:59:59 PM. I'll admit there was a certain lack of detail.

Will your "rabbit ears" TV antenna work tomorrow? Who knows?

CENSORED

The Encyclopedia of Radio and TV Broadcasting was printed in 1967. It was authored by none other than Robert St. John of NBC and the Career Academy School of Famous Broadcasters. The book is part history book, part reference book, and part technique manual. But both halves are very dated. The history stops with the coverage of Sputnik. The coverage of technique is fairy solid even today for news/talk but the section on Automation refers to the AP wire and tape. Most interesting was a short list under the Supervision and Ethics section:

"At certain times on certain stations in certain parts of the country the following subjects have been considered too hot to handle and a ban was in effect, at least locally, on any mention of them on the air: Astrology, Adam & Eve, Beds, Blood, Birth Control, Chiropractic, Female Legs, Father Coughlin, Family Planning, Fortune Telling, Goat Glands, Hard Liquor, Infections, Kingfish Long, Monks, Narcotics, Pregnancy, the Pope, Rabbis, Sex, Stomach, Townsend Plan, Wetbacks, WCTU.

By modern standards essentially none of these are offensive. I actually had to look some of those up. Some of the names I knew, Father Coughlin was a pro-fascist broadcaster, very radical and controversial. WCTU was the Women's Christian Temperance Union a group that crusaded for prohibition. Kingfish Long, is Huey "Kingfish"Long, the radical populist governor of New Orleans 1928-1932. Goat Glands is a reference to John Brinkley a nutty electrician that advertised the surgical implantation of goat glands into men to cure impotence.

Strangest of all was the Townsend Plan, a program considered during the great depression. Named for Dr. Francis E. Townsend, the plan would have structured a pension for unemployed senior citizens. The plan didn't pass, but was the idea that led to the social security act of 1935. The only difference between it and the plan that did pass was the source of revenue. Townsend's plan derived income from a 2% sales tax, Social Security from income the tax. I'm not sure how that was ever offensive...

Groundhogs Day

I'll set this straight now and state for the record that I think this is asinine, and somewhat mean to the rodent. Strangely, like an echo of the Bill Murray film, Groundhogs Day really has become a major media event. The holiday has been celebrated in Punxsutawney since 1886. When I checked their website I found that they even have a video feed.

Event: Groundhog Day Date: February 2nd, 2009 Time: 05:45 to 08:30 (Eastern) (30 Minute Soft Out) Satellite AMC - 5 (KU-Band Digital) Transponder K 08 Channel: A (9Mhz) Sym Rate: 6.380 msps FEC: 5/6 Bit Rate: 9.799348 Downlink Pol: Horizontal Downlink Freq: 11912.50 Mhz Audio: 6.2/6.8

Radio warmed to Phil-the-groundhog early on. In 1928, the groundhog's prediction was carried live on a program at KDKA-AM with Punx'y Rotary Club. KDKA stuck with the feature and in 1948 interviewed the President of the Groundhog Club on the "Brunch With Bill" program. In 1953 Punxsutawney got it's own local radio station, daytimer WPME on 1540 AM. They dutifully arrived at gobblers knob each year. In 1973 they got a local FM as well 104.1 WPME. Renda Broadcasting acquired the stations in 1981, but still cover Phil.


Today the holiday is covered essentially everywhere. WGN-AM has carried it dutifully for decades. The programming is silly and wholesome and part of what leaves radio freeze-dried in the past and why your cynical grand kids don't listen to the radio any more. Sadly this is still how radio staff are trained to look at radio. The 2004 text book "Radio" By Steve Warren had this to say:

"Make Groundhog day a big day. Plan a Groundhog day party, if not really then at least on air. Talk about Groundhog day decorations festooning the radio station. Get listeners involved with a Groundhog's day Happy Hour after work at a local restaurant or bar hosted by station personel. Have the bartender concoct a special drink like Groundhog Martini. Rename bar food Groundhog Burgers, groundhog Wings or Groundhog nuggetts..."

Homodyne ≠ Synchrodyne

I thought I'd found a horrible incongruity in history. Here we have an early PLL tuner and one book claims D.G. Tucker invented it, another book claims Francis Morley Colebrook did. It's my worst-case research scenario, both sources are credible, and I have to tease out the truth. Strangely it was a datasheet in a Chinese parts catalog that first reconciled my problem.
Colebrook was writing papers in the 1920s about rectifying detection. This work was derivative of Karl Braun and Jadadis Bose and a paper by E.V. Appleton on the synchronization of oscillators. But he made progress in calculating radiation resistance. Like a good researcher he built on the existing information and made some progress. Colebrook made the original homodyne receiver in 1924. His design mixed the received signal with a locally generated sine wave at the same frequency as the carrier wave to extract the signal from the carrier in a simple detector. Wikipedia completely skips this in their entry. Krzysztof Iniewski book Wireless Technology affirms my assertion. (His English is poor, I correct it in the quote)

"The use of PLL-based frequency synthesis has it's roots in the evolution of coherent communication systems. ...In 1924, a team of British engineers led my F.M. Colebrook the Homodyne (later renamed Synchrodyne) method, which consisted of a local oscillator, a mixer and an audio amplifier."

The Homodyne suffered from the fact that reception was valid only when the oscillators phase and frequency were very close to the incoming signal. Any slight shift in phase would cause the frequency to drift which in turn would cause signal strength to deteriorate. This short coming is what spurred later research in Automatic Frequency Control (AFC.) In 1931 Henri de Bellescize applied to patent an improved homodyne tuning circuit with AFC. That was the first PLL. henri cannot have derived his work from Tucker as he predates it. But before Colebrook was Robinson.

In March 1922, F.N. H. Robinson applied for a patent on a tuning circuit in which the carrier of the incoming signal is filtered out in a path separate from the main signal path. That signal was amplified in a regenerative tuned amplifier before being recombined with the original input signal. The basic idea is to reinforce the carrier signal, in other words a homodyne... J. Evans points out plainly what this is and also that nobody noticed.

So if Colebrook invented the precursor to the PLL, and Henri derived the true PLL, what did D.G. Tucker do? there were a series of small modifications by different invetors.. some plainly redundant. Walton in 1930, Reimann 1932, Jarvis 1933, Urte 1934?, Starnecki 1934, Oltze 1938. These primarily improve selectivity. More here.

In 1932 D.G. Tucker with R.A. Seymour and J. Garlick were co-authoring academic papers on the Synchrodyne. They did not in one step invent the synchrodyne. A series of small improvements led it to them. There were no new engineering principles here. Zero. This page addresses the confusion. Regenerative tuning circuits were called homodynes. That's where the erroneous idea that one homodyne became the synchrodyne arose. The synchrodyne wasn't even a radio, it was designed for measurement!

First of all, the technical name for this device is the Zero-IF Receiver. The name refers to it's zero intermediate frequency (IF). In this circuit the oscillator phase, is the reference for the PLL frequency synthesizer. It's controlled by the DC output voltage of the quadrature detector. Received frequencies are detected directly, without the need for super-heterodyne conversion. It's elegant and much less noisy than the homodyne models that led to it.

Colebrook went on to work at The national Physical Laboratory Radio Division in the 1940s. There he worked on the "Pilot ACE" one of the UKs first computers. D.G. Tucker became a member of the Newcomen Society and wrote some very detailed academic texts on the history of electrical engineering.

America Radio Warblers

I rejected the idea at first. I was at an antique store somewhere near Galesburg IL. On a shelf of 78s was a book called America Radio Warblers. On the cover was a drawing of a bird in a cage with the tag line "The Original Feathered Stars of the Air." Had there been a radio show of bird songs? Yes there had been.

From 1937 to 1952 the Mutual Broadcasting system carried the 15 minute program Sunday afternoons. Organist Preston Sellers played and was "accompanied" by 10 trained canaries. The program was sponsored by birdseed and pet shops. Hartz Mountain was an early sponsor. Hatz's name is actually on some versions of the recordings. It was Arthur C. Barnett (of Barnett Advertising) that brought the act to the recording studio. Barnett made a record that supposedly trained canaries to sing and to talk. It was just a recording of birds tweeting. It was called "How to Teach Your Parakeet to Talk." He had a thing for birds.


Preston Sellers was the WGN organist. If you look at this schedule from 1948 Sellers is just playing the organ to fill time randomly through the day. But it was a fine hybrid Wurlitzer-Kimball organ and people liked it enough. Organ music was common and even popular in the 1940s. WENR had a similar fill-in organist schedule. Sellers was also the organist at the State-Lake Theatre in Chicago playing organ for both stage and screen. He and his wife Edna performed as a husband-and-wife team at the Oriental theatre ias recently as 1972. This page leads me to belive he is deceased. Barnett brought Preston Sellers together with his troops of birds to WGN-AM. The program was picked up by MBS and carried coast-to-coast.

Barnett had the 78s re-released in 1951 as a set of 45s. 1952 MBS transformed from Cooperative network to corporate network. The birds got the hook. Sellers went back to theatre. Barnett added a partner to his advertising firm and it became Weston-Barnett Advertising. The State-lake Theatre became an RKO Movie house then was closedin 1958, gutted and is now the home of WLS-TV. The fate of the birds remains unknown.

NELA

The National Electric Light Association (N.E.L.A.) was founded in 1885 by Franklin Silas Terry, G.S. Bowen and Charles A. Brown. It was a trade association for power plants. Early in the last century electricity was not a standard utility it like radio, was a novelty. This was before Roosevelt's rural electrification program. Power companies were then selling a luxury service and thus actually had to advertise. The organized and published a quarterly bulletin. The issue from 1910 I link there actually fixates on "growing competition from gasoline powered lighting." Anyway distractions aside they were advertising, and marketing. They held an annual convention moving the city each year. the time line here is sketchy as references produce an anomaly. Their 36th annual convention was in Chicago in 1913, it's 9th convention was in 1889. If the first date is right the 9th should have been in 1886, if the second is right the Association began conventions five years before it was founded... The book "A Chronological History of Electrical Development" at least affirms the first date.

"1885 - The first convention of the National Electric Light Association is held in Chicago, November 25. At this time there are six hundred lighting companies in the United States."

NBC was only formed in 1926 which eliminates their 38th convention purportedly in June of 1915. Since it can be no earlier than 1926 then it must be their 41st convention or later. A reference in the August 1930 issue of N.R.I. National radio news leads me to prefer their 53rd convention on June 19th of that year. [ASIN: B00086AMOU]

But the radio tale is as follows: They planned a huge broadcast. As a task of engineering it was just a massive undertaking. Six different speakers would be broadcast and carried on multiple stations from six different locations to address the World's Power Conference in Berlin and the National Electric Light Association Convention in San Francisco simultaneously. It was carried on WJZ and WEAF. A set of five shortwave stations relayed it to the world: W3XAL Bound Brook, NJ; W2XK and W2XAD, Schenectady NY; W8XK, Pittsburgh, PA.; and W6XN, Oakland, California. More here.

The network was planned and engineered by the AT&T working with NBC in cooperation with various foreign communications groups. On the list of speakers were: Thomas A. Edison at his library in West Orange, NJ; Lord Derby, at Camberley, England; Guglielmo Marconi, from London; Owen D. Young, chairman of the Board of General Electric and Mathew Sloan, President of NELA, from the convention in San Francisco; and Dr. Karl Koettgen and Dr. Oskar Von Miller, from Berlin. That's the east coast, west coast, UK, and Germany. Even today this would be difficult.

NELA was disbanded in 1933. Congress had taken notice of some of NELA's activities that were less benign than broadcasting such as embezzling, fraud, and rate fixing. Despite Federal posturing NELA failed to purge and regulate itself. The Edison Electric Institute was formed and most power companies joined the new organization and promised to adhere to it's stricter rules, and more open policies.

*Their logo vexes me "C=E÷R." Typically C is capacitance, E is volts and R is resistance. But the equation to derive Capacitance is normally expressed as C= Q÷V. Their equation is just wrong. It should be C (electrical potential) = Q (magnitude of charge ) ÷ V (applied voltage.)

North Carolina Ridge Runners

The Great Depression drove many families from the Appalachians into Pennsylvania, Delaware and Maryland looking for work. Ola Belle Campbell was house-keeping in Nottingham, PA after one such relocation. When her brother Alex returned from WWII they both joined the North Carolina Ridge Runners. Ola Belle picked banjo, he played guitar and fiddle. More here.

The Ridge Runners were not based in North Carolina, but many members were refugees of that area. They were based around Maryland and Delaware. they played dances and carnivals and of course at radio stations. They played on WEHC at Henry College, WHIS in Bluefield WV, WRVA in Richmond,WEEU in Reading, WORK in York, WDEL and WILM in Wilmington, and WLAN in Lancaster.

Ola Belle stayed with the Ridge Runners until 1948 when they disbanded. The following year she married Ralph "Bud" Reed. They went off performing together with Alex. This led to a regular program on WASA in Havre de Grace, MD. Campbell's Corner was a weekly half hour program of country and mountain music. The Louvin Brothers performed, as did Bill Monroe, Stoney Cooper and the Stanley Brothers. In 1960 they moved the program to WCOJ in Coatesville, also performing on WBMO in Baltimore. A few years later they moved again to WWVA, a 50k watt station reaching a dozen states. More here.

The Campbells stayed musically active for decades. Alex retired from performance but started a radio show out of WGCB in Red Lion, PA that at it's peak was syndicated to 200 radio stations. Ola Belle suffered a stroke in 1987 and was was unabel to perform thereafter. She died in 2002. Many of her notes, clipping and recordings are archived at the Library of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

the chair

Radio people are the mediums harshest critics. We obsess on fidelity, EQ, loudness, compression, clarity, saturation and all manner of engineered audio nuances. Good airstaff are just as fixated on their own performance. The smoothness of delivery, the tone of their voice, their intonation pronunciation etc. Pros do not say "um."




Together these two groups create the smooth sound of commercial radio. I do not mean that it's inherently better, or occupies some moral high ground in radioland. Even casual listeners can spot an amateur when they cough, rustle paper rustle, and tap their pencil. But the single biggest clue is the chair drag. A chair in a broadcast booth should not squeak. Beside that, when the mic is on one should not hear it dragged out from the counter. Sit down BEFORE you pot up the mic! BEFORE, BEFORE, BEFORE! The same goes for the mic boom.

Degauss This!

Back in the Pleistocene era, when I was in radio, we used carts, reel to reel decks and spools of magnetic tape. Re-using tape required erasing that tape. Sometimes the contents was just incriminating and you wanted to erase it. We used a degausser or bulk eraser.

Degaussing is the process of decreasing or eliminating an unwanted magnetic field. It is named after Carl Friedrich Gauss a German mathematician and scientist. He was an early researcher in the field of magnetism. The terms "scientist" and "researcher" don't really describe the savant this fellow was. He was engaged in research as a teen, and published a substantial work on number theory Disquisitiones Arithmeticae in 1798 at the age of 21. He didn't even start looking at magnetic theory until the 1830s.

Here is how it works:
1. The degausser applies a a unidirectional magnetic field. Thsi would be a DC unit or a very powerful permanent magnet. (In my experience it works poorly)
2. The degausser applies an alternating field that is reduced in amplitude over time from an initial high value. These units direct you to pull away the degausser slowly.

Due to magnetic hysteresis it is generally not possible to reduce a magnetic field completely. Hysteresis is the property of metallic materials to maintain a magnetic field. Degaussing applies an external magnetic field and aligns the metallic particles to this known field.

The remaining field is called remanence. In the old reels it's actually hard to destroy all the data. You can render it unusable, even unintelligible. But as anyone who's attempted it knows, degaussing a hard drive is far more effective. When you degauss a hard drive you're not just wiping out the data on the drive. You'd damaging the control track and thus preventing the drive from ever being read again no matter what the condition of the rest of the data. Without the control track, data recovery is impossible. Hooray for digital.

Wanamaker's WOO-AM

I bought a 78. At the bottom of the sleeve in two dry, crumpling pieces was the original receipt from April 22nd 1933, back when the record was brand new. Wanamakers no longer exists. But when it did is was extravagant. It had the largest indoor pipe organ in the world, a child-size monorail, in-house physician and nurses, it's own dairy bar, a tea room, a post office and even ... a radio station.At that time the radio station was exotic, it was as much an attraction as the monorail or the pipe organ. But, the chain had always been radio focal. In 1912 Marconi build them a wireless set up just to send sales information between the New York and Philadelphia stores. The store broadcast its organ concerts on the Wanamaker-owned radio station WOO-AM beginning in 1922. At about the same time they launched WWZ-AM. WWZ only lasted from march of 1922 to about November of 1923. Because of the era, both stations operated on 833 kilocycles.

WOO-AM broadcast from a sound-proof room on the 2nd floor adjacent to the Egyptian Hall. It's transmitter was on the 11th. It re-transmit Arlington time signals from the naval observatory and carried weather information. In 1925 they broadcast the second inauguration of Calvin Coolidge. While it was his second, it was the first radio broadcast of a presidential inauguration.

In 1926 Wanamakers published a pamphlet titled "A Friendly Guide Book to Philadelphia and the Wanamaker Store." It appears to have been a freebie they gave to tourists who came to the store. It's an interesting booklet. it claims that Marconi installed their WWZ wireless in 1911 not 1912. It also claims that WOO, in Philadelphia is the first to install a Marconi Wireless.. a claim that's not even close to true. Their own New York station was earlier, and that wasn't' the first either.

****UPDATE 02/09/09****

I found a copy of The Business Biography of John Wanamaker. It further details the story of WOO-AM. It states that the Philadelphia Wanamaker store started it's own wireless station in 1911. but in it's time line in a previous chapter it clearly states that the Marconi wireless was installed in October of 1907. Regardless, it's inaugural message sent from was sent personally by Philadelphia mayor John Reyburn to New York Mayor William Gaynor. It read as follows:

"Sincere greetings and congratulations on completion of enterprise which gives Wanamaker wireless one more tie for our service and friendship to unite our cities."

John Wanamaker did not attend the launch. He was in Ems Prussia at that time. A message was then sent by Marconi in new York to him conveying it's completion. He did attend the launch of WOO-AM and made a breif address.

In 1924 At a Radio festival concerts from the New York Wanamaker auditorium were broadcast direct to the Wanamaker London House at 26 Pall Mall via RCA-owned WJZ-AM in New York. General Electric-owned WGY-AM in Schenectady also carried the program. From these two stations the program was further relayed over Great Britain. The bio also contains the last puzzle piece. WOO-AM was closed in 1928.

Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose

In Calcutta, there stands the Bose Institute, a university named for Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose. His original equipment and some of his lab are on display there. His ashes literally sit in a shrine. But in the west his name is unknown. He was born in India, but studied medicine at the University of London and Natural Science at Christ's College Cambridge. Then he returned to India. That's why we ignore an accomplished polymath. While his education happened in the west, his discoveries did not. We even refuse to spell his name right. Above is his signature. Despite that, we write it Jagadish Chandra Bose...

He developed the first point contact diode. (image below) Yes, that is the first "cats whisker" use of galena crystals for making receivers. He tested it with a galvanometer on both radio waves and with light. He was awarded a patent in 1904. but it wasn't his first work. It was just his first substantial patent. In general, he seemed to avoid patenting his work. More here.
In in Kolkata, in November of 1894 Bose demonstrated the ringing of a bell at a distance of a mile with 6mm microwaves. He also ignited gunpowder at a distance. Interestingly his microwave vies with the work of Augusto Righi for first generated microwave. He wrote "“The invisible light can easily pass through brick walls, buildings etc. Therefore, messages can be transmitted by means of it without the mediation of wires.” More here.

He developed wave guides, horn antenna, cut off grating, the mercury coherer, the dialectic lens, microwave reflectors, the double prism directional coupler, semiconductors, the polarimeter, interferometer, dielectrometer... Essentially the only item in his demonstration was the galvanometer which was invented by J.S. Schweigger. He authored a biography a science fiction novel and a series of quack Buddhist text books on plant response. Despite the weird plant thing he was knighted in 1917 and in 1920 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. He died in 1937, a week before his 80th birthday.

Radio Stock Update

In October last year I examined the state of radio as an investment. Things were getting ugly last fall and they have not improved. This is fluid, like all stocks but unlike all stocks, these were headed downward before the rest of the wave. In many cases you may have felt that they couldn't fall any further, they'd dropped form their IPOs into the realm of pocket change. But no, today a good number of these are on the verge of being delisted. Even West Wood ONe was threatened with delisting back in November. The layoffs in radio this quarter are already infamous. If you think that's harsh, you should read Jerry Del Colliano's article.

Clear Channel Communications CCU/NYSE
IPO 7/6/1994 - 29.9
Peak - 11/5/07 - 38.4
went private.. took their stock and went home.

Cumulus Media CMLS/NASDAQ
IPO - 11/16/2001 - 6.99
Peak - 4/23/2004 -22.25
10/15/08 - 1.77
Currently - 1.82

Saga Communications SGA/NYSE
IPO - 10/15/1993 - 5.4
Peak - 5/3/2002 -23.20
10/15/08 - 4.9
Currently - 4.28

Entravision Communications EVC/NYSE
IPO - 8/11//2000 - 18.1
Peak - 8/18/2000 - 20.0
10/15/08 - 1.3
Currently - 0.84
DELISTING LETTER 12/17/08

Citadel Broadcasting CDL/NYSE
IPO - 8/1/2003 - 20.09
Peak - 12/26/03 - 22.7
10/15/08 - 0.26
Currently - 0.2
DELISTING LETTER 9/15/08

Regent Communications RGCI/NASDAQ
IPO - 3/4/2000 - 13.12
Peak - 3/11/08 - 13.68
10/15/08 - 0.7
Currently - 0.1735
DELISTING LETTER 8/16/08

Cox Radio CXR/NYSE
IPO - 10/11/1996 - 7.2
Peak - 12/31/1999 - 33.25
10/15/08- 6.85
Currently - 5.20

Entercom Communications ETM/NYSE
IPO - 3/12/1999 - 29.68
Peak - 2/4/2000 - 65.8
10/15/08- 2.34
Currently - 1.28