Bolling Advanced Base Radio

You can't grow up to be an explorer anymore. Our species, long obsessed with exploration for the purposes of fun and commerce has managed to visit every hilltop, island, valley, crevasse, and mud hole on the entire planet. Admiral Richard E. Byrd was probably the last of the explorers. But he was unique. He was fixated on being the first person to visit very cold places... ostensibly to check the wind speed. In 1919 he flew over the arctic for the navy, in 1925 he flew over the Greenland icecap, in 1926 the north pole, in 1928 the south pole, and was back in the Antarctic in 1933 again. We all know he was a pilot, but in that era, pilots had to be quite skilled with their radios.

In 1933 He traveled to the Antarctic and he decided to winter there inland from a base called Bolling Advanced Base. This was a difficult journey from the somewhat more robust base on the Ross Ice Shelf "Little America."  He was to do "Meteorological and Auroral work." to quote his 1937 book Alone. Originally he had planned that this base would be staffed by three men: two weather observers and a radio operator. But later supply issues meant that only one person could man the inland base. Byrd stayed there alone, in a "base" that was little more than a tunnel under the snow. His chief radio engineer John Dyer had to quickly teach him how to make repairs, and the basic operation of the radio set. His troubles foretold future problems  

"Whenever I I looked at the complications of tubes, switches, and coils, my heart misgave me. I scarcely knew the Morse code. Fortunately Little America could talk to me by radio telephone. So I wasn't obliged to decipher hot outpourings of dots and dashes from skillful operators. but reply I must in dots and dashes, and that I doubted I could do."

Little America used the call sign KFZ and the inland base used the call sign KFY. He was sometimes an hour late because his antenna was blown down. Little America broadcast a "special program" to the Chicago World's Fair and Byrd added his own greeting in Morse Code "Antarctic Greetings." But weeks later the exhaust of the generator powering the radio clogged with ice and the back pressure nearly killed him with carbon monoxide. Little America continued to make weekly broadcasts to the United States which were received by CBS.  This was critical as they were sponsored by General Mills who was using then as part of a radio advertising campaign. They even had a CBS radio Correspondent on staff at Little America, Charles Murphy. Earlier trips required communication strictly in Morse code. But by 1933 they could broadcast voice and even music with a Collins shortwave radio.


Byrd continued to survive at the inland base despite the wee problem with carbon monoxide poisoning until the generator broke down. He had an emergency hand-powered radio set. but they were intended to be worked by two men. one to crank... one to key and transmit. He described it as harder than rubbing your gut while patting the top of your head.  Later even that set failed him because of a simple loose connection to the antenna lead. In the end, he survived because his erratic broadcasts alerted the men at Little America. They rescued him and he recovered enough to later serve in WWII and to try three more Antarctic expeditions. 

GFSK

GFSK is an acronym for Gaussian frequency-shift keying.  It's a type of frequency shift keying (FSK) modulation that uses a Gaussian filter to smooth positive/negative frequency deviations. Gaussian filtering is a common way to reduce spectral width. It's also used in GMSK. I got into some of this in my posts on Digital modes here.

Gaussian filtering, like Gaussian elimination and Gaussian functions come from linear algebra. In 1810,  Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss invented a lot of what we now call linear algebra. I won't get into this in too much detail.  The Gausian filters in GFSK have more to do with Gaussian functions, it's more related to geometry than algebra. A function reveals the probability that any real measurement will fall between any two real limits (a low and high value) and the probability curve approaches zero on either side of those limits. a comparison of probability density functions allows us to assign values within that rage with confidence. Here it's used outbound to shape the pulses to reduce spectral width.

In the case of GFSK the Gaussian filter is used to smooth positive and negative frequency deviations, which represent a binary 1 or 0. remember the amplitude is not varying (much), the frequency is shifting, just over a relatively narrow frequency band, the minimum deviation is only 115 kHz. In a technology like Bluetooth, where the frequency hops 1600 times a second, the pulses might be a bit messy. So GFSK has the advantage of reducing out-of-band spectrum.

DJ Adolph Hofner

Not that Adolph , the other Adolph.Originally billed as "Adolph And the Boys," they changed their name to Dolph Hofner and the San Antonians for obvious reasons. Some history books call it "anti-German hysteria" but I prefer to think of the anti-German sentiments of WWI as pretty understandable.

His musical career began in 1936 with a touring western band, Jimmie Revard and the Oklahoma Playboys. In 1938 he played with Tom Dickey's Show Boys and probably was on air at WDAI-AM. In 1939 the same band went back out on tour playing more western swing and even cut a couple sides for Columbia. After WWII Adolph began cutting more ethnic tunes, specializing in Czech music for Imperial records. In 1941, Hofner signed a recording contract with Okeh and began touring the Foreman Phillips chain of dance hall.  More here.

In 1950 he mixed it up and with a sponsorship from Pearl Beer, Hofner formed the "Pearl Wranglers" and worked a regular slot on KTSA-AM  in San Antonio. It aired on at Mondays at 5PM. He was already 34 and turning the corner of his musical career. (Foreman Phillips was a radioman himself and had a programs on KFOX, KRKD, KFWB, and KXLA.)  They got what they could out of a 15-minute spot every Sunday. It ended poorly by all reports and they did guest performances but never had a regular program again. The last broadcast show I found for them was on KENS-AM.

Hofner continued to record for the tiny Sarg label for another 20 years.  Their last release was in 1998, a post-humous, self-titled LP.  Dolph died in 2000. As you might expect he is a member of the Texas Polka Music Association Hall of Fame.

Transcription Mystery Disc #237

This is a metal core, Voice-O-Graph. It's clearly dated to August 17th 1949. It also notes that it was recorded in Washington D.C. The disc is the earliest I have seen for this make of Voice-O-Graph blank. All those others I've found are after 1951.  But as expected the earlier discs typically have the metal core.

Mother and child


The audio is quite serviceable for being 65 years old. The recording is of a mother and a child that is learning to speak. The child is hard to understand, but that's not the fidelity, the kid just doesn't have that talking thing down yet.  You can't glean much context from that kind of conversation. But I did catch that daddy went to Georgia on the train. No first names no last names... that's all there is.

The Electrifying Mojo

The Electrifying Mojo did not invent techno. But if you feel you need to blame someone for techno, and are not satisfied blaming artists collectively or individually... the Electrifying Mojo is a completely appropriate proxy for that culpability. Charles Johnson knows what he did, and he feels no guilt. Detroit has never been the same. Techno is just part of his long radio legacy. More here.

Charles Johnson,  the Electrifying Mojo himself is alive today.  He was born and raised in in Little Rock, Arkansas. He has been coy about his date of birth but it's assumed to be about 1948. His first spin on the radio was as a teenager at a daytimer, 1440 KOKY-AM in Little Rock. The station shared both staff and alumni with Little Rock Central High School but was not owned by the school. It was owned by Ebony Radio of Arkansas, Inc. This was not a fully independent station but somehow connected to John M. McLendon and his radio group sometimes called "Mclendon-Ebony Stations", and also sometimes called "Mclendon-Kent Stations." At the time they also owned WOKJ and WLNA. The Radio Annual lists the station as "100% Negro" even in 1957. They later owned KOKA, WENN and WYOU.

But Johnson.. already being called Mojo was drafted two years later. He served in the Vietnam war mostly in the Philippines. In the book You Should've Heard Just What I Seen by Bill Brown, the author claims that Mojo even found his way onto an ARFN station while stationed there.  After returning stateside, Mojo made his way to Ann Arbor. There he may or may not have been on air at WCBN.. (then only a carrier current station) but by 1972 he was on air at WAAM, where he stayed until 1976. In 1977 he popped up at WGPR where he just killed it for 5 straight years. He launched careers for artists like Prince, The B-52′s, and even Kraftwerk. He played what he wanted and his ratings were untouchable.

In 1982 he popped up at 97.9 WJLB, then a FM disco station.  But FM radio was in it's ascension... the move was good for Mojo. The station advertised his show on billboards announcing the landing of the mother ship. But like many popular DJs he was uncontrollable. He broke format, he wandered on tangents, ranted, raved, read aloud and mixed audio. This mixing, which he increasingly did with electronic artists was possibly the sole outlet for techno music in the Detroit metro in that era. But management didn't care for it. More here.

By 1990 he'd been through WHYT, WTWR, WMXD. In the mid 1990s Mojo began purchasing his air-time from WGPR and bringing in his own sponsors. But even under that arrangement, his program was too unstructured for station management. Mojo was shown the door again.. and he was getting if anything.. more eccentric and less controllable. He  turned up at WCHB starting in 1998 where he began reading poetry and prose from his book A Mental Machine in between cuts of rap, techno, works by Phillip glass, Billie Holiday and Duke Ellington. He made some guest appearances on WDTR in 2004 but he's been underground ever since.

I Remember Fred Bennignus

Some characters are so obscure I have trouble nailing down even the most basic of details. Different sources spell his surname with either two or three Ns. In 1983 Lawrence J Flynn published a book about 91.7 WVXU-FM titled Evolution Of A Public Radio Station. It includes one key sentence about Bennigus.

"Fred Bennignus, after seven years with WGUC, brought CAMP MEETING to WVXU in mid- September, for the Thursday 7:30 p.m. slot. Uncle Fred still continues to entertain with old recordings and a personalized humor."

Later short references confirmed he was on the station as late as 1982. In the minutes of a 1976 Raymond Walters College Convocation Committee meeting minutes someone suggests Mr. Bennignus interview a faculty member on WGUC. The Oct 1978 issue of Cincinnati Magazine notes his move from WGUC to WVXU. His new slot on Thursdays at 7:30 PM playing "old records."

In a 1982 report the Cincinnati Historical Society wrote "...the Fred Bennignus "I Remember Radio" collection documents early radio locally and nationally."   So even 30 years ago his legacy held enough local recognition for an exhibit to bear his name.

So the sum of what we know about Fred Bennignus is that he was on 90.9 WGUC prior to 1976. If we believe Lawrence Flynn's math then he debuted there around 1971, then moved to WVXU in 1978, staying at least until 1982. Both stations are non-coms. WGUC was then owned by the University of Cincinnati, now by Cincinnati Public Radio. WVXU was owned by Xavier University at the time. Presently they too are property of Cincinnati Public Radio.Why Fred crossed the street we may never know.

Ransomeware and Radio

I normally avoid news stories but this is so daft and so readily avoidable I feel I must comment. In the past the fear "hacks" in radio was largely limited to "broadcast intrusion" aka hijacking. I do note that last year USSOCOM posted on fbo.gov that they were seeking the ability to do that. [SOURCE] But these most recent attacks are more random, and more of a low-hanging-fruit target. Initial reports in Louisiana and Arkansas have been knocked off air by ransomware.  More here.

In Michigan the target was 980 WAKV-AM. In Louisiana the target was Stannard Broadcasting in Leesville including the three station in their cluster: 105.7  KVVP-FM, 95.7 KROK-FM and 106.7 KUMX-FM. In Arkansas another yet-unnamed station was been hit as well. More here.

Stannard Broadcasting in Leesville that was attacked. Not one but all three of its stations were affected; they are KVVP(FM) “Today’s Country 105.7” as well as KROK(FM) and KUMX(FM). - See more at: http://www.radioworld.com/article/%E2%80%9Cransomware%E2%80%9D-demanded--from-broadcaster/272950#sthash.yK56IFz3.dpuf

Stannard Broadcasting in Leesville that was attacked. Not one but all three of its stations were affected; they are KVVP(FM) “Today’s Country 105.7” as well as KROK(FM) and KUMX(FM). - See more at: http://www.radioworld.com/article/%E2%80%9Cransomware%E2%80%9D-demanded--from-broadcaster/272950#sthash.yK56IFz3.dpuf

nnard Broadcasting in Leesville that was attacked. Not one but all three of its stations were affected; they are KVVP(FM) “Today’s Country 105.7” as well as KROK(FM) and KUMX(FM). - See more at: http://www.radioworld.com/article/%E2%80%9Cransomware%E2%80%9D-demanded--from-broadcaster/272950#sthash.yK56IFz3.dpuf

The stations were still running Windows XP despite years of EOL announcements (End Of Life) from Microsoft. This is of course supremely stupid. Of course it also turns out that 95% of banks are equally stupid. By using a known explot hackers gained control of a PC with an internet connection (LAN) that was still on that archaic OS (operating system). froim there they shut down the stations OMT iMediaTouch Radio Automation System and compromised their digital music library. Game over. The hackers demanded just $500 in bitcoins to unlock the computer.  (Radio Ink and Radio World have covered this extensively.)

Let's review the mistakes that Stannard made and see if we can learn anything.

1. A PC with  access to core systems was on the LAN.
2. Using a PC with EOL operating system. 
3. Using Windows in general
4. Lack of archived back up files for disaster recovery
5. Lack of fail over systems

My recommendations are as follows: 

1. If you must run windows (ANY VERSION OF WINDOWS) to run it in a VM on a Linux server. 
2. Furthermore... it is not necessary to run windows. At this point, you can readily find applications that run in Linux for free, that will generally be less exposed to these problems.
3. You no longer need to run local versions of essentially anything. You can remotely host or run your infrastructure from an instance in the cloud and make redundancy and archiving their problem. 
4. If you feel you must run things locally do not connect devices running core services to the internet
5. If for some reason to feel compelled to make all of the above mistakes... build an offline back up system you can switch over to readily. More here.

Digital AM Tests

For years now we have been hearing about how digital AM will revitalize AM radio. Personally I think it's about as likely as Paul Rubens being elected to the Senate. AM radio station has a maximum bandwidth of 20 kHz, it is patently and inherently inferior to an FM station with 200 kHz of bandwidth—end of story. The estimated throughput of any all-digital AM schema is just 20 to 40 kilobits per second. This is not to say that I don't listen or that it's noise and affect isn't without it's charm. I listen to acetate recordings which we all know sound awful. The point is that anyone promising you "High Definition" or "High Fidelity" Digital AM radio is selling snake oil.

This service has been promised to us before. In fact in 2010 FCC approved IBOC (In-Band On-Channel) digital radio operation for both day and night  AM broadcasts. You can see a list of the 300+ stations using this service that no one cares about here. You will notice that over half of the list is are distributed across just three media owners: Disney, Cumulus and Clear Channel. [Damn you Little John.] The important note here is that they have permission from the FCC. None of them actually broadcast in HD so far as I know.

• 18 - CBS
• 17 - Radio Disney (but not for long)
• 86 - Clear Channel
• 24 - Cumulus

This month two radio stations in the Seattle metro are performed a series of digital tests.  Those brave test monkeys are 1380 KRKO-AM and 1520 KKXA-AM.  The two stations share studio space in Everette, WA and are owned by Andy Skotdal. KKXA only signed on in 2004 airing classic country KRKO airs Fox Sports and is a genuine heritage station dating back to 1922. They will partner together with NAB Labs for the tests. Real world test results will be submitted to the FCC in 2015. Andy claims that analog listeners will hear nothing but silence during the fun. Listeners with HD radios in the Seattle metro might be able to hear science happening.

Transcription Mystery Disc #236

This is a 6.5-inch metal-core Federal Perma Disk. It spins at 78 rpm and has an outer edge start. it's labeled on each side with the phrase "Play this side first" and "Play this side second." The date is written as Dec 1940. It's refreshing to find one with a date for once.

 Play this side first (Dec 1940)

The label is torn on one side and the disc slightly bent. But as with many metal core discs.. that can be ameliorated with a very judicious application of force. I don't recommend that technique for archival work... but that's not what we do here. The recording isn't free of surface noise but it was entirely listenable with no apparent wear. I ripped both sides and edited them together with a short gap.

The recording is an Xmas greeting with organ accompaniment to a couple in Florida. The recipients are identified only as Dr. and Mrs. Knight. The recording engineer briefly speaks on Side B and his name was Mr. O'Brien.The speakers accent and cadence are confident.. like an orator, DJ or preacher. I wish that his name had been included.

855-55-NOJAM

I just caught this in the news the other day.  Signal jamming is considered poor form by most in our industry. At best it's an act of protest, perhaps just a prank.. the rest of the time it's rude, or possibly a crime.  The FCC often reaches for a can of whupass. Actually in 2012 they opened a Jammer Tip Hotline to report such kinds of criminal activities. It's 855-55-NOJAM.

They have been dishing out fine for jamming for years. In 2011 Phonejammer.com won themselves a $25,000 fine for selling cell jammers online. Citations went out to a number of less overt offenders at the same time. This year CTS Technology received a record 34 Million dollar fine, though they're based in China and it may not be possible to collect. They also hit a Hillsborough County, FL employee 48k, and R&N Manufacturing got hit with a a $29,000 fine. While small compared to the CTS fine, this jamming was just particularly unscrupulous. More here and here.

"...Marriott Hotel Services, Inc will pay $600,000 to resolve a Federal Communications Commission investigation into whether Marriott intentionally interfered with and disabled Wi-Fi networks established by consumers in the conference facilities of the Gaylord Opryland Hotel in Nashville, in violation of Section 333 of the Communications Act"

I think they got off light. They were selling it to conference attendees and exhibitors for as much as $1,000 per device. It's the worst price gouging I've ever seen. Marriott admitted to the violation. They agreed to a $600k fine to settle complaints that they were deliberately and willfully jamming WiFi frequencies to force their guests to pay them for Internet service. Marriott also has to start up ans maintain a compliance plan and file compliance and usage reports with the FCC quarterly for 3 years. Despite the "resolution" Marriott Hotels is still keeping a different public face. Their most recent comment was as follows:

"Marriott has a strong interest in ensuring that when our guests use our Wi-Fi service, they will be protected from rogue wireless hotspots that can cause degraded service, insidious cyber-attacks and identity theft. The Gaylord Opryland protected its Wi-Fi network by using FCC-authorized equipment provided by well-known, reputable manufacturers. We believe that the Gaylord Opryland’s actions were lawful.”

I think they should get a second fine for gall.

WFIL-AM 1976 (Pt 2)

Here are three more playlists from Disco Hell. Except as a caricature of the disco era itself, none of these songs require a second listen. By the end of December Alice Cooper's worst single ever "I Never Cry" is in the middle of the chart and "Beth" an unspeakably bad cut by Kiss is on the upswing. And on this list they don't even stand out.

This era was just unforgivably bad for rock n' roll. the programming is cringe-worthy. Even now, decades later I struggle to maintain an anthropological ear in the face of truly awful music. No matter how shallow, vapid and disposable you find the playlists of pop radio stations today, you can't look at this and think that it used to be better. Today's CHR is a direct descendant of this rubbish.

WFIL-AM 1976 (Pt 1)

I'm posting this in two parts. They span together (with a gap) from the first week of August to the last week of December 1976. These are documents from deepest darkest midnight of the disco era. This is what Lucifer listens to while sitting in his hot tub of molten sulfur with Richard Nixon and Jesse Helms.

Hyperbole aside, this is truly the forgotten music. While oldies playlists drift into 1960s classic rock, actual Classic Rock playlists of the 1970s leap frog over the disco era and pick from more palatable singles of the 1980s.

The First Black Radio Announcer (Part 6)

Charles Walton called Al Benson the Godfather of Black Radio.He was a DJ (obviously) a musician and recording artist, a record producer an ordained minister, and a civil rights activist. Born in Jackson,  Missisippi, Benson worked vaudeville as a child and relocated to Chicago with his parents in 1923. He was only 15 years old. The success of Jack L Cooper on WSBC opened the door to some possibilities in Chicago and Benson walked through it.

The Chicago Tribute wrote that he "worked as a probation officer, railroad cook and precinct captain..." He went on to found a small church under his real name Arthur Leaner. Then in 1943 he began to broadcast his church services, sermons and gospel music on 1390 WGES-AM Sunday nights. The station signed on in 1925 as WTAY-AM and in the 1920s was a 3-way dayshare with WSBT and WJKS. In 1925 Coyne Electrical School purchased the station changed its call letters to WGES. It changed hands a coupel more times and in 1941 WGES left the share and moved to 1390 kHz and increased it's power from 500 watts power to 5,000 watts. By 1945 Benson also had another program spinning blues and jump music.

Benson introduced his show with the song  "9 O'clock Beer" by the Barney Bigard Quintet. He would stay with WGES until 1962 when it flipped to Top-40 as WYNR. The new owrner, Gordon McLendon fired all of its foreign language programmers and black DJs... including Benson. (It failed and went all-news in 1964)
 Benson was popular in Chicago. He cross the street and began DJing at WJJD. But the uproar over WGES continued. There were complaints the the FCC. There was a big polish population in Chicago that just got the palm.  The FCC held hearings.. but nada.

Benson cross the street to WHFC-AM and when the station was bought by Leonard Chess it was a dream come true. Under Leonard the station became a 24/7 black radio station as WVON. But he worked only a month more and announced his retirement in 1963. He did a couple part time gigs at WAIT, WWCA and WIMS. He died in 1978.

Transcription Mystery Disc #235

I was recently contacted by a descendant of Frank L. Eulau. You may or may not know that name, but a few years back I stumbled upon a short stack of his discs in a junk shoppe. I digitized and posted one here perviously. The brand of the disc is uncertain but I suspect it is an Audiodisc. The blank is a 10-inch, metal-core, 78 rpm acetate recording, with an outer edge start.  The sides are numbered 1- 6, but there are two discs bearing the sides 3 and 4, leading me to believe these are a mix of at least two different "sets."

Frank Eulau - 02/17/1955 (3:20)


The music seems to be Greek... possibly Turkish the capital letter appear to be Cyrillic. as is the rest of the labeling. Thankfully the dates are legible. The home made labels indicate that Frank was an amateur engineer of some kind and that he probably had a bit of practice before he recorded any of these. The only problem is that they have been played. They haven't been played to death, but enough to create some surface noise. I reduced the tracking weight and gave the disc a good wipe-down before giving it a go. It came out quite nicely.

Titan Is Watching You

Nobody involved could possibly think this is a good idea.  They probably enjoy being paid very well but you can't participate without thinking it might not end well. The headline on Buzzfeed read as follows:

"A company that controls thousands of New York City’s phone booth advertising displays has planted tiny radio transmitters known as “beacons” — devices that can be used to track people’s movements — in hundreds of pay phone booths in Manhattan"

Sadly it's true. Titan, the outdoor media company installed about 500 of the beacons in New York City. Their idea was to track users and serve them yet more advertisements. The problem was that they are physically tracking them.. you know like a creepy leery stalker guy. Apparently they have installed them in other major cities s well including San Francisco and L.A. among others. Supposedly, New York City’s Department of Information Technology and Communications (DoITT ) was only told by Titan that they were intended "for maintenance purposes only."  If that statement is true... then they should be expecting a tersely worded letter from the NY attorney general. Only weeks ago the U.S. Justice department arrested the CEO of InvoCode Hammad Akbar, for selling mobile apps designed to spying on peoples' smart phones including their location. More here.

How is this possible?  I'm not asking about oversight. I'm talking physics.  In a word—Bluetooth.  Invented by telecom vendor Ericsson in 1994, it was originally intended as a wireless alternative to RS-232 data cabling. Today it's the duct tape of the internet-of-things. Bluetooth operates in the UHF band between 2.4 to 2.485 GHz. Different standards can slice that into 40-79 channels that are either 1 or 2 MHz wide. The devices can change frequencies at up to 1600 hops per second, GFSK (Gaussian frequency-shift keying). it can move a lot of data quickly, but it only works over short distances.

For Titan, this meant extrapolating the movements by tracking the movements of multiple people via the wireless devices they carried as they passed near their beacons. they then tracked their movements like the old Decca air navigation system in reverse. [I wonder if they violated any patents doing that?] For the record the devices are made by Gimbal, Titan invented none of this RF technology. Previously before embarking on a career of crime, Titan was just selling ad space on the thousands of panels in phone kiosks around the city. After the story broke last week, New York City ordered the removal of the devices.

Radio Dot

Radio Dot was born Dorothy Maxine Henderson in 1916. She does not claim a radio first so far as I know, but I think radio Dot might have been the first female band leader on air. There were certainly soloists, famous opera singers but among actual bands.. Dot was one of the very earliest. A nice short history of her can be found in the book Mountaineer Jamboree by Ivan Tribe.

She put together her first serious band, the Jubilee Boys in October of 1937. The original line up consisted of Dot on vocals, John Stockdale on fiddle, John Graham on guitar, and Fred Wells on banjo.Later her brothers Jack and Ted were in the line up. Ted went on to play with his wife Wanda at WLAC-AM. By th March of 1938, Radio Dot met Louis W. "Smokey" Swan, whom she later married. They performed together and also printed a few pamphlets of hymns to sell on the radio.

920 WMMN-AM signed on in December of 1928. It was owned by the Rowe Novelty company and broadcast from the Fairmont hotel. The station was in part built with used parts bought from WEBH-AM in Chicago. At the time, it's 500 watts covered quite an era with reports of reception as far away as Little Rock, AR. In 1935 the station was bought by Fort Industry Inc, the same company that already owned WSPD-AM and WWVA-AM. They doubled the power in 1935, and then increased it to 5,000 in 1938. Their first day on air they broadcast  Church services and choir selections, a bit of piano, religious selections and Irish melodies to name the highlights. the country music programming grew slowly. It was a Hillbilly station before Radio Dot walked in the door. More here

In 1943 they were playing on KWKH-AM in Shreveport. But by 1945 the duo returned to West Virginia for a stint at 580 WCHS-AM in Charleston and even the Grand Old Opry on WSM-AM. They probably peaked in 1947 when they played Carnegie Hall in New York City with Minne Pearl, Ernest Tubb, Rosalie Allen and a few other openers. But Billboard panned them specifically. They called Swann a "Baggy Pants Comic" and it was true. They wrote The "...only time the show slowed down was when Radio Dot and Smokey Swann came on."  It was harsh but country music was already changing.  The vaudeville schtick that even Johnny Cash indulged in early on was fading away. they were still touring as late as 1950 but their radio gigs dried up.

Ad-Free Weekends!

I recently read that 95.3 WZLR-FM "the Eagle" in Dayton, OH has switched to ad-free weekend programming. This wasn't a stunt (supposedly) but a programming change.  They will stick with this plan "for the foreseeable future." The idea is that this would improve their TSL, and their ratings book in general. That'd lead to higher ad rates and therefore net gains. It could turn out to be a coup for COX, we shall have to wait and see. More here.

It's worth noting why this is such a selling point. I remember when Sirius Xm was ad-free. NPR is always ad-free and I often let the dial rest there. Spotify, Slacker and Pandora all offer ad-free services for a price. All of them have ads if you don't pay.  (Some even if you do) Yahoo's LaunchCast Debuted as an ad-free service in 2003... but eventually introduced ads. In 1998 Lucent Technologies and CD Radio talking a big game about their ad-free satellite radio service. It never happened. In short, ad-free programming is rare and ad-free services are an endangered species. 

But they noted that they were inspired by a change at 92.3 WBMP-FM  "Amp" a New York City area station.

They ran ad-free weekends over the summer months through Labor day. It boosted their ratings, in a very tough market. This claim got me wondering how far back do ad-free weekends,stunts and events go? I've certainly heard ad-free blocks on radio stations before.. but I have to confess I didn't take much notice of them. the presence of obnoxious ads is so ubiquitous that I don't think I paid enough attention to their absence.

You may remember in the 4th season of WRKP, which aired in 1982, the fictional station went ad-free and became ranked as the 6th station in Cincinnati. But real ad-free radio programming is harder to pull off.  But back in 1988 when Channel 63 in Los Angeles flipped calls from KTIE-TV to KBEH-TV they introduced ad-free weekends. In 1980 WCBN-FM went ad-free when they received the news that John Lennon has been murdered. They did it again in 1985 as a stunt "Commercial-Free for a Free South Africa." But that was not the first either. When 105.5 WWWM-FM  flipped formats to Free Form FM as 'M-105" in March of 1975 they did an ad-free weekend. That is one of the earliest references I can find.

But If you go back to the origins of radio Lee deForrest and David Sarnoff both envisioned a radio band free from advertisements. He mourned the presence of ads on WEAF and even then in the early 1920s was reminiscing about the unstructured broadcasts of a decade earlier because they were commercial-free.

DECTRA

In addition to the Navigator system, Decca also designed a special long-range system for crossing the North Atlantic Ocean. It was called DECTRA. They rolled it out in 1957, installing one node in Gander, Newfoundland, and another in Prestwick, Scotland. These operated in pairs, as slave and master stations., with one of each at each end. The radio waves were about a mile long, and the two pairs of stations were almost 100 miles apart on 70 kHz., transmitting alternately, not concurrently.

In an era that spawned a slew of radar systems: Doppler, Roller Map, Hi-fix, Loran C, Decca Navigator, Delrac and Omega, Sea-fix, Mini-fix, Lambda, and Data Link. DECTRA stands out as a very unique system that only operated for a short time.

The system was an adaptation of Decca intended to serve the needs of a very different terrain. The transmissions used normal "pattern" transmitters of a much higher power than on standard DECCA frequencies. The system was strangely simple. It consisted of two RF amplifiers, an oscillator, mixer, divider and phase component. With the two combined signals a navigating vessel can plot a course using phase meter reading.

The name DECTRA was actually an acronym for "DECcca Tracking and RAnging." Between the DECCA system over Europe and DECTRA over the Atlantic  it was said that there existed a continuous aerial highway between London and Quebec. While initially supportive, the UK eventually soured on the multiple competing systems. As late as 1959 they were pushing for adoption of Decca and DECTRA,

Transcription Mystery Disc #234

This is an 8-Inch,  metal-core, Duodisc home-recording acetate. It spins at 78 rpm and has an outer edge start. These are very standard. As is also common, it is totally unlabeled: no date, no name, no engineer, no nothing. It is in it's original brown paper sleeve, which is also unlabeled.

Unknown Cowboy "kentucky Waltz"


The recording consists of a single male vocalist accompanying himself on guitar. The audio is a bit muddy so I spent some time tweaking the EQ. The vvocals are still hard to make out. It still could use improvement if anyone wants to tackle that. Strangely I've had readers do that before on their own. I sometimes even find my discs on Youtube. (I don't mind it at all for the record.) 

The song is The Kentucky Waltz, written in 1946 by the one and only Bill Monroe. While it was his biggest hit, it was also a number 1 record for Eddy Arnold in 1951. This recording is probably pre-1950 and primarily influenced by the original Monroe version.

Birth Control on the Radio

 I find the timing is right to cover this topic. The hullabaloo over Limbaugh's most recent inane comments has subsided. But in senate races the topic has risen again. A century ago the legalization of birth control was opposed by the eugenics movement and white power groups. While (mostly) legal since 1918, birth control strangely find itself under attack from the same twisted and dark corners of the conservative political world. In that context I thought it was time to discuss legal changes that made it legal for radio stations to discuss birth control. You'll have to excuse me while I fill in the back-story.

Many early writers on the topic were arrested on on obscenity charges ex. Charles Knowlton. Strangely it was technically legal at the time. Birth control was not actually banned until 1873 with the Comstock Act.  Other far reaching state laws are often referred to as "Comstock laws."  The conflict with free speech here is pretty clear but that never seems to bother conservatives. In 1914 a feminist named Margaret Sanger deliberately flouted the Comstock laws by publishing pamphlets on birth control. She was charged by New York state prosecutors in 1914. they cleverly charged her under materials not related to birth control in the same pamphlets so she fled to the UK. Bitter about the near-miss they arrested her husband and that got written up in multiple publications such as Harpers and the New York Tribune.

She returned and opened a clinic in Brooklyn for which she was arrested in 1916.  She was jailed but appealed in 1917 with a mixed victory. She was still guilty.. but the Judges indicated that birth control by prescription may be permitted. Politically things rested on that stalemate for another decade. (in some ways even through today) The chess peices moved such that contraception was illegal but those laws were no longer enforced. However, radio remained hyper-conservative. Birth control advocates were blacklisted by the radio industry. This prohibition wasn't relaxed until WWII.

 In 1929 The ABCL approached 115 radio stations including 29 run by universities requesting time to discuss family planning. Only 27 responded at all.. of those only two said yes. The big win was the Buffalo Broadcasting Company which included WKBW, WGR, WMAK, and WKEN. WEVD in New York also responded in the affirmative. The things began to look up. In 1934 the FRC was replaced by the FCC. And one of the FCC's first mandates was the inclusion of educational or other public service programs. This new and vaguely defined window was what the ABCL (American Birth Control league) filled with their programming.

In 1935 the NBC Network featured Congressman Walter N. Pierce [D] discussing birth control legislation. Only Six years earlier they had refused to carry any coverage of the ABCL convention. Also in 1935, WOR-AM held a poll on birth control. Sanger herself that year gave an address on the CBS network. In 1939 on WWJ-AM in Detroit Dr. Clarence Cook Little gave a talk titled "The Relation of Birth Control to Democracy." You can read more on this in the book Broadcasting Birth Control by Manon Parry.

Not everyone on the radio was a yes vote on birth control though. The infamously villainous Father Coughlin was in the opposed column. But things were sorted out for good in 1936 when the Supreme Court ruled in U.S. Vs. One Pack of Japanese Pessaries that the distribution of information on contraception was not obscene. The following year the AMA finally endorsed birth control. By 1943 Planned Parenthood was producing programs and pre recorded syndicate public service announcements.

WLAN Postcard

I got a postcard in the mail. This one isn't a reproduction or an antique.. it might be the only new radio post card I've seen in decades. The station is WLAN 1390/96.9 a heritage Lancaster, PA station founded in 1947. The credit for the photo goes to Julie Vitto. More here.

The Radiro Radio Orchestra Festival

Radio Orchestras are virtually non-existent in modern American broadcasting.  But in the golden era they were huge. The biggst name in the US was probably the NBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Arturo Toscanini, but the last was actually the Tonight Show Band, aka the NBC Orchestra, which was led by Doc Severinsen. When Jay Leno took over the program in 1995 the Orchestra (which was small-ish to begin with) distinctly became a band. That was the quiet ending to a long American radio tradition.

But the idea never died in the rest of the world. In Europe the BBC has at least 5 different orchestras today. Germany is really big on radio orchestras and has no fewer than twelve different radio orchestras performing classical and jazz for it's regional radio networks. Denmark has two, and the Netherlands have twice that. But in America it's utterly fizzled. the very last orchestra is the the CBC Radio Orchestra. they were founded in 1938, dissolved in 2008 and went independent as the National Broadcast Orchestra out of Vancouver. Australia has six radio orchestras, and in Japan the NHK Symphony Orchestra has been operating continually since 1951.

The world as a whole is loaded with radio orchestras. They're in Finland and France, Buenos Aires, Russia, Romania, Poland. Even North Korea had a radio orchestra until 2013. Based in Pyongyang, the Unhasu Orchestra when nine of their members were executed by the state. [SOURCE] But there are no radio orchestras on the North American Continent so far as I know that covers The USA, Mexico and canada. The nearest one is actually in Cuba where the National Symphony Orchestra of Cuba is so reknowned they have even preformed on WGBH. More here.

So it is no surprise that the rest of the world quite likes their radio orchestras. This year the Radrio Festival celebrated thew world's top radio orchestras. More here.  Just two years ago the Romanian Radio Broadcasting Company began holding the festival in Bucharest gathering radio orchestras, acclaimed soloists and conductors.  Sadly, America cannot even participate.

Radiofrequency Ablation

 Here is a really peculiar use of radio waves. That image above is from the cover of a medical text book edited by Shoei Huang and David Wilber. Were this a much older medical text book it would sound like quackery... but this is quite real. Amazingly it is not a new idea. while only in vogue abotu less than 20 years, it was actually first conceived in 1891 by Jacques Arsene d'Arsonval. He described heating of tissue when the RF waves pass through living tissue. In 1882 Jacques became head of the laboratory of biophysics, at Collège de France in Paris. He died in 1940 surely knowing by then that he was right, btu not seeing much in the way of practical application. He also invented a type of galvanometer and the thermocouple ammeter. I'll get back to him another day.

Ablation is removal of material from the surface of an object by vaporization, chipping, or other erosive processes. I think you can now guess what Radio frequency ablation (RFA) is.   Yes, it's zapping away bits of oneself that have gone bad. This use of RF replaces the previously used as a "high frequency alternating current." the FDA considers it "minimally invasive" and thus is can be an outpatient procedure.

This ray-gun like treatment is performed usually with local anesthetic. The frequency is usually from 350 to 500 kHz. Though one 2004 text I read described a range of 10 kHz - 2.9 GHz to be "well-defined."  That was somwwhat concerning.  A probe is inserted into the organ in question and it can zap away cancerous growths modern applications include lung tumors, pancreatic cancer and bile duct cancer. It's a bit more obscure but it's also used to destroy "abnormal electrical pathways" in the heart.

It has some advantages. Because nerves and muscles respond to electrical charges it's much saver than the old AC and DC treatments. The human body, being more-or-less a bag of salt water, is a poor conductor. So when radio waves pass through it energy is lost as heat or "moving ions." In medical texts this is called "ionic agitation." Yes, they are cooking your tumor. Dessicated tissue functions as insulation for the surrounding tissue further increasing the current density. It can eventually result in "charring."  While this is very nice on BBQ, it's kind of gross if it's in my liver.