The AM Forum

An index of all the archived Sites of the Week currently available on fybush.com.  Listed by state/province/country

http://www.fybush.com/siteindex.html


A couple of samples:


WSM's Blaw-Knox tower  http://www.fybush.com/site-020424.html


Here's an interesting one from the UK. Scroll down to the bottom of the page. The Brookmans Park facility has provided medium-wave radio to greater London and the southeast since the late 1930s.  Notice a couple of their antennas are 1920's style longwire hammocks stretching between self-supporting towers. Transmitter power runs from 50 to 150 kilowatts.

http://www.fybush.com/site-020703.html

Scott Fybush also sells a calendar with tower photos on it.  If you don't have enough calendars from the ones put out by CQ, you can get his  :D  warning -- you'll wind up keeping them for photos so they pile up.  I still have the 2004 on my office wall because it has a big photo of the WSM blaw-knox

Good site!  I enjoyed reading about  the Montreal area sites of my youth, including CKGM, CFCF, and CFOX.     Also, the page dealing with Ottawa area sites was interesting, as I have seen  the changes in Ottawa BC sites in the last 20 years.  I will pass on that URL to VE3HYS, Harrie Jones, CE of CFRA nad CKKL Radio here in Ottawa.

See three Blaw-Knox towers lined up here.

http://www.fybush.com/site-030508.html



Nice bidirectional North-South pattern with these babies!

I was browsing through some of the photos and ran across a Blaw-Knox tower that has the usual single set of guys at the midpoint, but the entire tower is a fat, uniform cross-section structure.  A few years ago, a 2nd set of guys was added to the top after the tower was damaged by a storm.

Now-gone Blaw-Knoxes once stood at WADO New York, the old WABC in Wayne, N.J., WCAU's site in Newtown Square, Pennsylvania, WHO in Des Moines and KDKA (http://www.pbrtv.com/blog/entry_289.php) in Pittsburgh.  There were also some smaller ones in California, but only KSTN (http://www.fybush.com/sites/2005/site-051118.html), Stockton, is still standing.

I know there is one (don't remember the city) that had the top half dismantled, and the remaining bottom half is used to host a forest of communications antennas.  It is bizarre looking, like a self-supported tower turned upside down.

I recall hearing a story about a huge one on the west coast of France, but it was destroyed in a bombing raid during WW2.  There still are a few of them in Europe.  Don't know about the rest of the world, or how many others were destroyed during the War.

That style of tower became a popular icon during the 30's, symbolic of radio.  In a lot of radio-related ads and publicity features, you would see logos depicting the diamond shaped tower with zig-zag rays shooting from it.

According to Wikipedia, the following Blaw-Knox diamond-cantilever towers remain standing in Europe:

    * Lisnagarvey Mast (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisnagarvey_transmitting_station) (constructed: 1936) at Lisnagarvey, Northern Ireland
    * Lakihegy Tower (constructed: 1933, height: 314 metres) at Szigetszentmiklós-Lakihegy, Hungary (The tallest Blaw-Knox tower ever built)
    * Vakarel Transmitter (constructed: 1937, height: 215 metres) at Vakarel, Bulgaria
    * Stara Zagora Transmitter at Stara Zagora, Bulgaria
    * Riga LVRTC Transmitter at Riga, Latvia



Here is a photo of the Lakihegy Tower.

(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/6/66/Lakihegy1.jpg/180px-Lakihegy1.jpg)

Yep, I know well about WMT and KCRG.

http://www.fybush.com/site-010822.html

WMT is about 1/2 mile from me and KCRG is about two miles away.

KCRG's second harmonic and WMT's fundamental used to combine to give me some real problems at 3.880.

KMRY is a great adult standards station off Edgewood road down near the Cedar River. Great sound, good soil conductivity.

I have seen the great WSM Blaw-Knox up close.

http://www.fybush.com/site-020424.html Very impressive.

Phil - AC0OB

I have admired WBTs towers off Nations Ford Road south of Charlotte for many years driving from the airport to SC.

Also listed on his site are two Phoenix locations I know well: The South Mountain City Park transmitter site.  The very location from whence I retired after 30 some-odd (some very odd) years of beating on transmitters up there for KZZP-FM, KJZZ-FM, and KBAQ-FM. This is one amazing intermod generator, with over 200 users located on the one peak.
 
The other is the mall-located two-tower DA of KTAR.  Some years back a poor soul comitted suicide by jumping from the top of the North tower.  Later the same year the tower guy (no pun) I have used throughout my broadcast career did a relamp on that tower.  

When he was done, he tossed the remains of the jumpers' hand on the secretary's desk, saying she might want a souvenir.  He found it impaled on the lightning rod.

She got very excited.....

That lower half of a Blaw-Knox is in Des Moines Iowa I believe.

Here is one in the Czech republic, standing and then going down...

http://www.prostor-ad.cz/pruvodce/pvychod/cbrod/vysilac.htm

The KDKA Blaw Knox sits on my home desk in lucite as described in the story about the KDKA tower. The tag describes it as "The Worlds First Commercial Radio Tower"

then there's this tower.....

I think we should have a annual AM calendar.  :o

Seriously. have everyone send in their best shots of gear and antennas, massage, and produce.

I'd buy one.

Blaw-Knox sure made some cool towers!  We had a 290' microwave tower in downtown Fort Wayne at our main central office that was a Blaw-Knox tower. It was almost like the top 1/2 of those guyed diamond broadcast towers.  4-legs - self supported- with big mounting rings at the top to support microwave reflectors and dishes.  Most of our microwave antennas in those days were periscope systems with the dish at the bottom and a "flyswatter" reflector at the top of the tower.  The tower was built like a battleship and was considered, at the time, to be the Cadillac of towers.  It was constructed of very heavy steel angle and plates.  I think it was first constructed in the late 40's and we tore it down in the 70's and replaced it with a big enclosed structure that looked like a lighthouse.  The new tower was actually part of the building and had enclosed equipment rooms inside at the top.  That structure was also torn down in the 90's when microwave routes were replaced with fiber optics.
I think I still have one or two of the original bolts out of the old Blaw-Knox somewhere around here...kept some as souvenirs when we tore it down.

73,  Jack, W9GT

There is still yet another Blaw standing and in use in NH but I forgot where??

Yup MOP radio got a little leg tooo.
Hows come when messages get long(?) that the window jumps up and down whilst typing. Becoming very annoying to us hunt-and peckers



FRED

Just east of the Turnpike northbound lane either in Londonderry or Manchester. (before the toll booths anway). Easily visible from the road, complete with the very nice transmitter building (brick with white trim).

I have driven by this site twice. It is EMR, the Voice of turkey. It is located on a central high plateau called Haymana about 70km south of Ankara. This photo was posted by Must-K on the Panaramio site.

Awesome!

Looks like about half the Blaw-Knox diamonds ever built are still standing.

It would be interesting if someone with time on their hands would research a list of all the known towers and which ones still survive, like the list of KW-1's that circulated in the 1980's.

I suspect there are some diamonds somewhere that got missed on the links posted here, especially overseas.

Has anyone ever heard of a Diamond manufactured by any company other than Blaw-Knox?

I recall a story in one of the broadcast rags about some self supported towers on the order of 400' tall somewhere on the East coast that were demolished a few years ago.  They were built in the 1920's for transatlantic radiotelephone links and engineered to last 800 years!

But then, consider that the Parthenon in Athens was erected over 2500 years ago, and as recently as 322 years ago remained in nearly mint condition, until the Ottoman Turks decided to use the building as a gunpowder magazine.