The AM Forum

Not that I ever, ever had anything to do with this. I know nothing! NO-Thing!

http://www.fortunecity.com/skyscraper/redmond/699/

I recognise these photos.  It is the station in Arkansas that had been locked up since the beginning of WW2, where Brian W5AMI picked up his famous Bartlesville Kilowatt. The station was found undisturbed just as the owner had left it nearly 60 years earlier when he went to war.  A real time capsule. 

http://www.fortunecity.com/skyscraper/redmond/699/kitchentable.html


This workshop would make my shack neat and orderly by comparison.  It would even make Clyde, k4uxk's rig (http://home.earthlink.net/~kx4r/id5.html) look professional.

http://www.moonshine.50megs.com/537819.html

I hope all that stuff didn't just get trashed.  Looks like there might be some real treasures buried amongst the rubble somewhere.

Once I got through the pop up ads, the shack was definitely a time capsule. A little more info and less humour that it was once a modern b'cast facility would have been appreciated. Who's shack ?? Is the Ham SK?
The "book shelf transmiiter" was the prize!!!!

Fred

I have worked Clyde UXK's bookshelf transmitter many times.  It's the best sounding rig he ever had on the air, including his Gates broadcast transmitter.  And the longest one in use.  Usually, just as soon as he gets a rig sounding good on the air, he takes it all apart and starts something new from scratch.

Did everyone notice the HRO Sr. receiver, and the ring mounted microphone in the time capsule station?

Brian actually put the transmitter on the  air a few times.  As I recall, he told me that the tube lineup was a pair of 849's in the modulator and the final was a pair of 304TL's.  I seem to recall that the original finals were something else and that either Brian or the original owner changed to 304TL's.  Brian was debating whether or not to keep the transmitter in its original cabinet, or to rebuild it in a more conventional layout.  He was caught between the historical value and the hideousness of the original.

I think the workshop shown in the bottom photos is at a totally different place from the time capsule station.  Brian told me that the original owner was financially very well to do, and that before going off to war, he simply locked up the building, and for unknown personal reasons, never opened it again.  I believe he went SK a few years ago, and the family opened the building when they setted the estate.  Unfortunately, no effort was made to keep the station intact when they disposed of the contents of the building.  Those photos were taken before anything was touched.  Brian told me that there was even a dust covered log book on the desk opened to the page with an entry for the last time the station was on the air.

BTW, my Custom Hosts file, and Firefox pop-up blocker must work.  I didn't get a single popup ad.  Never do.

I also recommend NoScript (http://noscript.net/), which is a whitelist-based JavaScript preprocessing filter. You will be astonished at how much faster web surfing can be when you're not held up by ten different advertising sites before a page's content loads.

FWIW. YMMV.

73,

Bill W1AC

The story of the Bartlesville Kilowatt:
http://amfone.net/ECSound/BartlesvilleTX/bvilletx.htm

The "radio station" and the "workshop" are apparently unrelated. The pirate radio site was I believe put in place for a halloween pirate broadcast and has been around for years (as evidenced by the windows 95 jab), I just recently re-found it. halloween is the biggest night of the year for pirates.

The workshop I do know about - much of it was carted off by electronic junk scroungers but the guy wanted too much money for everything. He ended up bulldozing what was left. I bought all the tubes and tube manuals from him. The place absolutely reeked of PCB spill. Behind the room with the TV sets, here was a weird "room" about 15FT long with shelves from floor to the 4.5FT ceiling. On the lower shelves were dozens of klystrons and other special "metal and magnet" tubes, rather rusty and filthy, and above them, hundreds and hundreds of old rusty oil caps that had subsequently leaked down all over those tubes. I left that mess alone.

As for the pages, I used to have the pictures of the workshop on the internet; I took them. Someone else decided to copy them and make a story of it. As for the pirate site, I suppose they linked to the story page. Funny how stuff goes around and around. Or do twisted minds think alike? Dang ol' possum!!!