The AM Forum

Anyone know the location of this tower? Quite strapping!

KPHO-TV Tower on top of Hotel WestwardHO <I don't remember the exact spelling> from when Channel 5 went on the air in 1949 as an independent up until the shakeup in Phoenix Stations in about 1975 when it became and still is CBS
TV-5 moved their transmitter to the top of South Mountain about 1960 I think it was.

They must have been really desperate for coverage to build a tower on top of a building. One of the few tower pictures that is not very pretty at all.
Fred

Don't have a picture handy (on the camera SD card somewhere) of an small old time radio tower on a midtown Manhattan skyscraper on (I think) 53rd Street...looked to me like one Armstrong would have liked to climb on.  Anyone know about this one?  Nicky Badwires - you might know?

It's one of the tower supports for the "short tower" in Marboro, CT.  Which is  located  up on a hill behind the last farm house on the left were the road ends next to the state forest.
Joe 

I forgot to add to my original post that the Hotel Westward Ho was at one time THE place to stay in Phoenix, AZ. It was AIR CONDITIONED!
It is located on W. Roosevelt & N 1St Ave.


Here is part of the reason they chose the "Westward Ho" for their tower since it was the highest point in Metropolitan? 1949 Phoenix.

1949 -- Dec. 4, KPHO signs on the air becoming Arizona’s first TV station (and the only station between El Paso, Texas and San Diego, CA). Studio is located at 631 N. First Ave. in the Westward Ho building.

Westward Ho is a skyscraper located at 618 North Central Avenue in Phoenix, Arizona, formerly occupied by a hotel of the same name. When completed in 1928, the 208-foot (63 m) hotel was the tallest building in Arizona, a title it held until 1960.

The Westward Ho was one of the city's premier luxury hotels until it closed in 1979.

Westward Ho currently supports a large radio transmitter antenna, mounted asymmetrically, which reaches a height more than twice that of the building itself. The antenna was used by KPHO-TV from its 1949 sign-on until 1960 when KPHO moved its transmitter to South Mountain.[2]

A Quick history of KPHO TV's firsts in Television broadcasting.
http://www.kpho.com/history/11552750/detail.html (http://www.kpho.com/history/11552750/detail.html)

A Quick history of the Hotel Westward Ho
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westward_Ho_%28Phoenix%29 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westward_Ho_%28Phoenix%29)

I hope this provides enough information on this Tower.

Back to my prairie dog home.
KF7DYU

In the early days of radio, it was very  common to see broadcast towers on the tops of buildings, usually downtown hotels with the studios located on a lower floor of the building.  There would usually be two towers, with a multi-wire cage or flat-top strung in between, to form an inverted L or Tee antenna. Sometimes they laid a ground system on the roof under the antenna, but others would simply use the steel frame of the building as the ground.

KF7DYU nailed it. I took that photo about 10 years ago when I was in Phoenix. Quite a sight in person.
Thanks for the history.

There's a tower in Philly on the PSFS building, right in the heart of Center City. I'm not sure what's on the tower now but it used to have an FM station that has since moved. The tower has been there a long time.

It looks so bad on there, I would have thought it would have been taken off there by now. There is another on ether in Wilkes-Barre or Scranton, PA on top a building. I think I just read something where they no longer use in in the past couple years and they put the tower somewhere else to gain more power. 

It's always amazed me when you see a tower on top of a building.  It's like something a kid would do to gain a few more feet.  If it's a guyed tower, there is a limit to how far out the guys can go unless they straddle with the guys to the ground... yikes. The weight is tremendous when the guy pulls are added in, maybe thousands of pounds.  A self supporting tower gets an advantage, but, the building's appearance gets totally  dominated by the tower.  Something only a ham could appreciate and normal people shake their heads at.

Me, I think it looks grand!!

T

Me too! Especially the old stations with two towers on a roof or between buildings, cage or curtain hanging between. Helluva way to gain some instant elevation in the middle of the concrete jungle, too.

Cool pic, Steve.

Steve also has some better shots of the single stick on top of an old movie theater in Washington, DC that housed WUST, 1120Kc for many years.

My Collins 300-G came out of the projection room of this place.

The tower is still there as of last week, although the station itself re-located to northern Virginia with a power upgrade.

---

Photo courtesy Michael Horsley, used with permission.

I moved to Phoenix in 1952 for health reasons and it was one of the first things I noticed as a 6 yr old.
I lived in Phoenix through most of the changes to the station and knew a few of the personalities that made it a great station.
FWIW: I have heard stories that some people thought it was used to tether "Airships" and this was in the 70's and 80's.
Things that people come up with.
Glad to have helped.
Adrian KF7DYU

The studios and tx at WMFJ Daytona Beach were located on the second floor of a two- story building in the center of the business district of Daytona. The tower was of uniform cross section, 18" on a side. It was located on the roof of the building. Nothing spectacular, but it was a tower on the roof of a building.

The station first came on the air in 1937, but it is the one where I worked during 1940 before I went with the FCC. I baby-sat the tx, operated the turntables, performed as station announcer-console operator and copied Press Wireless news service, copying WCX/WJS at 38 WPM. We had no teletype for news. There was no time for relaxation until we joined NBC. Great learning experience for a kid.

Walt

There was one still in use until just a few years ago.  It was located in L.A., on top of the Odd Fellows hall. It was an inverted L, held up with a couple of tubular masts, with the steel frame of the building serving as ground.  There were some pictures of it shown on this board.

From what I understand of the story, it was a historical station, dating back to 1928 or so.  They ended up broadcasting in Korean language to a Korean community in the vicinity.  The owners of the station decided to re-locate it to another tower site, and di-plex it with one of the towers of a 3-tower directional owned by the same company.  But the signal was so poor in the target community that they re-located back to the original site with the wire antenna, until the new owners of the building saw $$ and upped the rent several-fold, thinking they had a captive audience and that the station had no choice but to pay.  Instead, the station just folded and went dark because they couldn't afford the increased rent.  That was believed to be the last of of the multi-wire flat top broadcast antennas still in use in the USA.

It's funny what we notice as young JNs.    Reminds me of when I was about 12, our school was across the street from a ham who had a Mosley TA-33 tribander on the roof using a tripod. OMG! I couldn't believe the size of this antenna and figgered the owner could receive any TV or radio station in the whirl!  I used to stare at it for minutes at a time until I vowed to one day own an antenna just like that.  It must be in our DNA cuz my buddies could care less about it at the time.

A month later I met the son of the ham and went to his house. The cellar was LOADED with gear including a homebrew AM plate modulated 10M rig in a black rack. The son learned how to turn on the filaments. There was a Hammarlund HQ-180 and Valiant on the table. They had so many frequencies on the dial I was floored.  That started the interest big time.

About 15 years later I actually met the ham who owned the station and told him the story. He got a kick outa hearing it.

So much for antennas on the roof.

T

I installed thousands of antennas on roofs, including some on towers.  Seemed like a good place to put them. 

I once had a customer ask me if the antenna could be installed in the cellar.  I told her that it could, or I can also just leave it in the box in the garage.

Fred

The World Trade Center was beautiful!!

My favorite ...

(http://cache.wists.com/thumbnails/3/96/396dc3dfe0b1be7eb5f959f1f0bcf0ce-orig)

I never shed a tear for the WTC.  Just for the people who died inside.  I never got over my contempt for the damned thing when they used eminent domain to take out Radio Row.

I recall stories that some of the stores were bulldozed with the contents inside still intact, when the owners just took their money and walked away.

eminent domain is an evil thing...

The local small town station here had a four tower array.  very thin towers, but when it went through a series of problems they sold off the site, which had towers, a large house which doubled as the studio/transmitter building and moved into some offices in town, and now share an antenna with the local "all sports all talk" station. They dropped those towers and the building has finally been bulldozed.  now there is a cluster of McMansions with tiny yards and hideous architecture where the array and building stood for so many decades.  Sad really, the developer got stuck in the housing crash and who knows when they'll ever even finish that work.

When I worked for a communications company in the early '70's in East St. Louis, there was an AM stick on top of a Hotel in downtown East St. Louis that was still broadcasting at the time.

Supposedly, a large number of bedsprings had been connected together under the tower for a groundplane and the whole array of bedsprings was grounded to the building's frame.

Phil - AC0OB

Some BC stations are using new base insulators.

That  must be one of those contented California cows!   ;D

I get to see the old Ch-5 tower every time I trundle into town from home. 

I was born in Phoenix, and when I was a kid it was still in full use.  Today it holds up a few part 90 antennas, and one FM CP job that is no longer in use.

Just nearby still stands the old studios where the Dick Van Dike show was filmed, along with lots of other 50's & 60's nationally syndicated programs.

Word now is since the downtown is 'revitalized' they like the funky look of that old tower, and the cost + liability insurance to take it down isn't worth it.

73DG

Wow, someone definitely has a beef with that tower set up. *slap*slap*  ;D

Some buildings look pretty good with a tower...

http://www.necrat.us/empirefm.html

It is important to keep in mind that Phoenix was at that time all on the floor of a dead flat valley! Wouldn't take much height to get "coverage"...

I was there in the summer of '73, wish I had stayed, and had my eye on outlying "desert" land - the roads just stopped and turned into a dirt track then nuthin'... miles out to the hills north, south and west... miles... and miles of nutin'... all 'burbs now... ah well...

And, back then it was this wonderfully laid back place... I got a job doing repairs, and the "boss" was so calm about things that I didn't even know he had hired me!! No "production" pressure, nothin'... wow... I had been working at Heathkit in NYC, this was a far cry. "...what time should I show up?" He said that they opened at this time, but any time after that was ok... what time was lunch? how long does it take you to eat? How great was THAT!!

I remember a bottler out west on Camelback I think, bottles of soda at 5cents a pop.

                           _-_-

Took a "walk" on 53rd Street in NYC on Google Streetview this morning and found the buzzardly looking antenna on a skyscraper I had noticed down there a while back..and it is  indeed of historical significance... From Wikipedia:

The DuMont Building (also known as 515 Madison Avenue) is a 532 foot (162 m) high building at 53rd Street and Madison Avenue in New York City.[1]

The building was built in art deco style by John H. Carpenter and designed by his brother, architect J.E.R. Carpenter who also designed Lincoln Tower as well as nearly 125 buildings along Fifth Avenue and Park Avenue.[2][3][4]

One of the building's most distinctive features is a broadcasting antenna that traces back to the building's role in the first television broadcasts of WNYW in 1938.

In 1938, Allen B. DuMont began broadcasting experimental television W2XWV from the building. In 1944, the station became WABD (named for his initials). The station was one of the few that continued to broadcast through World War II. The broadcast of news about the dropping of the atomic bomb on Nagasaki in 1945 was considered the beginning of the DuMont Television Network. After the war, the network/station moved to bigger studios - first at the old Wanamaker's store at Ninth and Broadway in Greenwich Village,[5] then the Adelphi Theatre, the Ambassador Theatre, and in 1954 to the Jacob Ruppert Central Opera House at 205 East 67th and which today is the Fox Television Center.

In 1947, the building was the site of a protest by 700 picketers demanding that the United States end diplomatic relations with Spain as a protest against the government of Francisco Franco at the site of the Spanish consulate, located in the building.[6]

In 1962, the 250,000-square-foot (23,000 m2) building was sold to Newmark & Co. which still owns and manages it.[7]

In 1977, WKCR-FM, the radio station of Columbia University, became the first radio (or television) station to transmit from the antenna atop the World Trade Center, having previously broadcast from an antenna atop the DuMont Building for 19 years, until the construction of other surrounding skyscrapers started interfering with the station's signal.[8]


http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/42/Dumont-building.jpg

Take that streeview south to Canal Street on the west side, there is the old AT&T building with very nice towerage on it! I had a nice shot of it on my digital camera, BEFORE IT VANISHED... don't think I downloaded that sequence. :(

                     _-_-bear