The AM Forum

http://www.wgem.com/story/17999969/harris-corporation-getting-out-of-the-broadcast-business

"Harris Corporation as announced today to the market and its employees has decided to divest itself of its broadcast division," said Chris Parsons, Vice President of Global Operations for Harris. "Harris is selling its broadcast division because it does not fit with the rest of the company's operations."

Terri Black, a Harris public relations official, says that the entire broadcast division of Harris, including the Quincy facility, will be sold. The facility will continue to operate until the sale is complete, but the new owners could do whatever they want to the facility and the rest of the broadcast division.
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Anyone want to buy a transmitter company?

73 Dave

A copy of the email that they sent out:
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May 1, 2012
Dear Ray Fantini,
Today, Harris announced its decision to divest the Broadcast Communications business. I fully support this decision and believe that the timing is right for both Harris and Broadcast Communications.
Harris has supported us by investing in our business, allowing us to develop some of the market’s most innovative, solution-based technologies. However, over time the Broadcast Communications business has become less aligned with the Harris core businesses and long term strategy.
Operating independently or as part of a broadcast or media-focused enterprise will provide us with strategic investment, increased competitive flexibility, and customer focus to lead the continuing transformation in this competitive marketplace.
The decision to divest in no way reflects the quality of the work Broadcast Communications performed in support of our customers and our company.  Harris simply determined that Broadcast Communications could provide higher value and operate more effectively under a different ownership model. 
In the interim, Broadcast Communications will continue to be a part of Harris Corporation and operate business as usual. Our valued relationships, both longstanding and new, remain our top priority. The global Broadcast Communications team will continue to work diligently to ensure our commitment to our customers and partners remains steadfast, our execution to fulfill commitments is flawless, and our progress against strategic objectives remains focused. 
Please feel free to contact any of the global team, including me, should you have any questions regarding this announcement. 
Thank you for your continued support.

Harris Morris
President, Broadcast Communications Division
Harris Corporation
9800 S. Meridian Boulevard, Suite 300
Englewood, CO  80112

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I don’t know if this has anything to do with sales or profitability, but not seeing the Harris name will be a big deal for me. Maybe they did not do as well in the television market being that almost all the ATSC (HD) transmitters I have seen are Rhodes & Schwartz and Comark /Thales but there Net VX line of ATSC encoders and products are still a market leader.  There has been many changes and new products in the AM and FM broadcast line including a new generation of FM solid state high power transmitters that are just as small as what they have done with AM, I have a couple AM DAX series 5 kW transmitters that are signal rack solid state units that are a fraction of the size of the older tube transmitters they replaced. Have to wonder if at some point in the future where there will be no manufactures of broadcast transmitters in this country?

Maybe they'll sell it to the Gates Radio Co.

Here's one heck of a leveraged buy out - Radio Engineering Associates Inc buys Harris' broadcast division   ;D

Free REA mod monitor with every transmitter   ;)

I suppose stranger things have happened!

There's probably a few guys on here who would buy a transmitter just to get one of your monitors :)

I am a little baffled by the PR actually.  Normally when a company releases such a PR, they also announce WHO is buying the company.  So as far as I can tell this is a PR that says it is FOR SALE, any and all offers will be considered. 

Maybe we'll see a line of 1 kw class E ham band transmitters as the first new item offered? :)

Complete with extra clip leads  ;D ;D ;D ;D

I hope the good quality and name will live on and remain true and USA-made. Harris has always meant good stuff you could depend on. Their military gear is sweeet too. The PRC-150 for example.

Here is a WGEM note as well with comments by BE:

http://www.wgem.com/story/17999923/harris-corp-reportedly-getting-out-of-broadcast-communications-business

And another by Radio WOrld:

http://radioworld.com/article/harris-will-sell-its-broadcast-business/213205


http://blog.devoncroft.com/2012/05/01/harris-corporation-to-divest-broadcast-business/

Sounds like something Dilberts pointy-haird boss would say   ;D

Phil

Harris has been tilting toward military contracts for years now. 

Higher volume, higher profit, reliable revenue compared to the broadcast equipment market.

A while ago they teamed up with an Indiana-based broadcast supply house to somewhat outsource their retail business with the stations.  Allied, not the same as the one that combined for a while with Radio Shack.

Don't know if that's still a pair or not, but they or some other supply house like BSW might be among the candidates to buy the unit Harris plans to cut loose.

I wasn't completely joking about Gates Radio co.  I wonder if Gates sold out to Harris Intertype in the 1950s because they could no longer make it as a stand-alone company, or if it was sale of opportunity or maybe even a hostile take-over.

Before selling out to Harris, Gates transmitters were big, heavy and built like a battleship.  I have an early 50s catalogue that touts the size and weight of Gates equipment, saying anything Gates will probably be bigger and heavier than the competition, and then they go on to say that as with a  steam locomotive, ocean liner or other piece of industrial equipment, size and weight translate to quality and reliability.  Also, the old Gates company claimed that cost and price were not factors in their designs. The ultimate boat-anchor manufacturer!  The 1 kw 833-A BC transmitter, the BC1-F, weighed almost 3000 lbs. with the mod xfmr alone weighing close to 200 lbs. After the Harris buy-out, Gates went the cheap, light-weight route. The BC1-T has a total weight of about 900 lbs, is half the cabinet-width of the 1-F, and the mod xfmr is light enough that one person can easily pick it up and carry it.  A husky individual could carry two of them (or perhaps the mod xfmr and mod reactor), one under each arm. Maybe Gates, as a stand-alone company, was losing money because few stations (like Hammy Hambone, small-town broadcast stations tend to be cheap and miserly) were willing to pay their price and go to all the trouble and expense to move the heavy equipment around.

A similar thing happened with the Hunter fan company.  Originally a stand-alone company located in upstate NY, they sold out to Robin Myers, a HVAC company located in Memphis.  They relocated their manufacturing operation to Memphis and continued production of the same product lines, then eventually broke off from Robin Myers and became a stand-alone operation once again.  But when the last surviving member of the family that founded the original Hunter fan company died, the heirs dismantled the Memphis manufacturing plant and relocated it to Taiwan.  Now Hunter fan products are the same cheap "offshore" junk as the rest of the fan products you see in the big-box stores.

Now that Harris wants to divest itself of the broadcast line, it's conceivable that someone could restore the old stand-alone Gates Radio Co., but no guarantee that the products would be of anywhere near the quality of the original company, although with contemporary technology the transmitters would assuredly be much smaller and  lighter in weight.

Translation: "We don't see enough in the future of-over-the air TV and radio broadcasting to continue on with a declining endeavor.."

Maybe everything is really going on-line.

Don, Nautel in Canada and BE in Quincy, IL are the last two players. The technology has greatly advanced, we have a 50 KW Nautel AM box in Denver the size of your home refrigerator.  A 1 KW AM rig will fit in a foot of a 19" rack. For 50 KW now, a little box, but 3" rigid and a 3" conduit feeding 480 volt juice into it. No more 15 feet of floor space..

I don't think there is going to be enough future market for broadcast transmitters to sustain three big manufacturers. Neither does Hair-ass.

Bill

Do you know if there is any connection between Broadcast Electronics and Gates, since Gates also used to be in Quincy, Il?

BE bought the old gates building at 123 Hampshire St. in Cincy when Harris moved to Mason.

AFAIK there is no biz relationship.

73DG

To further muddy the waters, Nautel now has a field office in Quincy. 
73 Dave

Interesting. Was that Mason OH, home of WLW and the now-defunct VOA site? I wonder if BE inherited anything left behind by Gates, other than the building. I don't think Gates kept any of their old-style transmitter production facilities.  A few years ago someone here reported contacting them, and they no longer kept even any documentation on their old tube-type transmitter lines.

IIRC, when I bought the stuff to build my tower, the Rohn tower co. was also located in Quincy, or very near there.

And Broadcast Electronics started out in Silver Spring, Maryland.

I have a Spotmaster cart machine, the old lever-release type, whose service book has the old address.

Deregulation and the resulting consolidation of the broadcast industry did not help transmitter manufacturers...but Harris was the preferred vendor for Cumulus, Citadel (now part of Cumulus), and possibly Clear Channel, so it's hard to understand from that standpoint how the broadcast division could have been unprofitable.

There is a downside to Harris: Many of their broadcast transmitters are definitely not engineer-friendly. The Quest FM transmitters (now discontinued) are very hard to work on, as key circuit boards are hard to get to. The Platinum FM transmitters have the fuses and rectifiers mounted directly atop the power transformer. To replace one or more blown fuses, you need to disconnect a lot of wires, then slide a 750 pound transformer out of the bottom of the transmitter. Try doing that by yourself when you're working at 3 AM on the top of a mountain in a January gale! I would NEVER specify a Harris transmitter if I were building or upgrading an FM site. Ray, are the AM transmitters any easier to work on?

Gates was purchased by Harris many years ago. Broadcast Electronics and Harris are both in Quincy, but they are competitors. B-E makes studio products as well as transmitters. The AudioVault brand of program automation systems is made there and B-E has excellent training and support for that product.

There is one more: Continental Electronics in Texas. They are still alive and well and, in fact, they bought out the Rockwell/Collins broadcast line some years ago. Continental had long been known for high-power AM and shortwave transmitters. Their transmitters are well-designed and reliable.

There are three small companies as well: Energy-Onix in Valatie, NY (near Albany), Armstrong Transmitters near Syracuse, NY (although their FM transmitters are made in Italy and rebranded; the AM transmitters are made locally), and QEI in Williamstown, NJ. QEI has moved into related product lines, although some broadcast products are still available from them. While Cumulus and Clear Channel generally don't buy from any of these smaller companies, a lot of the small, mom-and-pop stations do buy their products.

An aside regarding the Armstrong FM transmitters: About ten years ago, I assisted in installing one of their higher-power transmitters at a site in South Jersey. The transmitter was made in Italy and rebranded. The station's chief engineer was puzzled at the AC primary wiring, as it used the European color code. I am familiar with that code, so I hooked up the power. Some pages of the manual were untranslated...they were in the original Italian! My high school Latin and Spanish helped me there.

Continental got out of the AM broadcast market, they only sell FM and shortwave transmitters now. And the Armstrong FM rigs are rebranded RVRs.

Imagine it's all what your use to, being the group down here was Cumulus and then Clear channel I have worked so long with Harris products that I have learned how to deal with the issues, think I can remove the front panel, disconnect all the cables and roll out a power supply deck on a Z -10 in under fifteen minutes. The trick for me at least is to remove and discard the back locking nuts and use a crow bar to get the assembly to roll back in over the lip of the frame. Got to love anytime you have an excuse to use a crow bar for working on a transmitter. The good thing is all our sites have backup transmitters so don’t have to do anything in hurry or the middle of the night. The Harris DAX-5 AM transmitters have some issues with eating switching supplies and circuit barkers but they are  off the shelf components and we order them directly from the manufacture or Newark at half the cost of buying them thru Harris. Think the biggest complaint about the DAX is it only works into a 50 J-0 load and wont operate with anything that isn't, no tuning or anything like the BE but if you can't get your antenna network to 50 J-0 don’t think you should be doing broadcast in the first place. Energy- Onyx, Armstrong and QEI are poor excuses for transmitter companies, maybe QEI is a little better then the first two but always had the opinion that all three look like they were produced in someone's basement or garage using the cheapest parts working right at the maximum level they were capable of, but they are cheap. Funny thing is I always liked the QEI modulation monitors.

BE started out in a loft over the garage of WWDC-AM in Silver Spring, MD where I was once the chief engineer. Two station engineers invented the audio cart machine there in their spare time. I think it was the late-1950's. By the time I arrived on the scene the studio building where Murray the K and Johnny Holliday had once spun records had long since been sold off, and the garage turned into a shack for the AM/FM transmitters. I didn't know the significance of the building until after I left the place. I've always said to myself that the building deserves an historical marker.

73, Jim
WA2AJM/3

Yeah Jim, Brookeville Rd.  The transmitter site is still there.  Across the street, I buy tires for our various vehicles at a place that's been there since I was in college, and I used to get my Motorola commercial 2-way radios tuned up at Teltronics on the WWDC side, remember them?  Still there too.

Several months, maybe a year ago, Harris released a necessary firmware upgrade for the DAX transmitters. Part of the modification is to correct an issue where certain chips in the controller are written to so frequently that they reach their lifetime cycle limit after a number of years, then you got a dead transmitter. I did a DAX-6 late 2011 without any problems. If you maintain any Harris DAX boxes, be aware of it...

Bill

Paul, yes indeed. I think the office park next door which once housed the old FM tower is still called "WWDC Park" or some such. You probably also know that BE/Spotmaster's rival called Tapecaster was located on Wilkins Ave in Rockville near the present HHS office building.  My wife used to work down the street from them in what was once the sales counter and warehouse for Capitol Radio Wholesalers, the former parts emporium. 

73, Jim
WA2AJM/3

Wondering- How and why did BE end up moving to Quincy, Ill., the hometown of Gates?

I think it's best described that BE transmitters are built like Russian designs, easier to fix, compared to Harris and Nautel.

Although, BE really screwed up a 20 KW FM box I had to fix...The plate transformer had its 208 volt 3-phase primary's wound first around the iron core, then the 13 KV secondaries were the outside winding, only covered with a few layers of glass cloth tape and varnish. BE routed the #1 THHN wire to the primary, but they laid it across one HV leg of the plate transformer. Result? Arc through the 600V rated THHN to the HV primary as they touched...Burnt secondary winding on plate transformer...Replacement cost, only $5,000 or so.

Doh!


Bill

Bill, I think that Quincy became a hub of broadcast manufacturing because there is experienced talent there which is difficult to find elsewhere for what is basically a niche industry. Although IIRC Harris Broadcast has been retrenching a lot of its broadcast support and operations to the Denver area for the last 10-years, maybe more so on the TV side. 

The last time I ever bought a rig was for the former WTEM 570 in Bethesda, MD for which I purchased two BE AM5 rigs when that line had just been released. I liked them a lot over the Harris MW-5A's that they replaced, but all-in-all I would probably buy Nautel next time. I've been out of commercial radio since 1993 and so don't think I'll ever get the opportunity to install a broadcast rig again.

73, Jim
WA2AJM/3