WBZA SPRINGFIELD, MA

[W2PFY]

I ran across this site today thought some of you out there would like to view it. WBZ is in Boston running 50K but at one time they had a satellite station called WBZA. It ran 1000 watts with an impressive roof top antenna system. When I first went to the Springfield area  as a young salesman, the antennas were still up there. I don't know if they were in use then. This was around 1973. The towers are still up and you can Google Earth them at 655 Page Boulevard Springfield Ma.

The link has the original blue prints of the installation. Since there is a copyright on the page, I didn't post any pictures here but I'm sure you'll enjoy looking at them. I also notice that on the right tower, someone mounted a beam up there. I don't remember seeing that.


Does anyone know when WBZA went off the air?

Here's the link....

http://www.springfieldradio.com/wbz.html

[flintstone mop]

Interesting info here.
Paul, WA3VJB could fill us in on another station in Washington DC that was 1kw and a rooftop antenna on a metal surface. WUST???

Fred

[K1DEU]

WBZ off de air 1AM early Monday morning while WBZA would stay on the air for another half a hour to a hour.

Widdle WBZA had a decent signal in Michigan by itself.  The Audio and carriers were synced together most of the time quite well. As I lived in Williamstown, Mass in the 50's they had to be for we would often get an somewhat equal signal strength from both!

Its end fed inverted L Antenna had some good horizontal component for skywave !!!

[WA3VJB]

Interesting info here.
Paul, WA3VJB could fill us in on another station in Washington DC that was 1kw and a rooftop antenna on a metal surface. WUST???

Fred

Yeup, the single tower is still on top of what started out as movie theater here in Washington, DC.

The station long ago moved to northern Virginia, and today diplexes at 20,000 watts off a tower that carried the old WEAM Arlington.

[W2DU]

As I remember WBZA, it was on the same carrier frequency as WBZ, which I guess is what K1EDU means when he said the audio and carrier of the two stations were synced. Their carriers would have to have been synced, otherwise a beat note would have been generated.

For listeners between Boston and Springfield, how would they know which station they were hearing? I would presume they were hearing both simultaneously. However, due to the distance between them I would expect there was a phase difference between the two carrier signals

Walt

[k4kyv]

A real treasure trove of radio history.  Thanks for posting it, Terry.

Interesting that they appear to have used a single wire between the towers instead of a cage or multi-wire flat top.  I wonder if the original antenna in the 1920s might have been multi-wire, later replaced with a single wire for less maintenance.

It is rare to find original blue-prints and schematics for one of those old broadcast installations.

It was common practice (or at least something used by several stations across the country) in those days to synchronise more than one transmitter to the same frequency.  I think they transmitted a tone signal via phone line between sites to maintain the two carriers in phase.  One problem would be dead spots in areas where both carriers are approximately equal, corresponding to standing waves in the interference pattern.  Moving the receiving antenna a short distance would clear up the problem.

In the 1930s the BBC reportedly synched several transmitters each to a few specific national frequencies for coverage throughout the UK.

I saved the entire page as HTML file, but also saved the individual images as gif images (supposedly they don't compress and lose resolution every time you copy and save, as jpegs do), although the first saved images seem to lose some resolution compared to the original html page.

[W8IXY]

Many years ago when Westinghouse owned WBZ, I had the good fortune to speak with a Westinghouse broadcast  engineer who explained to me the "synchronization" of WBZ and WBZA.  At the Boston transmitter location, they used the 1030kc  frequency standard for both the Boston and Springfield transmitters.  They divided the 1030kc generated at Boston to a frequency that could be sent via twisted pair phone line to Springfield, where they used that to synchronize WBZA to the exact same frequency as WBZ, therefore resulting in no low frequency beat.  I do not remember discussing audio synchronization, so if anyone knows the details, we'd all like to hear more.

I remember very clearly when, as a kid, I'd pick up WBZ (Boston) well before sunset and hear the joint ID:  "WBZ Boston, WBZA Springfield"

I don't know if WBZA had much nighttime operation.  In White's Radio log from the early 60's, it listed WBZA as a 1kw daytimer.  I also never heard any beat between WBZ and WBZA, so if both stations were on when skywave was in, the carrier frequency synchronization must have been working well.  With WBZ's two tower half wave system, pulling a cardioid pattern max to the west, with a deep null over the ocean, I would think that the 1kw from WBZA would have very little comparable skywave to contribute.

73
Ted   W8IXY

[DMOD]

Thanks Terry.

Looking at the memorabilia, I remember my grandmother had one of the first H-73 "All-Wave" radios in western KY.

As I recall, it had pushbutton (memory) tuning as well as dial tuning, similar to the later car radios.

I remember it well since she had me run a wire from the "Parlor" to the big oak tree outside with an insulator on the tree end, at her farm home in
Lynnville, KY.

Phil - AC0OB

[K1DEU]

Terry and I have beaten this subject to death many times on 75 AM before. He should do all the typing.

In the 50's some Monday mornings all audio would stop and sometimes 10 to 20 minutes later ID would be WBZ only, good studio mike. Then WBZ would drop their 50 or 10 KW carrier and Another carrier would come and ID this is WBZA in the office near holy-smoke, Mass kinda a flat dynamic lemonade can and still be very audible to me being K1DEU/8 in Livonia, Michigan. Perhaps only 10 to 13 db down with less QSB.

And Yes Walt if driving between Springfield and Boston up on Route 2 or down on the old east west corridor It could get interesting. The bottom line was always better fidelity on WBZ of course than twisted pair POTS WBZA and sometimes there would be a momentary audio cancellation !

[W2PFY]

Terry and I have beaten this subject to death many times on 75 AM before. He should do all the typing.

Well John, I'm very happy that your doing some typing here as your adding more history than I can remember of our "on air conversations". I don't know why I'm fixated on WBZA? Must be that the two towers I observed reminded me of the old radio books I use to read in Danville, PA public library about early aerials.

Phil, what year did you run that wire for your grandmother? We all had indoor antennas and outdoor rest rooms that were very cold in the wintertime

I noticed in the blue prints of the transmitter output circuit that the RF ammeter was at the bottom of the coil coupled to ground via two capacitors. Never seen that done before and it must have been to lessen the effects of lighting?? Any comments on this?

One other thing, I thinks it great to beat the so called dead horse when it's a subject your interested in. Very cool information is reaped this way Good comments all the way around. Thanks guys!

[W2PFY]

R U sick of this yet? I received an email today from K2PG and it pretty much tells the rest of the story.


WBZA went off the air in 1961, when Westinghouse acquired WINS in New York City. Even though WBZA was strictly a satellite of WBZ, the FCC counted it toward the total number of stations owned by Westinghouse. In those days, a single entity was limited to no more than 7 AM, 7 FM, and 7 TV stations nationally. Of the TV stations, no more than 5 of them could be VHF. Because WINS would have been Westinghouse's eighth station, Westinghouse had to take WBZA off the air and surrender the license.

WBZ in Boston divided its 1030 kHz signal down to the audio range, giving an audio tone of approximately 500 cycles. This was sent down a dedicated telco line to the transmitter in the Springfield area, where it was used to synchronize the oscillator in the WBZA transmitter. I believe that WBZA also used a frequency divider chain and an AFC loop compared the 500 cycle signal from the local transmitter with the one coming in from Boston.

There are some synchronous repeaters operating in Puerto Rico under experimental licenses, such as WI3XSO, 1260 kc. in Aguadilla, which rebroadcasts WISO, 1260 kc. in Ponce. These probably use a GPS system to synchronize the two transmitters and a digital delay at the master station to eliminate any echo on the audio.
 

Thanks Phil.

[Todd, KA1KAQ]

I seem to recall a thread about the towers a year or so back (you probably started it, Terry  ). IIRC, they were turning those building into some kind of new usage and had looked for funds to possibly preserve the towers but had run into money issues? Or they weren't going to do it because of the cost?

There was a time when those roof top towers were quite common around the country during broadcast radio's earlier years. Wonder how many still exist? Someone(W2ZE maybe?) posted a picture of one on a building in AZ or NM a while back that had been saved. Hopefully more have survived.

[K2PG]

There is one such tower still in use in Scranton, PA. It is on top of the Scranton Times building and two local AM stations are diplexed on it: WEJL, 630 kHz and WBZU (formerly WGBI), 910 kHz. In season, that tower is decorated with Christmas lights. WBZU moved there a couple of years ago after losing its transmitter site on Davis Street in Scranton. It is most unusual that WBZU was allowed to use that site, as the FCC will normally not permit the use of rooftop towers for AM radio. The site was grandfathered for WEJL. There are three others that, to my knowledge, are no longer used. One is in Lancaster, on top of the Intelligencer-Journal building, which was used by WGAL (now WLPA) on 1490 kHz and WGAL-TV, which once operated on channel 4. When I last saw that tower, the 2 bay channel 4 batwing antenna was still mounted on it. It served as a kind of top hat for the AM station. Another was on the roof of the long-defunct Pomeroy's department store in downtown Reading and was used by WRAW, 1340 kHz. A third was on an office building in downtown Harrisburg and was used by WFEC on 1400 kHz.

Horizontally polarized or inverted-L antennas may no longer be used for AM broadcasting except in an emergency.

[k4kyv]

Reportedly, the last known functioning AM antenna of this type in the USA was discontinued about 4 years ago.  It was located in Los Angeles. There was a thread on the subject on this board, complete with photos, if anyone is interested in finding it.  That one, instead of two towers, used guyed tubular masts and the inverted-L antenna was multi-wire, with the horizontal part in the form of a flat-top. One of the broadcast rags ran an article on it, showing the transmitter and ATU, as well as photos of the base where it fed up through a Dolly Parton insulator in the roof of the 5-storey building.

Disappointingly, the transmitter was a 100-watt or 250 watt solid state unit mounted in a 19" rack, about the same size as a Viking I or II, or maybe even smaller.  The in-house studio had been moved to another location years earlier.

That type of antenna wouldn't meet to-day's FCC standards, but I am sure existing ones would be grandfathered for as long as they remained in use. Reports of more recently de-commissioned ones indicate that they were taken out of service for bureaucratic or financial reasons, not for technical reasons. For example, the close-down of WBZA, required by the FeeCee in order to allow Westinghouse to acquire another AM station in NYC, and the one in LA because the building was sold and the new landlord increased the rent to some ridiculous figure that the station couldn't afford. The station owners said they actually had better coverage to their target audience, a Korean community in LA located near the old antenna site, than they could achieve after diplexing with another AM transmitter site that the company owned.  I think they eventually went dark due to the loss of their audience following the move.

Things have  changed a lot since 1961.  Now, the same corporation may own more than 7 radio stations in the same city, let alone nationwide... and in 1961, there was actually something worth listening to on the AM band.

WCAS, 740 KC in Cambridge MA used to have a rooftop tower.  It was a self-supported vertical located on top of an industrial building at the edge of town.  But this was not a tee or cage; it was just a vertical mast located on a rooftop, not on the ground.  I would assume the FCC would still allow it if a sufficient ground system could be deployed.  WCAS moved their site to somewhere north of Boston for a while, but I read or heard somewhere that they eventually moved back to their old location with the same tower, but with a different call sign and format.  When I lived there, they ran a folk/rock format, and gave the bigtime FMs in Boston a run for their money while they were on the air, daytime only.

[W4AAB]

KYPA was the station with the flat-top antenna.Scott Fybush, the radio programming guru, has a picture of it on his web site <www.fybush.com>. KYPA moved their transmitter and the rooftop antenna was needed no more. It would have been nice to put that antenna in a museum.
                                                            Joe W4AAB

[k4kyv]

Or better still, a ham station using it on 160.

Here is more on WBZA.  Originally, WBZ was in Springfield and the Boston station was WBZA.  They swapped call signs in 1931.

http://www.fybush.com/site-010919.html

By moving to Hull, with substantially its entire listening audience to the west, WBZ was also able to take advantage of the new science of directional AM antennas. While the station enjoyed the best possible allocations classification (what would soon be known as a "I-A clear channel), allowing it to run 50,000 watts day and night without directionalizing its signal, its engineers realized that a simple cardoid pattern at Hull would reduce the amount of signal wasted over the Atlantic Ocean while increasing its field strength in densely-populated metro Boston. Only a handful of other "optional" directional arrays were ever built: WTAM in Cleveland and KNX in Los Angeles eventually returned to non-directional operation, and today only WWL in New Orleans and WBZ in Boston are directional I-A clears.

(An amusing digression: many decades later, an FCC inspector visited WBZ for a routine inspection. As he would do at any directional AM, the inspector asked to see the list of monitoring points the station used to ensure its array was in compliance. It took some explaining, a WBZ engineer would recount later on, to persuade the inspector that WBZ had no monitoring points, as it had no obligation to protect any station in its nulls and, indeed, no obligation to operate with a DA at all.)

http://www.fybush.com/sites/2005/site-050805.html

[W2PFY]

Here is yet another wire broadcast antenna still in use. It looks like a two wire loop.

KAPS-AM 660 PARAN ANTENNA

http://community-2.webtv.net/AM-DXer/KAPSAM660PARAN/index.html

After looking up the FCC data on this station it appears that the antenna is non directional. The radiation pattern is equal at 360 degrees and the night time signal is the same, just a smaller pattern. Looks like this would be a good antenna for 160 for local stuff.

[Steve - K4HX]

I guess this is omni or is it favoring SE?

[Steve - K4HX]

Overhead

Those towers look short for 660 kHz. The loop is probably some way to make a "fat" radiator out of all four towers to make up for the "missing" height.

[W2PFY]

I guess your right Steve, I got this from the internet.

Abstract:  Abstract A PARAN (perimeter current antenna) antenna which was constructed, tested, and licensed at radio station KAPS in Mount Vernon, Washington, USA, is described. A PARAN antenna is intended for the broadcaster whose site is severely limited in height and ground area. Both current distribution versus height measurements and full field proof-of-performance measurements were made to prove the antenna's efficiency. The results show that a PARAN antenna can produce a radiation field better than 282 mV/m/1 kw at 1 km (175 mV/m/1 kw at 1 mi). Bandwidth evaluation measurements and radiation hazard measurements are discussed

[k4kyv]

A PARAN antenna is intended for the broadcaster whose site is severely limited in height and ground area. Both current distribution versus height measurements and full field proof-of-performance measurements were made to prove the antenna's efficiency. The results show that a PARAN antenna can produce a radiation field better than 282 mV/m/1 kw at 1 km (175 mV/m/1 kw at 1 mi).

Maybe it should be investigated for 160m ham use for those living on postage-stamp size lots.

[KD6VXI]

PARAN sounds like the antenna they had at the sub comms facility that became Navy housing down in San Diego during Clintonia.

HUGE towers, I SO miss seeing them on top of College when I'd be coming in to San Diego.  All you see now is a tall repeater tower


--Shane
KD6VXI

[K2PG]

Maybe it should be investigated for 160m ham use for those living on postage-stamp size lots.

Another good antenna for people with limited real estate is the folded unipole antenna. It is a physically short, "fat" radiator that will easily fit on a city lot. The optimum tower height for the center of the unipole is 90 feet on 160 meters and about 45-50 feet for 80. The tower itself is grounded. There are three skirt wires, each one running parallel to a tower leg and held from the tower by several sets of insulating spacers. (I use PVC pipe for my system.) A commoning ring connects the three skirt wires together near the top of the tower and is bonded electrically to the tower. This ring can be moved up or down the tower to get a resistive component of 50 ohms. There is a second ring connecting the wires together at the bottom of the tower. This is insulated from the tower and is the feedpoint. A small matching network is used at the feedpoint to tune out the reactive component. Folded unipoles are usually inductive. You will need a set of radials with this antenna, but, if you don't have the space for full-length radials, put in what you can and the antenna will still work. In New Jersey, I have about 24 various lengths of galvanized barbed wire radials, installed after copper thieves stole my ground system a couple of years ago. I use folded unipoles in both New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

If you live in a place where you cannot put up a tower, you can substitute a pole. It must be conductive and it must be grounded.

If you mount other antennas on the folded unipole tower, be sure to ground the shield of each feedline to the base of the tower.

[K6IC]

Hi Phil,

Great information,  and very nice to see you back here after a too-long absence.

73  Vic

[K1DEU]

When I fed my tower on 160 and 80.

A Rohn 25g tower with base grounded apx 1/4 wave high. I just put a 3 foot long halyard near the top and ran some insulated # 6 stranded aluminum from the tower top out the halyard then down to a ATU about 10 foot from the bottom side of the tower.  Two or Three wires is not necessary.

I also have used many inverted U's    like 160 foot of large conductor wire grounded at base of a tree  up the tree and then back down to the ground 10 or more feet away to the feed point or at a 45 degree angle away from tree to get some horizontal component.

Russ KF2TX and I did this for a few years, we were about 250 miles apart. We had ground wave in the day time with DX-100 power. Mostly on 160 and a little on 8o meters.

Glad that groundhog saw his shadow Phil !

Regards< John K1DEU

Shane that PARAN Antenna looks like George, W2WLR  (Watertown's little radio ) design

  http://www.hamelectronics.com/k1deu/pages/ham/antennas/pages/w2wlr/index__w2wlr.htm