WBZA SPRINGFIELD, MA

[KM1H]

My oldest son lived a few blocks away from WBZA during 2001-05 on Fresno St. I used to stare at those towers every time we visited.

Even with a directional antenna WBZ put a strong signal into Europe, at least aboard ship in the 60's. WKBW was another I listened to a lot since they were a good R&R station.

There has been a steady shift to various music formats on AM BCB lately and political talk is rather sparse around here. Now if they would only get rid of those damn bible thumpers and sports yakkers . There are also many ethnic stations or segments on other stations with some good music and a way for me to keep up with some measure of fluency.

740 is now WJIB with 250W day, 5W night, and 40-109W PSRA. A 280' on ground tower does the radiating and is decent copy here during the day.
http://www.wjib740.com/2.html

Carl

[W8IXY]

Interesting that Don mentioned that KYW (when it was on 1100 in Cleveland) was a 1A clear channel but used a directional antenna.  The unique thing about that antenna was that it was a 3 element antenna system on a single tower.  That tower also supported their channel 3 television, and their 105.7 FM..

The 1100 AM frequency's full wavelength was about 905 feet.  905 feet was also ideal from that location as the height for a VHF TV station antenna.  Plus, when the FM went on the air about 1958, the HAAT for the FM was the highest in the market at the time.

So, Westinghouse built the AM antenna as a full wave, 905 foot beauty, sectionalized in the middle.  The Franklin antenna is 2 half waves in phase, a collinear, and resulted in a sizzling groundwave signal, with its low angle of radiation, as well as significant suppression of high angle skywave to eliminate close in destructive nighttime skywave self interference.

The main transmitter was a Westinghouse 50HG2, feeding a one-of-a-kind power dividing network/phasor to provide the directional pattern.  The first time I visited the site in 1961, I was wondering why they had a phase monitor for their single antenna tower.  Looking up the tower, you could see the sampling loops at the mid point of the two half wave sections (at the point of maximum current).  In addition, since the groundwave was slightly beyond that allowed by the Canadian agreement (the tower was about 10 miles south of the city which is on the south shore of Lake Erie), there was the necessity to slightly decrease radiation toward any point on the Canadian border.  So, a vertical wire was attached to a guy wire on the north side of the tower, operating against the lower half of the tall tower, hence it became a 3 element antenna system on a single tower.  When first installed, several methods were tried to determine the best and most stable way to feed the drop wire to pull a slight null toward Canada.  After trying a resistor, a tuned circuit, and feeding the wire as a "third tower", the "feeding the wire as a third tower" method was eventually built and tuned up.  All that was needed was about a 3 to 4 db "pullback" toward Canada.

Some difficulty in engineering was worked out when isolating two runs of 3" coax up the full length of the tower for the TV antenna, and another run of 3" coax for the FM, located just under the TV antenna at the top of the tower, as well as the 3" line that went to the middle of the tower to feed the two sections.  AM directional, FM, and TV....all coming off a single tower.

When WKYC AM & FM (changed in 1965 when KYW went back to Philadelphia) were sold in the mid 70's, WKYC AM and FM became WWWE and WWWM.  The AM antenna was moved back to its original location which was built in 1938 for WTAM, while the 105.7 FM was allowed to stay on the TV tower.   The WTAM call letters on 1100 came back in the 90's.  The original WTAM 1/2 wave antenna, when reactivated for AM, was also a location for several FM stations, a bunch of two way gear,  a .22-.82 repeater, and panel antennas for TV channel 55.

A 225 foot 1/4 wave "stub" tower was built about 2 feet from the south side of the 450 half wave tower, grounded at the base, and joined to the 450 foot tower at the 225 foot level, theoretically providing a way to isolate the many runs of coax and lighting wiring from the AM on that tower.  The coax runs and TV waveguide were removed from the main tower and run up the 225 foot stub tower, and bonded to the main tower at the 225 foot level.  The TV channel 55 antenna was removed sometime in the 80's, but the other antennas still populate all levels of that tower.  Its an interesting sight, seeing a tower loaded with all kinds of VHF, UHF, microwave and FM broadcast antennas on a tower also carrying 50kw of AM.

I was the CE there for several runs, in the 70's and the 80's.  When the AM was relocated, the ground wave signal was significantly reduced, but nothing could be done about it.  We had to move the AM off the old Franklin due to contractural obligations, and even though the FCC would allow doubling the height of the old WTAM tower to construct a new Franklin, the city and the FAA shot those requests down in a hurry.  It was great while the huge antenna lasted.

The Franklin antenna tower was dismantled and removed last year when Channel 3, soon to be RF channel 17, went to its digital transmissions.  A new tower was constructed about 10 feet from the old Franklin tower, and it now also holds up the digital RF channel 26 antenna of WVIZ-PBS in Cleveland.  An era had passed.  I live about 2 miles from that tower site, and even though I see the new tower from my front window, all that is left of that great full wave Franklin is the memory.

73
Ted  W8IXY



To isolate

[W1LSB]

A very interesting thread indeed. 

I just sent a note to the current RF systems manager at WBZ to see if he can add anything to the discussion.  He's not a ham, but is aware of our interest in broadcast history.   I'll see him at the local SBE meeting next week, and report back on any new info.

There was another synchronous station in this area for many years; WLLH in Lowell and Lawrence MA.  They were on 1400 KHz, ran maybe 250 Watts at each site, and used a motor driven sync system that worked over a dedicated phone line line.  The synchro system was actually shown in the old red Kauffman Q&A manual that many of us studied in order to pass FCC first & second class license exams.

73, George - W1LSB
SBE CPBE

[W1DAN]

Hi:

I worked at WBZ-TV in Boston for many years and heard the story of the phone line tone that locked carrier phase with WBZ and WBZA radio. Interestingly, the call letters WBZA was the first call letters for the New England Westinghouse station in the Hotel Brunswick in Boston, beginning in 1924.

Scott Fybush mentioned a while back that the towers in Springfield were slated to be torn down.

73,
Dan
W1DAN
SBE CBTE, CBNT

[KM1H]

WLLH is still synchronized according to the FCC. Im almost in the middle and there is often some strange aurora sound on the audio. Its an all Spanish station now and its also where Ed McMahon got his start.

There has also been talk about reviving the idea of a 3rd station in Haverhill. WLLH was originally for Lowell, Lawrence, Haverhill.

Carl

[k4kyv]

I haven't heard George on the air for many years.  According to his QRZ.com listing, he has renewed and is current until 2018 when he will be 101. That would put him at 93 or 94 now.

Class   Advanced Codes: HAI
Effective   2008-05-13
Expires   2018-06-17
Latitude   43.965982 (43° 57' 57'' N)
Longitude   -75.895535 (75° 53' 43'' W)
Grid Square   FN23bx
US State   New York
Born   1917

[Jeff W9GY]

Ted, having grown up in the Cleveland area, I sure remember the KYW/WKYC transmitting tower.  Got a tour through the transmitting facility, I believe it was in 1963.  Saw the big Westinghouse tx, and some sort of a standby AM transmitter, too, but don't remember it's manufacturer.  We got the low-down on the vertical wire and it's purpose from the tx operators. 

BTW, if you ever tried to build a crystal set in those days, you could never make it selective enough to get rid of KYW!!!

[K2PG]

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.

There's one other: WOR in Newark, NJ (later moved to New York City). They went to an optional directional array in 1935, when they built their transmitter site in Carteret, NJ. WOR wanted to concentrate its signal along the New York/Philadelphia corridor; in fact, the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin used to list WOR in their radio program sections. The nulls were set up to minimize the signal over the Atlantic Ocean and the then-sparsely populated Pocono region. The array was quite interesting, as it was a three-tower array that used only two towers. The third radiator was a heavy steel cable that was dropped from a set of porcelain insulators that were suspended between the two 385 foot self-supporting towers in a triangle. From Roosevelt Avenue, the array looked like a dipole, but the horizontal cable run was just for support and it was broken up by egg insulators. The transmitter building also housed a small studio and was shielded with copper screening run inside the walls and by copper flashing on the roof. A rotating red beacon, resembling a searchlight, warned pilots about the cable strung between the two towers. The site was located near the approaches to Linden Airport (general aviation) and Newark Airport (now Newark Liberty International Airport).

Because this array put part of its eastern null over sections of Brooklyn and Staten Island, WOR built a new transmitter site on a former landfill in Lyndhurst, NJ and closed the Carteret site in 1968. The Carteret site was sold to Middlesex County for use as parkland and the towers and building were torn down in January, 1975.

WOR was downgraded to a Class I-B station, allowing a number of full-time stations to operate within the areas of its nulls. Under the current system of classifying AM broadcast stations, WOR is a Class A station. It has run 50 kW since Carteret first went on the air, although WOR and competitor WJZ (which once had its transmitter site in Bound Brook, NJ) had sought to go to superpower in the wake of WLW doing so in Cincinnati. WJZ is now WABC and its transmitter site is in Lodi, NJ. It is still non-directional. (The WJZ call letters were returned to the radio dial in 2008, when CBS requested them for an AM and FM station that it owns in Baltimore. Those call letters conform to the ones on WJZ-TV, which existed there since 1957.

[flintstone mop]

Any links to the old KYW??
I used to listen to a DJ named ? Big Wilson. They played nice jazz music. Not the smooth Jazz we have now, but small groups. Piano, bass, drums type.
KYW sounded really nice during the 60's
Fred

[Jeff W9GY]

Fred, I met Big Wilson in the Cleveland KYW days.  He hosted both a radio program and the afternoon movie on KYW-TV Ch3.  As I remember, the radio show was kind of middle - of - the - road stuff and not too much early rock and roll. I understand he went from Cleveland to NYC,  He is now SK.  He was a popular and well liked personality in those days.  Jeff


His OBIT. Published: October 07, 1989
 
 
Malcolm John Wilson Jr., a radio personality known as Big Wilson, died after a heart attack Thursday at a hotel in Selma, N.C. He had observed his 65th birthday this week and was touring the country with his wife, Jody.

Mr. Wilson, who was 6 feet 6 inches tall and weighed more than 300 pounds, came to New York in the early 1960's and joined WNBC as a disk jockey. He moved to Miami in 1975 and worked as a disk jockey on radio station WIOD and as a late-night movie host for WCIX-TV.

In addition to his wife, Mr. Wilson is survived by his son, John Jeffrey, of Fort Lauderdale, and his sister, Barbara Sagendorf, of Cobleskill, N.Y.


Je

[KX5JT]

Speaking of Springfield, MA.... and totally off topic otherwise...

Good movie with Anthony Hopkins "The Worlds Fastest Indian" Motorcycle that is.

[KM1H]

I decided to stop off in Springfield on my way back from the NY "shopping" trip yesterday. See my Gates BC-1T thread in Technical for details.

The WBZA towers are still there and the building looks a lot cleaner but it was a bright sunny day also.

Carl

[k4kyv]

Looking at the blueprint, you will see that the old inverted-L wire was exactly a quarter-wavelength for 1030.  Those two old towers would be just about the perfect distance apart for hanging a 160m half-wave open-wire fed dipole, which would put out a great signal on 80m as well, as a double zepp (two half waves in phase}.  Wonder what direction the two towers are broadside to?

[KM1H]

Pretty much E-W as the road out front is US-20

[W2PFY]

Those two old towers would be just about the perfect distance apart for hanging a 160m half-wave open-wire fed dipole

It would be a great transmitter site for perhaps a remotely controlled station but the RFI around there may be a bit much!