WSM Tower/Transmitter Site Open House Tomorrow Morning

[W4AAB]

The 80th anniversary of WSM's 808 foot tower is tomorrow from 10 a.m.-2 p.m. Just Google "WSM Tower" and the info is available. I plan on being there and am bringing Boys Shelton, W4ZWE, whose older brother Aaron was an  engineer and later manager of WSM.Nice weather for such an event.
                                                      Joe W4AAB

[Steve - K4HX]

Very cool. Please post some pix if you can.

[W4NEQ]

Many years ago, I attended an SBE "Chilli Bash" event held at the WSM transmitter site, with interesting techie tours and general socializing.   It's a great site and I would love to see that kind of event happen again.

Chris

[Todd, KA1KAQ]

Heard them announce the Open House last Sunday night on the Out of the Blue program. They boom in over here quite nicely. The announcer mentioned that they had held the celebration each year but that this was the first time they were doing so at the tower site.

You lucky dawgs. Would love to have been there. A beautiful day wx-wise for sure.

[W4AAB]

It was an AWESOME event!! The event didn't start until noon, but W4ZWE and myself arrived at 11:15. Battey was down on my camera, but Dr. John KN4ME,Don K4KYV,Gary K4XK and Bob K4BKC were there. Dr. John was snapping pictures. Don and I walked all the way down under the big tower itself. I will check and see what video/pictures were made there today and see if I can post some of them. Really enjoyed myself there. Met all the on-air personalities. Lots of broadcast folks there as well.
                                                             Joe W4AAB

[K6JEK]

I would like to nominate that tower for the Most Beautiful Tower Ever award. Others may have other favorites.

Does that diamond shape give it some structural advantage over straight or just a triangle?

[k4kyv]

There are maybe a  half dozen of those towers left in N America, and 3 or 4 in Europe.  The diamond shape was abandoned sometime in the 30s, for one reason because the shape affected the rf current distribution and calculation of effective length.  WSM had to lop off about 80 ft. of the tubular mast on top because the calculations initially came out wrong, and a high angle lobe was causing enough selective fading to degrade signal quality in Chattanooga. It was later decided that uniform cross section towers were the best way to go after all. Contrary to what I often hear, the design of  the tower had nothing to do with the higher rf current near the mid-point when a tower is close to a half wavelength high. Some competitors even accused Blaw-Knox of designing the tower that way only for aesthetic reasons, hoping it would become popular because it was attractive, and bring them more customers.

The visit was well worth taking a few hours off my Saturday house-maintenance chores. I was a little disappointed to learn that they had abandoned the 5-conductor open wire line to the tower back in 2002, replacing it with buried heliax.  The engineer said they had a problem with birds occasionally getting zapped on the OWL; the older transmitters had always been forgiving of the momentary change in load impedance whenever a bird would get zapped, and kept rolling right along until the remains were completely burnt away, but  the newer digital solid state rig would not tolerate the momentary mismatch very well and sometimes kick off the air, and someone would have to drive out to the TX site and remove the carcass before the transmitter would stay on the air.

Interestingly, the old OWL tuner components are still there although dismantled.  There is a humongous fixed air capacitor, a nitrogen-filled 1000-2000 pf variable, and a couple of home-made coils about 18" in diameter constructed from copper tubing and held together with varnished plywood.  The new tuner uses compact fixed vacuum and mica caps, and edge-wound coils with Mycalex insulation like the ones EF Johnson used to make.  Their original feed line was a two-wire OWL used with the original transmitter that had balanced output, later replaced by a 5-wire unbalanced line when that transmitter was replaced with a newer one that had unbalanced output.  The original two-wire pairs of Dolly Partin feedthrough insulators are still mounted on the walls of both the transmitter building and dog house.  Near the end of the open-house, the engineer opened the gate at the tower site and let visitors peer inside the dog-house and inside the fenced-in area to see the base insulator. The 5-conductor OWL is still in place and he said they have no intention of dismantling it (otherwise I might have tried to talk them into letting me have it).  A solid brick wall is built round the tower base instead of the usual white picket fence.  The story I heard years ago was that the wall was built during WWII to prevent Nazi saboteurs from shooting out the base insulator, since the station was heard quite well in Europe and reportedly embedded strategic war information into their programming. I have noticed a similar wall surrounding the base of the WLW tower in Cincinnati as well.  None of the people at WSM I talked to had ever heard that story, but they all said it sounded plausible. The site is fairly well maintained, but not quite so well as I would have expected. You can see that the 1932 steel hardware and concrete are showing their age, although the tower structure itself is well painted with no signs of rust or deterioration. Some of the guy wires are rusty and corroded, and I noticed a bunch of cracks in the concrete base pier, and what looks like a few small holes in the ceramic near the bottom of the base insulator.  The engineer said those holes had always been there for as long as he remembers, maybe air bubbles from when the porcelain was cast. Looked like vines had been allowed to grow up near the tower base over the brick wall, but had recently been trimmed away.
 

[KR4WI]

I got to tour the WLW site a few yrs ago. I was told the same abt nazi aircraft protection around bottom of tower. Their coax was above ground, and I think he said nitrogen was keeping it cool. I stepped inside the dog house and i would swear i felt the hair on my arms stand up. If you all get toward cinn you should call and ck WLW out also. It was well worth 4 hour drive for me...REAL HISTORY In my back door...Matthew KR4WI

[W4NEQ]

I recall a fluorescent lamp being held, and it lighting Tesla-style as we approached the tower base.  This was prior to regulation of the RFR limits.  There were pull-ropes for ammeter switching.  The wall around the base was for insulator protection against a possible Axis sniper's bullet.  Being so far inland, the Luftwaffe threat wasn't considered significant.

The transmitter building has inlaid ornamental floors.

Times have changed.

Chris

[k4kyv]

I recall a fluorescent lamp being held, and it lighting Tesla-style as we approached the tower base.  This was prior to regulation of the RFR limits.  There were pull-ropes for ammeter switching.

When I first arrived, there was a long slow-moving queue to sign the guest book and visit the inside of the transmitter building.  I decided to skip that step until later and visit the tower base first.  They had freshly mowed a wide path between transmitter building and tower, and people could be seen wandering down the path to the tower and back.  As I walked towards the tower, a young lady informed me that the tower area was off-limits beyond the porta-pottys at the end of the building.  She said something about Gaylord (the corporate owners of the station) being concerned about RF exposure limits.  I pointed to all the other people at the tower, and she said they weren't supposed to be there, and that someone would soon be down to ask them to leave.  So I walked to the other side of the building and there was no guard posted, so I went on down to the tower base. At the time the gate was  closed, but I had a good look at the old 5-conductor OWL feeders and how they were configured to enter through a window pane, and the two abandoned feed-through insulators that once accommodated the original 2-wire OWL.

Later on, just before the event was about to close, I noticed a crowd of people gathered at the tower, so I went back down.  This time the gate was open and the CE was giving people a tour of the inside of the area, with the gate to the tower base open so that one could peek in and see  the base insulator.  He also opened the door to the dog-house (a tiny 1932-era brick art deco style building).  There was a new looking homemade rack that held the T-network, with all modern new components.  The RF ammeter was a small mirror-scale instrument mounted on the rack where he inserted probes into a receptacle to get a reading.  Nothing particularly spectacular or exciting, and the pull-rope switch was apparently long gone.  The old tuning unit components had been moved to the main building for the open-house event.  He mentioned that water had risen into the dog-house during last year's flood, but not high enough to knock the transmitter off the air.

Evidently, they didn't consider the RF hazard to be serious enough to keep the public away from the tower base for a brief visit, despite what the lady had been telling the crowd. The CE wouldn't let anyone enter the dog-house.  He said he had learnt his lesson in that regard a few months ago from a close call when someone was filming a TV documentary about the station, and he let them inside the  dog-house.  The person noticed that one could hear audio from the modulation emanating from the tuner components.  He held his  microphone out to record the sound and almost touched the tuning coil with the mic before the CE was able to yank him away.