what's truly sad is there are no more clear channel stations on am unless you count the crap tat calls itself clear channel the company not the concept I can't hear ksl out here and the used to be an absolute clear channel station alon with a few others. wsm nashvile should cover the whole country, but even they have trouble alot of the time with other crap ontheir frequency, and ksl 1160 doesn't have a chance. they tel me that years ago you could hear ksl out here in Raleigh, bu tno more too many crap crap stations splattering all over am not to mentiont he iboc crap. the am band has been made almost useless. when i was a kid am radio was awesome
On Nov 14, 2011, at 12:32 PM, Martin McCormick wrote:
> I do remember the CONELRAD tests.
>
> Radio and television stations would broadcast an
> introductory message as to what was about to happen. The carrier
> would go down for 15 seconds. Then, it would come back up for
> another 15 seconds. It was down for yet another 15 seconds and
> when it came back up, there was a 1 KHZ tone for maybe another
> 15 seconds. CONELRAD receivers had to detect the two drops in
> carrier plus the tone and that initiated the CONELRAD condition.
>
> My father was a science teacher at a school in Tulsa,
> Oklahoma at the time and had gone in to the teachers' lounge or
> maybe the school office for something and turned on the radio.
> He first thought the radio was broken because there were only
> two signals on the air. Then, he was reminded of the test which
> went for half an hour or so and then all other stations came
> back on and things were normal.
>
> I think the test was done every year for a while. I
> don't remember the first test, but the one in 1957 or 1958
> featured a talk by our state's governor at the time.
>
> I bet the station engineers loved this test if their
> station was one of the CONELRAD stations because they had to run
> all this stuff that you couldn't test any other time and it had
> to work perfectly this one day and, of course, be ready to
> switch in on a moment's notice.
>
> Tulsa had a 50,000-watt station KVOO at 1170 which was
> one of the CONELRAD stations so they had to electrically chop
> off part of their antenna to tune it up on 1240. I am sure this
> was accomplished by large contactors which are just huge relays,
> but still, when else could you make sure it worked?
>
> The other 50,000-watt station in Tulsa was KRMG at 740.
> I have no idea, for sure if they were the 640 CONELRAD station,
> but they would have had to add some electronic length to their
> masts to reach 640.
>
> It did work, however, so it just shows you what people
> do when they need to.
>
> Something else you might find interesting during those
> days was a plan to use AM broadcast transmitters as data links
> for RTTY and Morse.
>
> There was an article in "QST" several years ago about
> WSM 650 in Nashville TN. They actually had a FSK encoder on
> their 50-KW transmitter which shifted the carrier maybe 50 HZ
> and would have let them send RTTY to suitable decoders. An
> average citizen listening to WSM would have noticed nothing
> unusual. The article described the test transmission as a loop
> sending the call letters and the word "test."
>
> Lloyd Rasmussen writes:
>> I don't remember hearing any of those celebrity PSA's, but they aren't
>> very
>> different from what FEMA tells us today at ready.gov or other websites.
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