ok I don'tknwo how that happened that was very weird this stuff is facinating and makes more sense than the waste of taxpayer money we have today. why do they need to redesign a system when the old system worked perfectly well although sad to ay I can't listen to wsm even here in Raleigh without getting crap from other waste of time stations. the old days of am should have stayed that way it's disghusting how wasteful it is to have the same crap on all the stations and waste the resource of long distance coverage. if tey tok half the trash off am it wold make far mroe sense thanks fcc for screwing us overa nd over and over again i remember wen am dxing was awesome but now it's a waste of time unless you happen to be out int he middle of nowhere and can't get anythign else is it jus tme or has am reception gotten MUCH MUCh worse in the last 7 or so years? i seem to remember it being much better when I moved here than it is now
and it was actually very good out west in Idaho and Utah
and you should hear am radio as it was back int he late 80s when you were 50 miles from the closest transmitter and had no noise and no neighbor closer than a quarter mile I used to get ksl out of salt lake like I was in salt lake city up in Island park by yellowstone same for the other am stations too am ruled up there fm was too distorted by multipath unless you used a very directional antenna, and then it was only the same crap you got in town unles syou plled it from the park
73 kb7la
On Dec 7, 2011, at 5:10 PM, Michael Thurman wrote:
> Concerning the 1 KHz tone, I seem to remember that there was 1 =
> 100 hertz modulation tone associated with it.
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Martin McCormick <[log in to unmask]>
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Date: Monday, Nov 14, 2011 09:32:14
> Subject: Re: A Bit of Radio History
>
>> =20
>> =20
>> I do remember the CONELRAD tests.
>> =20
>> 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.
>> =20
>> 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.
>> =20
>> 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.=20
>> =20
>> 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.
>> =20
>> 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?
>> =20
>> 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.
>> =20
>> It did work, however, so it just shows you what people
>> do when they need to.
>> =20
>> Something else you might find interesting during those
>> days was a plan to use AM broadcast transmitters as data links
>> for RTTY and Morse.
>> =20
>> 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."
>> =20
>> Lloyd Rasmussen writes:
>>> I don't remember hearing any of those celebrity PSA's, but they =
> aren't=20
>>> very
>>> different from what FEMA tells us today at ready.gov or other =
> websites.
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