I am not surprised. That is just a lot of power any way
you look at it.

	When XERF first came on in the thirties, the transmitter
tubes had to be specially ordered. The transmitter was
water-cooled. I wonder, back in the late sixties or seventies,
if when the US and Mexico negotiated a better broadcasting setup
for the AM band, they just turned down the screen voltage on
that monster and kept it loafing along on 50,000
Watts. Just think, that transmitter was designed to put out
500,000 watts all day long so it probably could do 50 K for the
next 75 years and just get a little dusty.

	Seriously, it was probably full of PCB oil and hard to
keep going so they probably just scrapped it and bought a modern
transmitter.
Pat Byrne writes:
> martin,
> I also heard on an old NPR broadcast that XERF would bring close
> flying birds out of the sky to their demise.  And I believe, in their
> heyday there were a number of "super power" stations just across our
> southern border.
> Pat, K9JAUAt 12:00 PM 1/24/2011, you wrote:
> >         I recently finished reading a book about one of the
> >biggest medical fraudsters in US history who snake-oiled his way
> >to riches during the 1930's in the United States and then from a
> >powerful AM radio station on the Mexican border. His name was
> >John R. Brinkley and he called himself a physician though he had
> >no valid medical degree.
> >
> >         Most of the book is not directly radio-related, but
> >there is a brief description of Brinkley's Mexican boarder radio
> >station which later became XERF and I am sure some of you
> >remember the preachers selling all kinds of stuff that one could
> >hear after dark on XERF.
> >
> >         XERF's transmitters were just across the river from Del
> >Rio, Texas and, at one time, were 500,000 Watts directional in
> >to the United States.
> >
> >         People report that at night, the antenna towers arced
> >with green flashes. XERF leaked in to telephones in town, could
> >be heard on things that weren't even electronic such as bed
> >springs, and made the headlights of cars come on even when they
> >were supposed to be off as they drove around town.
> >
> >         XERF transmitted on 735 KHZ in the mid thirties and many
> >of the radios were TRF or Tuned Radio Frequency receivers. These
> >were the predecessors of the superheterodyne radios we are more
> >familiar with. In a TRF radio, you have 1 or more tuned circuits
> >which you peak and tweak until they are centered on the
> >frequency of the radio station you want to listen to. There is
> >no IF, no conversion, no nothing; just tuned tank circuits of
> >sometimes dubious Q factor between the antenna and detector.
> >
> >         If you ever had a crystal radio or have seen an old
> >radio from the early part of the last century, it was a TRF.
> >
> >         In the 1930's, XERF had such a power-house signal at
> >night that people trying to listen to other radio stations in
> >other parts of the AM band suffered interference from Brinkley's
> >transmitter no matter where they tried to tune.
> >
> >         It was a combination of tremendous AM transmitter power
> >coupled with basically poor quality receivers.
> 
>