Re: WHIL/WWEL

[Shawn Mamros <mamros@MIT.EDU>]

>At one time WTBS/WMBR (forget which it was at the time) was the same
>way...turning off the transmitter just turned off the final...the exciter
>stayed on & radiated for a mile or two.  If someone forgot to take the
>board off airchain feed, it made for some interesting listening, too.

It was WMBR at the time.  What you describe was the old 200/360 watt setup
that ran from 1979 until sometime around 1990 or so.  It was a Rockwell/
Collins exciter that ran into a Cetec (Sparta) transmitter.  The original
Cetec exciter that came with the transmitter turned out to be unreliable
(not that the transmitter was much better, but at least it didn't go into
weird oscillations that were quite audible in the signal, unlike the exciter),
so it was replaced with the Collins.  But as a result, the two boxes had
independent power supplies, and the remote control was only hooked up to
the Cetec's on/off switch.  The output of the Collins was attenuated quite
a bit through the powered-off RF amplifiers of the Cetec, but a little bit
of signal still managed to leak through - enough at least to be audible
on the studio monitors, only a couple blocks away from the TX site.

I could tell a lot of stories about that (expletive deleted) Cetec, none
of them good ones.  Fortunately, we ditched it in favor of a Broadcast
Electronics exciter/transmitter around 1990 that's proven far more reliable
(aside from the occasional blown fuse caused by a lousy electrical supply).
Shutting it down powers off both exciter and trasnmitter, so exciter carrier
leaks are a thing of the past.

- -Shawn Mamros
E-mail to: mamros@mit.edu

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