Re: "The Radio Rabbi" and early remotes

[Shawn Mamros <mamros@MIT.EDU>]

Donna asked:
>[...]  In order for WNAC to run 
>remote lines all the way from downtown Boston out to the Boston University 
>area, how would they have done it?  I mean, that's a fairly long distance 
>for 1924.  [...]

Not all that long a distance for that time.  Eight years earlier, when
MIT moved from the Back Bay to its current Cambridge campus, one of
the events that week was a long-distance telephone hookup between
Boston and (I think it was) an alumni club in New York City.  (There
may have been other cities involved too, but I'm fairly certain NYC
was at least part of it.)  The audio quality may not have been stellar,
but it worked.  Surely if AT&T could pull that off, NET (and it was
all the same company back then, right?) could get a decent-enough
signal across Boston eight years later.

Rob mentioned:
>The classic Western Electric 111C repeat coils (now highly coveted for
>their sonic quality) and KS-20159 equalizers date from the 1930's, I
>think; I'm not sure what their predecessors were.

And I think it wasn't all that long ago (perhaps a decade or so) that,
when a station called up NET to set up a remote line, they'd still use
111Cs and KS-20159s.  At WMBR, we had (and might still have) some "surplus"
KS-20159s that we'd use for remotes on campus via MIT's own phone lines.
Tuning those equalizers for flat audio response seemed much more an art
than a science. :-)  But it was possible; for years, they were part of
our airchain, at the end of our half-mile or so of shielded cable that
links the Walker Memorial studios to the transmitter room at the top of
Eastgate.  (Might still be in use, for all I know!)

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