Re: WFLY and the Empire Network

["Peter Q. George" <radiojunkie3@yahoo.com>]

     Well, the good thing about using off-air relays
was that you did NOT have to pay Ma Bell for her
exhorbitant telco line charges.  The BAD thing was
that by the time you get to the last station in the
chain and since the audio was processed several times
(station to station) there was a chance that you might
be stuck with a less than acceptable signal from the
original source (station).  
     "Mountaintopping" goes back to the early days of
FM.  Major Armstrong started it all in the early
1940's with the daisy chaining three FM (40 MC/s)
stations from Mount Washington, New Hampshire to
Paxton, Massachusetts to Meriden, Connecticut.  Check
out the GGN Info webpage and you can actually hear
what it sounded like, some 60+ years ago.  It was
quite an "innovation", as Major Armstrong used to say.
 So much, in fact, that the big chains of NBC, CBS did
everything in their power to stop it.  I'm sure AT&T
didn't like the idea of bypassing their wired
networks, either.  When FM was shanghai'ed "upstairs"
to 88 to 108 MC/s in 1947, the days of the HIGH
powered FM'ers were over.  Ironic that after nearly 50
years after Armstrong's tragic death, FM is KING and
the stations of the AM networks are just a shadow of
what they once used to be.  NBC radio is gone, as is
Sarnoff and his mighty NBC empire of stations.

-Pete (K1XRB)

         
--- Cooper Fox <fox893@yahoo.com> wrote:
> 
> That seems like kind of a crazy way to do it.  Were
> those comon in the earlier days of radio?
> 
> 
> --- "Peter Q. George" <radiojunkie3@yahoo.com>
> wrote:
> >      WFLY (92.3) in Troy, NY was NOT part of the
> > Rural
> > Radio Network, but a part of the "Empire Network".
> 
> > The "network" consisted WBUF (92.9) in Buffalo,
> WVOR
> > (100.5) in Rochester, WDDS (93.1) in Syracuse and
> > WFLY
> > (92.3) in Troy.  Like the RRN, these loosely
> > interconnected stations used off-air relays in a
> > kind
> > of "daisy chain" across New York State.
> 
> =====
> Cooper Fox
>    WWBX- (All new, all hit, B97.1)
>    WVOM- (The Voice of Maine)
>    KISS 94.5
> 
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=====
Peter Q. George (K1XRB)
Whitman, Massachusetts
                           "Scanning the bands since 1967"
radiojunkie1@yahoo.com
radiojunkie3@yahoo.com
***********************************************************

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