[no subject]

It was run out of a basement using a WWII-era shortwave transmitter with 
converted coils. The audio fidelity was horrendously bad (it was designed 
for speech communication, not music) and the frequency was not precisely 
stable, so at night it caused horrible heterodynes with KYW which varied
greatly in pitch as the set gradually warmed up over many hours. 

The signal covered the western suburbs of Boston quite well, it got into 
Boston proper (weakly) on a good radio (one with enough selectivity to 
separate from WBZ) and the fringes could be heard to the west out to Natick 
and Framingham, north to Burlington and Woburn, south through beyond
Dedham. 
He claimed to have heard from DX'ers in southern NH. 

Communities such as Waltham, Newton, Weston, Lexington, Lincoln, Watertown,
Brighton, Needham and Belmont got this pirate signal at least as powerfully 
as the subsequent legal signals on 1060 from Natick and Framingham over the
years, with no interference in the daytime. 

The programming was essentially amateur free-form AOR with bad audio 
fidelity, the operator called it "WEGN". I found the "studio" by tracking 
the station with a directional AM radio on my bicycle until it began 
overloading by a house with an odd antenna on the roof.

The "station" died around springtime 1971 from a meltdown of the vintage 
shortwave transmitter following attempts to modify it for more power. The 
operator then gave up the hobby. I don't know what would've happened to 
him if he had still been on and found to be "in the way" a year and a half
later when Garabedian finally put WGTR on the air.

Eli Polonsky



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