Its been nice knowing you all

[Scott Fybush]

At 09:37 PM 1/19/2004 -0500, Dan Strassberg wrote:
>WEAF/WNBC/WRCA/WFAN was directional until the move to High Island. I'm not
>sure when that move took place but the date is available if you look for it.

November 1963, just weeks before JFK. They were in Port Washington from 
1940-1963, in Bellmore, L.I. from the thirties until 1940 and in Bound 
Brook NJ before that. I'm pretty sure Bellmore was a horizontal wire antenna.

>The transmitter was in Port Washignton LI, not far from Huntington on Long
>Island sound. It was a two-tower array that might have begun life as the
>pair of towers that supported a horizontal long-wire.

Nope - I'm certain that it was designed as a DA from the beginning. Fred 
Vobbe of the National Radio Club has (and has posted on the web somewhere, 
though I can't find it at present) the actual proofs that were done on the 
DA in 1940 as it was being readied for air.

>I don't remember when WTAM/KYW/WKYC/WWWE gave up its DA. I've heard that it
>was a unquie Carl Smith design--a DA with only one tower. One tower yes, but
>two elements. The story is that the second "element" was a vertical wire
>dropped from one of the guy wires. The DA-1 pattern was very loose but was
>designed to reduce the energy wasted over lake Erie.

I'm not sure on the dates, either, but I know who to ask and will do so. 
WTAM was in several different locations over the years, and its present 
site in Brecksville, where it's ND, is also the site it used in the forties 
and fifties before going to that unusual Carl Smith DA. The other unusual 
thing about that one was that it had (and still has) a TV antenna at the 
top of it - what was then WNBK and is now WKYC-TV 3. Now that I think about 
it, I wonder if the move back to Brecksville from the combo TV/AM site 
wasn't in the early seventies when the radio was sold off separately from 
the TV.

Carl Smith's offices were and are at the base of the WTAM ND tower in 
Brecksville; it too eventually got a TV on top, WBNX channel 55 (and now 
has WAKS 96.5 Akron side-mounted on it, too.)

I'm way overdue to do some Cleveland Tower Sites of the Week, and these 
would certainly be candidates!

s