Directional ex-Class IA AMs

[Dave Doherty]

My dad worked for NBC-TV, and one of my earliest memories is of the "NBC 
Picnic" held at the Port Washington site. Big building, brick, as I recall, 
with a pond out front and a fountain - to cool the transmitter, of course, 
but it looked neat and extravagant.

 IIRC, there were two towers, oriented north-south. If that memory is 
correct, they would probably have been reducing power to the south over the 
ocean.  Two-tower patterns are always symmetrical about the axis, so they 
would have been putting as much power east as west if the towers were 
aligned N-S.  Maybe they were more like NW-SE, which would make more sense.

There's some more info in this article: http://jeff560.tripod.com/am4.html - 
and a lot of early radio info, as well. Note in paragraph 15 the reference 
to the joint WCBS/WNBC tower being demolished in an airplane accident in 
1967, and WNBC's temporary move to the site in Lodi formerly used by WABC. I 
don't recall that WABC ever left the Lodi site, but the article may refer to 
the short aux tower on that site.

There's more on that site. It's worth a look: 
http://jeff560.tripod.com/broadcasting.html

WABC, WMAQ, and WGN are three stations that have roughly half-wave towers 
with shorter aux towers on the property that I understand were used in the 
early days to directionalize the signals a bit. All are "ND" today, and the 
aux towers are available for standby use but mostly they just support STL 
and other aux antennas.

-d

--------------------------------------------------
From: "Dan.Strassberg" <dan.strassberg@att.net>
Sent: Monday, November 23, 2009 8:57 AM
To: "A. Joseph Ross" <joe@attorneyross.com>
Cc: "Boston Radio Interest" <boston-radio-interest@rolinin.bostonradio.org>
Subject: Directional ex-Class IA AMs