Clyde Haehnle, Remembering WLW & VOA

hi I'm Jorge with amateur logic TV and I'm talking today with Clyde Handley a broadcast engineer from the Cincinnati Ohio area Clyde we really appreciate you taking out time to talk with us today glad to do it smile on her and and you've worked in broadcasting most of your life all of my life molecules star in 1941 I was a co-op student from the University of Cincinnati my first job was to work down at wlw midnight to 8:00 a.m. running the old 500,000 watts during the experimental period - tell me about that that had to have been that was a long experience the real thrill at midnight we'd sign off with 50 kilowatts we'd fire up the 500 kilowatt the fire up procedure took about a half hour before it at midnight we turn on on the air in the water on all the there were three power amplifiers in series there were about 200 kilowatts each there were two modulator units and one power supply and then we used the 50 kilowatt as a driver for the three power amplifiers and a 50 kilowatts I mean that it's the biggest you can have on the air today yeah well we had but that was our driver we had we load that thing up in one night to 700,000 watts Wow it was a real thrill that's a very real throw if you're an amateur to dip your plate currents to a hundred amperes whoa a bet to rocket through resonance and that really felt good what kind of voltage to the plate voltage in the 15 kilovolts 15 K we had we had 24 tubes or 898 A's so you were 100 kilowatts each 7af kilowatts just to light the filament on each tube and we had 30 gallons per minute of water to cool the anodes well since a six phase on the filaments seven and a half kilowatts so what what was your your first job there well I you at that time to get the distilled water up to the plate anode voltage we had to use Pyrex pipe there were none of these ceramic isolating coils available at that time and I was one of 100 pounds I was the only guy would fit down in the vault to stop the leaks in the Pyrex so that was my main job then after we signed off I would go through which suite we'd run the 500 kilowatts from midnight to 2:00 a.m. non commercial my job then was to go through and check for leeches and water filled every capacitor for eating and heated capacitor I'd have to change check all the connections that took about two hours and then I have a bite eat well so you'd have to climb up inside the transmitter to do well oh well there were three powering up for our cubicles to modulator cubicles in the red the rectifier cubicle and you have to move from one cubicle to the next and isolate each one as if it was a fascinating job I learned a lot about it about transmitters doing that no I'll bet dude did you use the I guess we called him the Jesus dick to hot snakes chopsticks yeah the short everything out before no before you could get into a vault you had to pull up a bar that got an all the high voltage in that cubicle okay so they had some safety bill oh that was a lot of built-in safety on that yes that's the only I guess 500 kilowatt the RCA ever built in the you well RCA GE and Westinghouse all three builded Westinghouse built the cooling system and the power supply Westinghouse heard GE built the transformers RCA built the modulator and by the way our modulation transformers we had two modulation transformers 12 feet high eight feet in diameter Wow they were huge oh did they have PCBs in them you think PCB all at that time we don't know what that was yeah uh did you work with any of the engineers who were there when it was built no that was built 1933 and 34 I didn't start until 41 it ran from 1934 to 1939 as a full-time operation daytime commercial 1939 senator wheeler of Montana Railroad a resolution through limiting the power gas stations 250 kilowatts and so we had to shut down from from commercial operation but we operated from midnight to 2:00 a.m. non commercial that's what I was involved so you said you had to go in after the transmitter was shutdown and failed for warm components did you ever find him oh yeah every night you'd find something wrong really every night and you have an explorer in fact the tower had had eight guy-wires supporting the tower you can see it down the road and if it got struck by lightning the Lightning would jump across the ball gaps on the guy wires well the transmitter power was enough to maintain the ionization of the arc she had to shut the transmitter off to stop the arcs on the guy wires so we had to build an electric an electric eye pointing to one of the gaps in the base of the tower when that flashed the trip the transmitter off to deionized arcs so it would sustain its own arc once again story once it got started yet it was ionized so what did you use for transmission line how did you get 500 kilowatts to the base oh I was easy it was a 10 inch aluminum pipe with a 2 inch aluminum center conductor supported with my collects air dielectric no gas no pressure so I was a hundred ohm line 10 inches in diameter so what was the output impedance of the transmitter was it 100 ohms or was it 50 and you matched it down to the one well we went to a ha to 100 ohm line we ran the the base impedance of the tower was 396 ohms we ran about 11 11 11 amps at 50 kilowatts 30 amps at 500 kilowatts mmm that's a lot of current Oh a lot of base current well that's not a plate current where'd you get a little plate a hundred amperes yeah yeah we released around 15 amps a grid current Wow and and most transmitters the recent deep transmitters wouldn't even run 15 amps on the plate how most of our competition was fine kilowatt and 250 watt stations well we had 24 tubes that took seven 1/2 kilowatts each to register just to light the filaments so did you ever have any problems with rodents or oh yeah or anything we had a bank of filter condensers in the power supply the rodents is get across those and explode yeah just find little pieces I guess fine pieces all over the basement and we had double y breakers to start to transfer her up from a double into a Y connection oh so you'd actually have to shift it dear and start up oh yeah if put on low voltage and his shift ended under Y breaker like you know building shook when you did that I had 500 kilowatts I guess you really couldn't have a backup generator could you oh no we had to we had a power source from Cincinnati gas electric from Dayton Power and Light it's we had two power sources coming in yeah were there we okay we got our own substation well were you fortunate enough that both of them never went down at the same time that during your period out you always had power from one or the other oh yeah so always had some power we never had lots of power what kind of matching network was there at the base of the towers an owl Network a tail well network we went from the hundred ohm line to the 300 ohm 371 ohm base impedance of the tower that's a pretty hot base in P what's half wave tower yeah well yeah Jeff we've got now I had heard stories that originally that Tower was a little taller and that was a problem yes that was Tower was five eighths of a wavelength tall at the beginning well when you have a 5/8 wavelength Tower you get good fielder's a mile in the horizontal plane but you get a secondary lobe that secondary lobe landed in Indianapolis and Columbus constant and cause a distortion zone during sunset period so we had to take that flagpole off dropped it from 831 feet to 708 feet and you waited from a 5/8 tower to a half-wave Tower Wow and that stopped to destroy the distortion in Indianapolis and Columbus and I guess those areas just or far enough out that that was cities you wanted to hit well that's right there are a hundred miles out and that secondary lobe at the Anna Stern came right down at under miles out hmm and I guess counseled with the tomato Oh with the ground wave but yeah cuz just because the selective fading is what about nighttime operation was it did you get I guess you would send out qsl cards but did you get reports from from quite a distance Australia Australia okay that's that's about as far as you can go I think we had consistent listeners inside jela for Nia but of course at 700 kilocycles your coverage during a summertime yes limited because of that mystic noise we did an extensive study on atmospheric noise relationship to class or of reception instead of going to actual millivolts per meter we went to ISO service contours constant signal-to-noise ratio so we knew where the noise was we measured atmospheric noise we measured man-made noise in the cities I bet the man-made noise now today would be so much higher than it was back then oh yeah it's really kind of killed a.m. with with everything all the garbage we put out in the air today right well when we went out to all different sized cities to measured man-made noise in the cities with the vehicle and we come back and call and correlate that to the population the city and we knew the population we knew what the man-made noise was so we knew what strength this thing we had to get in there to provide satisfactory coverage we had three classes on coverage eight being a served 90% of the time say 60% of the time and four and 30% of the time for the three classes of service and wlw is non directional and always has been and that's still the original tower this well we were directional in the vertical plane pattern only to protect our signal up into Toronto when we were Farren with sit with kfr beam 690 mm in the vertical plane yeah we had a null in the vertical plane pattern only fruit slide Orff's designed that we had to suppressor towers several wavelengths away from the main error and they just caused a null in the vertical plane pattern toward Toronto so the ground wave was ground wave was non directional yeah well that's that's quite interesting I guess that's probably the first time that had ever been done see I think if you know the only time that was ever done so that's that's an old tower I don't remember what year wlw came only in 1934 the towers building 33 33 that's two blocks age 40s back to back oh yeah bottom ones upside down was upside down and there's this one I guess there's still the one in Nashville yeah WSM are there any more left it was winning the blood in New York w it's got a smaller tire on the bottom and taller one on the top it's one in New York and I don't know where the other one did yeah the station's I used to work for we had some old low NOx towers used as STL's there were only a hundred and twenty five foot tall but they were looked in that same style with four legs the over the old design yeah but those things that really stood the test mr. dad they were used for in the 40s of the late 40s and 50s they were used for TV towers this particular one here no no no some other block see the the old Channel five tower was a blonde oxi tower just half of this one 500 feet Wow and how big of those guy wires I am those guys were about two inches in diameter the the breaker insulators her for breaker insulators in each guy wire he weighed 600 pounds each bowling they were big yeah about this big and there's there's resistors across those ordering resistors across him what else we did we put a wooden jig in each guy wire and put a hard steel slug two inches up from there in a slot after we get hit by lightning we take that slug out measure how much was magnetized from the Lightning current going down the guy wire multiply that by eight eight guy wires then check the base one figure out what the amplitude of the lightning it was calibrated that has 40,000 amperes Wow lightning current then we we also add some steel ball on the top of the tower it's all full of holes from lightning hits we took it up to GE and calibrated that came up with forty thousand amperes at at that hike they're gonna catch just about any storm that comes through we've got a lot of them we had 250 kilowatts of audio - 250 kilowatts of audio to modulate to transpire yeah yeah I guess yeah you'd have to and but was that enough to get a hundred percent there just barely just barely barely it was tough did did you have compressors and limiters back during that what we did I maybe I shouldn't say this but when you chipped from 50 kilowatts to 500 kilowatts the the automatic volume control receiver compensated for most that people couldn't tell the difference in their primary coverage zone so what we do is before we'd shift we'd cut the modulation down slowly so by the time we were shifting we were only modulating about 50% and then we came over the five hundred one hundred percent modulation and they jump in your seat you'd know that it had been turned out we knew it was turned on yes we yes we had automatic homemade automatic amplifiers we'd actually forget how they work down My Mind's not clear as it was in those days so how was of course you know the studio was was located in Cincinnati Trudy was in Cincinnati yes how did you get the audio from the studio out to the transplant self-aligned equalize cell phone lines then we went to high fidelity transmitter they can eat in the cathode system we got to put in a microwave to get this out there and I fidelity form that was an interesting transmitter thrilling we were flat from we ant we had the audio under control from two cycles to 600 kilocycles audio through the modulator under control Wow and shaped we had 50 DB of feed 48 DB of feedback and we were flat from 20 cycles to 20 kilo cycles and that transmitter with about 0.5% and her modulation Distortion that is tremendous that was a lot of work so what did you cut off the top end audio at or did you let 20 kilohertz real sure I bet that sounded great on some of those alrighty antenna those old crystal sets we had real broadband crystal detectors fitting into a good eye for amplifier and so you had to have a man there on site I guess with it being a 50 kilowatt 24 hours a day there was a man there responsible for taking me to readings every 30 minutes every 30 minutes we had to be on duty because of the danger of the place mm-hm had two men always on duty you were just telling about the the hi-fi transmitter there who built that Rockwell Jim Rockwell my boss okay so that was a custom-built custom-built cathode nonferrous no audio went through a transformer really yes totally non-ferrous audio all the way through to the output okay that's why that's how we could get the low distortion yeah and and now there's I don't know I guess might be three or four transmitters in that building just different different generations that's right so the original transmitter was that 50 kilowatt Western Electric again when double-o five was a serial number Wow and and then you went to the one Rockwell built well we modified that old western electric several times change the tubes in it change the tank circuit change the modulator so I was this it was a composite by the time it would retired him and and what did you go to next I was down there until we built this place in nineteen four third - I came up here I'm 42 - till we got this on the air and I got involved in television and I built WI NS in New York City and then I built several television since ninety Dayton Columbus Indianapolis television San Antonio and then the seven stations in Saudi Arabia in 1969 did you ever work with Rockwell oh yeah I replaced Rockwell oh you did yeah he was my boss he and I were very close I worked and in the end with him all the time how was it to work with him charming yeah it's the thing we we said he used to think like a vacuum tube he was a bulldog he wouldn't give up he try and do something wouldn't work he would never give up it's got to be it's got to be able to finish this his theory was the dead the difficult we do immediately the impossible takes a little while longer and and you worked with Crosley as well well I pal cause even hired me and pal cause II was around till 1945 man it was a it was bought by fqo corporation try daddy to get to know pal very well yeah but you did work with Rocco for a number of years I would walk well till nineteen seventy-seven till he died I replaced him I took his job no we we tried to sell our patent to gates and that was too complicated for the average operator yeah so we didn't go very far with it it was a difficult transmitter to operate it was good oh yeah those those specs are unheard of Am I I guess even today you won't not now in fact is there even good for FM yeah we had 65 DB noise level you left wlw for why did you leave there how do you leave oh you did I was there for 40 years okay never left never left couldn't get rid of me well what about VOA how did that play that was crossing project yeah I was done by the Crosley Engineers we designed this place and so you worked at both facilities I worked down there and worked up here I did the antenna work here transmission lines and antennas we developed the reentrant round we came to the system familiar that yeah yeah I'm just sorry that it's not out here we can look at it but that was quite a system tell me a little bit about how that well what we did we had it down the road we had two shortwave antennas down in Mason and the 75 kilowatt transmitted a 50 kilowatt shortwave transmitter but those were small antennas we used lump parameters to phase the feed line return line back into the input and it was very very sensitive very delicate very difficult to tune so we go for more antennas across the road larger antennas we started using love parameters on those and I went to I was in college doing well at that time studying under professor a professor Oscar Brock he taught a course in transmission line theory he said now there's a bear clan theorem I said when the world's a beer can through me so we can hang anything on a transmission line even beer cans go a quarter wave down with the same disturbance on the line you won't upset the match the line but you'll change the phase rotation between the two disturbances let's see that'll work well with our rhombic s-- so the rhombic we built here we're faced with a patent with matching stubs seven lump parameters oh we had K factors we can increase the efficiency radiation efficacy for rhombic from 60% to 98% well that's a significant well reason when you throw away 50 40 50 percent of your power determination you know just save that and feed it back in the input again so so that you're feeding from now put back to the input of the the antenna circuit yeah and it just bugged it by phasing it correctly you could just crazy get impedance matching it correctly you know you could return that power to the common point and put it around the antenna again so what kind of game would you get out of an antenna like this dB that's significant with 200 kilowatts yeah it's a pretty heavy beam yeah and of course VOA would change frequencies throughout the day well we had these set up with stubs that we can set it each antenna up for four frequencies and we had for certain frequencies assigned to us say we had antennas were two different groups was an ad group B group in a C group different sizes we had a set a six megahertz two to 9 9 to 11 11 to 15 it was six let me think six to 11 11 to 15 weird to transmission lines running out to three antennas we'd switch the transmission line between the low band and the high band antennas then we had to come back here match that line real broadband step transformers because we kept our VSWR under one point one two one all the way back to the transmitter output Wow so the switching matrix network out here it was that quick strictly switching the antennas or did it also switched the tuning networks oh no just the antenna it's just the an Ted took the the the output of six transmitters and fed them into any one at twenty four antennas it was a crossbar switch during your flow of the old crossbars yeah 300 ohms and we have to go from 300 ohm output of the switch to the 525 ohm transmission line through stepped impedance transformers and I've seen the transmission line down here I've never seen anything quite like that above that Continental that's down there now no Mike yeah well we had the 300 ohm lines were number about quarter inch diameter Copperweld three inches apart vertically and 10 inches of separates or four wires out like this that was a 300 ohm line to feed out the the selector switch selector switch was three was three three-quarter inch copper pipe on seven inch ten inch diameter tenant separation that was true I was a very very low VSWR away through that when the war came oh I guess us really when the government got interested in in bringing the voice of America online how long did it take to plan all of this out and then to construct it and get it on the air President Roosevelt called a meeting in just several months after Pearl Harbor because we had only thirteen shortwave transmitters the access countries had over a hundred and he said we're not physically equipped to engage in cycling psychological warfare we need to build some heavy-duty transmitters so I called a meeting in Washington with RCA Westinghouse General Electric NBC CBS Crosley and other manufacturers and our chairman of the board Jimmy house went to that meeting at the White House during a break of the meeting he called Rockwell and said Rockwell can you build two hundred kilowatt transmitters for shortwave weapons as hell I don't know but I'll give a hell of a try yeah that's all shall state he went back and committed us to build six 200,000 watt transmitters and twenty-four antennas and we got a contract on one sheet of paper to build this place oh and she a paper who for the time we got the contract from the time we broke ground for the time we got the first transmitter on the air was one year that there are no tubes available for their transmitters so we had send Jim Hollis our transmitter guy to Nutley New Jersey the federal to plan in Nutley New Jersey to design the tubes that would fit in the transmitter and you did all this in a year when your boy I guess that you had a really large crew eight engineers eight engineers and then well three and three of us didn't work on transmitter it's only seven of them worked under the transmitters we the three of us worked on the antenna systems who who built the towers and what brand of towers did you have here well there are pools when we build it there were just wooden balls but spiced 180-foot at all after they were but spliced but then in 1951 we put the curtain up the curtain was those are those weren't blond locks Ezra I don't remember who the manufacturer was but that went up in 1951 during the army McCarthy hearings okay but so so back during the war period then that was wood poles wood poles well a hundred and eighty foot wood bone no there were no there were 90 foot poles but spliced okay we build a sleeve about the size this table about this big in diameter and put it at the butt of each pole into it and they were but spliced together just reach in they were guided in the center the top this crossbar switch out here that's mostly all the original wood from that's the original wood we built a model that skill model at 4:00 we both the switch that's quite a complicated looking where we got there did you ever have any arcs or anything oh yeah every once while you get switch it didn't close tight and it burn we in fact we actually set up demonstrations at night cause arcs we could get 10 feet of flame coming off the transmission lines that's pretty good and and so wlw is just right down the road here I mean you can step out here and see the tower just really good was there any interference one to the other did you ever have RF I from from say VOA getting into gear at wlw well the problem that we had we were concerned that when we put the curtain up we were didn't affect the non directional power on wlw so we worked with the Air Force got a helicopter and did a lot of research work and found it was a minimal disturbance I did a lot of work on that but yeah well when we build our shortwave antennas down the road with wlw at 50 kilowatts we had a lot of trouble with we couldn't teach the electrician's to work bare hand instead of gloves I always wanted to use gloves Yeah right through the glove yeah yeah well I had a engineer one time helping me with the directional antenna system it was Ted high-tech or worked for or Cullum I knew I'll call ya Texas they designed the am directional system we had station I worked at wjd X and of course he did the typical old column phaser it was on in a brick building on the wall down there at the center Tower rather than being in cabinets but the thing had been out and nobody was able to bring it back in so we hired Ted high tech ER to come in and help us put that thing back in and he wanted me to climb the center Tower which was owned during the day at five kilowatts it was on 620 so it you know I got out pretty good but he wanted me to go check the sample loop on it and I said well I can't touch that tower it's five kilowatts they so there's nothing to it get your wood ladder and lean up against it I said okay and he said not take these take this pair of pliers I turned crescent wrench on with a crescent wrench and he said just grab it with that and then just hold like the paint and just go on up it and it worked if I'd had on gloves so that wouldn't have been so good with it no it was sure wouldn't but we climbed the five hundred kilowatt hour early in the day what was on the air the big wooden ladder gee that's of course the FCC wouldn't let you go anywhere near doing something like that today they've tightened up them you know RF rules and all of it so you worked with wlw you came over here you built the VOA across the field did did you work at any other VA away site said no justice right just this one and were those others built around the same time by the same time yes GE build one and and NBC built one we're in Dixon Delano California Brentwood Brentwood there was one in Jersey one of the interesting things about the rear of the red turnaround bik's back during the Cold War State Department called asked me if I would entertain the chief engineer from Broadcasting Corporation of China and Taipei Taiwan who wanted to reach the free Chinese behind the bamboo curtain was going to build a facility like this in Taiwan to broadcast their voice into the bud behind the bamboo curtain so I said fine and I said but classified what can I tell him he said open the floodgates anything he wants no helping the first thing I asked him was what are you going to learn about it I'd like to learn about the render Andromache antennas you designed during that war I said we never published any papers on them they were classified how'd you learn about him to learn about through the underground he knew my name and all the guys that worked with me on him Wow city was Manchuria see so there's four guard towers up here at wlw to protect it during the war and I guess the same thing here at VOA we had guards up in the tower here that's what the tyrants wore high-powered rifles searchlights do you know if they ever had to shoe anybody off that well we all call him at night but then you'd heard once while doing the night you'd hear some gunfire but they were certain rabbits oh but we would we had when tower was bombed here during the Cold War by some mentally deranged person we had two bullet holes in the side of the building here but that's all I know about nothing serious there's any other stories that come to mind funny or just scary or different about wo W or VOA just something you might remember through the years well we had a Paul one of the technicians worked here was bald as a cue ball and the transmission lines going out the side of the building here were 300 ohms at 200 kilowatts each he was on top of a truck he went under one of the transmission lines arc to his head just burped all skinned off the top of his head we rushed him down the dock Patchi down here managed him up before we took the bandage off he start growing hair oh I wonder if anybody ever tried to patent that math there's a hair group well we had enough trouble without with the crowd Z's xserve act you know about crows EXO act Oh crossing you was concerned about losing his hair so he designed this machine that a big cup on the top of your head it would suck vacuum then pressure to massage your scalp it's called across the Exeter back he put those in barber shops you get across the extract treatment well the Federal Trade Commission got on him for being questionable practice and so they he had a separately incorporate the broadcast facility so that's how we came a separate corporation because that damn cross the exit rack do you think the extra vac actually worked well we would they send one to us so we said the only way it would work if you hit the suction high enough would suck the hair off your chest and pull out the top area I know Crosley built radios and he built WL w was instrumental in VO way did he have any other projects going on besides the oh yeah Airport he build our planes built cameras he wheeled WI NS in New York City broadcast Yankees and he had a big home in Florida he built the autocross the automobile Wow he was a trainee he he he was more interested in automobiles a wasn't brought yet wlw vo a what did you do next well I built a bunch of television stations let me think you know the VOA WI and SF was spent three years in New York City building WN s I used a helicopter in 1949 to measure the pattern because we had we radiation with all the other towers out in the swamps house the first time we used helicopter for you for fuel intensity measurements and I guess that's the only way you could get to those points is we didn't get the points we flew radios we do miss stop and measure have measuring points came back here who installed the curtain in 1951 got that going and built some television stations since Inez Dayton Columbus in Indianapolis did you like television as well as you liked radio well I liked radio because all the time we had three full orchestras in radio we had live talent we had a hundred employees at the radio station Wow well it was a big station and then radio was big we didn't million dollars a month in business I remember she and and in dollars all those years spent a lot of time in Washington representing the broadcast industry on the Clear Channel Broadcasting Service then there so sociation maximum service Telecasters i was chairman of their engineering committee for about 15 years okay what was that difficult to do to keep the channels clear was the FCC trying to break it up they were trying to break us up to placate all the channels and I was trying to maintain him we didn't we didn't make it when you got into television was that was it brand-new at that point oh yes 1949 49 okay so everything was black online they always start in 1938 builder from the old steviol 440 line standards at a television station the crew tower with a bi conical dipole in 1938 and working among we turned that off after the war we turned it back on then after 1949 48 49 we got the new standards converted that to a 525 lines system we build our own cameras you did a video cons the old the old iconoscope memory I kind of scope just barely I never saw one I got one downstairs oh really oh I kind of scope camera it's a trapezoidal picture because they scan it from an angle and we had to put so much light on the subject it's been there will the wool in their clothes scorcher they couldn't stand in the lights more in three or four minutes Wow but it they had got television stars we got television started then we bought the RCA cameras with the whole first image orthicon television took quite a bit more bandwidth was that a challenge giving the antenna systems and well that was in it that was interesting because RCA did a real good job on coming up with the antenna system I did a lot of work on since establishing the accurate ratio of visual power to sound power oh you did yeah because we used to think you'd have to have as much oil as you did vision that's right and I got it down to 10% because when you ran 50% Oh aural power with a color picture that sound carrier interfered with subcarrier and you got some grainy pictures yeah so I got that picture down so I got a lot of papers I wrote on that so tell us how that works that's real interesting that you would think you'd have to have the same amount of power to go the same distance but you don't know it's killing way it's kilowatts per kilo cycle of bandwidth so if you compress it you don't need that much power if you spread 50 kilowatts over six megahertz that's not much per megahertz so you can have a little bit of in fact I ran a picture the sound power ratio test one year 256 to one 256 times or visual power than audio power and nobody could tell the difference well so that was quite a bit of power savings and tubes and everything nice in fact I shut the sound transmitter down one day and multiplex the sound carrier through the official transmitter and nobody could tell the difference Wow it's hard to keep the the tubes working right because every time you drive a sync pulse through you'd cut the sound carrier off a little bit yeah I get a little bit of buzz that's pretty amazing that's because that really wasn't that long ago that that we were running the same amount of power on both no I do too the initial starts was twice the fu if you had a hundred kilowatts of video did 50 kilowatts a sound and I got it down to ten percent or less and today it's all digital so there's no separate aural visual transmitter it's right all just one and a fraction of the power of what we ran in a much better picture much better picture I'm not sure I think the jury's still out on if you got the same coverage area you had before at least where I live but you know I know some people that lost coverage after the conversion but everybody had an antenna outdoors back in those days I guess have you always worked in broadcasting Clyde or did you laughter in other areas in 1975 our parent company was in Carter vision remember cart revision and seaboard finance I'm not sure I remember that Oh Carter vision was the first cartridge television device ever made okay they invested a ton of money in that they invested a lot of money in seaboard finance which is a Canadian financing company both of those went belly-up Deana liquidate some of the company and some of their companies and they decide to sell broadcasting so I was involved in the liquidation of our company so I spent two years selling the assets of fqo Broadcasting Corporation raised about three hundred million dollars I thought this is fun I think I'll do this for business so I got the investment banking business I spent the next 15 years proprietary radio and television stations so I guess that was a little more profitable than being an engineer it sure was it sure was yeah that's but but that's part of the industry I mean you've got to have all of these pieces to make it work yeah and I was the only broker that could read a schematic diagram and I bet you could go out and look at a facility and tell if it was really worth what I praised television station without even looking at him he could sure because the amount of equipment in the station is insignificant to the the property Wow it's it's in the advertising revenue the license the revenue yes yeah so I get appraised the station by just looking at the books without even looking at the station did you like that line of work I enjoyed it thoroughly maybe man man I made a lot of money yeah so did you retire from that or retired from that well I retired from that then I went to do the appraisal business at home and I closed that company did at home and did special consulting work a lot of depositions and then when I was 80 83 years old I hung it all up hung it all up and and you were instrumental in getting jcore I was involved with involved with it but I wasn't instrumental okay I was not one of the prime movers of that okay so what do you think about broadcasting's future with the Internet here today do you think Broadcasting's got what it's what it's going to take to hang in there or do you think we're where we need to pay attention well I think we're gonna have trouble I see more and more advertising showing up on cable network stations and that's all every time that would have been on yeah on the over-the-air stage so I think it's gonna be a rough road I think so no a real rough road yeah because like the advertiser can usually buy this this time on cable a little bit cheaper than they could buy a lot cheaper yeah I think yeah I think yeah I think AM radio has a place but for broadband coverage like Clear Channel stations that what do you think about digital radio that I'm really not up on that I you know the parade past me when I came along job you didn't have to worry about but don't worry about that yeah I'm glad I'm not an engineer today because I couldn't design one of these cameras no I couldn't either I can barely figure out how to turn it on it or on it but it'll pretty much run itself if you can ever get it on No pretty went by point passed me a long time ago yeah I'm glad I'm not an engineer these days I was a great career it it was and it sounds like you were you were right on the cutting edge for all these decades it was a lot of fun particularly a 500 kilowatt and developing this facility I was a lot of real basic raw engineering I've heard stories I don't know if they're true about people hearing the radio station in their bed springs oh yes a lot of that crosstalk his fence posts fence post downspouts we had we had a crew going around just putting in self-tapping screws and downspouts to to mention connections so there wouldn't be any cross minded cross modulation there so let me ask from an engineering standpoint when something let like that occurs is that energy wasted that could have been broadcast out over the air is that actually being wasted there at that down there so sir that's a small amount yes you know like the ground system we've only got 58 radios in the ground system with wlw really safe wave tower doesn't need a ground system yeah true okay you know people think you need a higher in 20 radios yeah not necessarily a half-wave tower yeah totally different design if I if I would copperplate all the property we owned I couldn't increase improve the efficiency by more than two percent gene what what about the cooling system up there I see those old ponds are still there in front of WL yes those are raw water cooling we we cooled the tubes with distilled water and then we would run that through a Westinghouse heat exchanger boiler type heat exchanger pump the raw water through the heat exchanger out of the ponds to cool it we had a lot of heat to dissipate well well there is a thing to get 500 kilowatts output you need three times that input so twice that is going away indeed somewhere yeah so you got a megawatt to eat gotta get rid of see it's and it's shame you couldn't use that heat for something I guess you could heat the build well we didn't need to redo this building we said the transmitters down there's no eating this building yeah yeah that's what we talked about that with Dave Snider over here last year and some of the damage that came from not having any heat in here it was VOA did you have to have cooling ponds here or the technology at a point that that wasn't necessary oh we had radiators radiators then they went to the steam tubes the tubes that actually boiled into steam condenses back to water yeah I remember seeing that that was really interesting I didn't do much on the inside of the building all my work was outside yeah and crossbar switch impedance transformers transmission lines and antennas was there much maintenance on that we had to ban full-time just to maintain the antennas full-time so would would they have a regular schedule of things the maintenance they had to do to make sure that it that everything was there was always something broke yeah an insulator cracked transmission line would break they were busy yeah and so but they did a great job on this facility same with wlw both of these are iconic places no nothing else like them in the world they're a lot of fun to work I guarantee you they bound to have been fly we really appreciate you talking with us this has been great to hear some of these stories from you and learn a little bit about the history of broadcasting from somebody who was actually here through a lot of it well I got this all documented on a video gdb which I'll give you a copy we'd love to see it thank you Thank You Clyde you say Amen Oh what what was the thing the you have to say for the nuns to leave going PC a suspended yeah remember you told me a good story about that a minute ago

Channel: AmateurLogic.TV

Views: 4,155

Rating: 4.9238095 out of 5

Keywords: amateurlogic, amateur radio, ham radio, electronics, comedy, computer, hobby, tech, qrp, antenna, sdr, hamfest, cw, ssb, kenwood, icom, yaesu, alinco, echolink, aprs, irlp, dstar, hamnation, qsl, w5jdx, n5zno, vk3pb, shortwave, twit, datv, receiver, arrl, field day, MFJ, arduino, Clyde Haehnle, WLW, VOA

Id: Lnw-STvoj20

Length: 49min 14sec (2954 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 17 2018