This is serious, but it also amuses me, rather. In the early 1950s, I built a transmitter, using 1200kcs., because it was wide-open except for San Antonio and Venezuela. With a 10-foot wire, I was able to broadcast my 78 rpm records about 500 feet using a decent radio as a receiver. But I wanted more. So, I set-up a long wire to near the top of a very tall tree more than three times the height of our house, then across five acres to another tall tree near the barn, then down to a vent-pipe sticking up from the barn roof (from bathroom plumbing in the barn). This got me out there a little more than a half-mile; and so I wound the insulsted wire around the vent pipe to hold it in place -- and suddenly my distance multiplied! Then I experimented with the coil and its windings, cutting down the power of the R.F. fed into the antenna to ridiculously low levels -- and I still hit one "sweet spot" with tuning the coil, which got me out about 1-1/2 miles using our Packard car radio. And yet the signsl was so low, even in the house, that I could hear San Antonio underneath it, and Fort Wayne and Philadelphia splattered onto it -- and yet it was about as strong 1/2 mile away! So, I turned it back up to original power, and you could hear it for 18 miles! It was not overwhelmingly strong right at the transnitter: it simply CARRIED unbelievably. I loved playing with it, and even got hold of a studio microphone and old mixing board and began broadcasting to any possible listener who might care to hear it. I gave our home number as a "request-line", and calls began coming in from several places. I kept doing this and never got in trouble (I was lucky!!!). One night, I received a call from someone listening in New Jersey, who said that he could hear Texas and hear me, together That was it: I shut the thing down, fearing that the Feds would arrest me! I was too YOUNG to go to prison! I had got the circuit from a 1947 radio magazine, as I recall -- and though I did not have a crystal, I had the oscillator circuit stable enough to hold within a cycle or two, once the thing had been on for about an hour. I checked it by using intermodulation with strong local stations (e.g., 810 should zero-beat with whatever was on 1590 -- usually Waterbury or Akron). After I shut my operation down, I listened on 1200 and found it to be quite active at that time with pirates. The "dead air" on 1610 was another popular place to find surreptitious broadcasters back then. Hard to believe, that was 70+ years ago: where has all the time gone? I still listen to Guy Lombardo, Rosemary Clooney, The Ames Brothers, Phil Harris.......
