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A DIY vintage AM revolution?

T

tradrev

I hate today's radio. But I love OTR, airchecks, Internet streaming, American standards, great DXing, old music, LP thriftstore gems, shortwave radio, vintage living, tube radios, transistor radios, the works.

In the past year Clear Channel killed the 2 best AM stations around and now there's nothing for me to listen to. But I've got gigabytes of airchecks, lots of good stream links, and fellow collectors & enthusiasts like all of you on this board.

So I've been thinking about all these great collectible radios I've got around the house ... most of them are AM-only, and they're way too quiet these days. There must be a way to transmit to them from my computer: a DIY AM transmitter that I can connect to the sound card and have all these wonderful radios live again with my airchecks, with internet streams, you name it.

Is there such a beast out there, something like a short-range or low-power AM transmitter that you can connect to your computer? Because I think such a beast would be a required peripheral in this age of gross corporate-conglomerate radio .... we'd be able to make use of all our nice vintage equipment again!
 
Check the Community Radio board. They specialize in Part 15 broadcasting, and should be able to help you.
 
tradrev said:
something like a short-range or low-power AM transmitter that you can connect to your computer? Because I think such a beast would be a required peripheral in this age of gross corporate-conglomerate radio .... we'd be able to make use of all our nice vintage equipment again!
Click to expand...

I love where tradrev is coming from. I'd do it also.

My first "transmitter" was just that. I ordered it from whatever the mail order equivilant of Radio Shack was in 1962. The engineer at the 1kw daytime station hot wired it for me and I strung an antenna wire around my parents second story roof. I got out about a mile with an ok signal!
 
tcsnrayp said:
My first "transmitter" was just that. I ordered it from whatever the mail order equivilant of Radio Shack was in 1962. The engineer at the 1kw daytime station hot wired it for me and I strung an antenna wire around my parents second story roof. I got out about a mile with an ok signal!
Click to expand...

I played with one of those as well when I was a kid - one of those 100-project kits from Allied Radio in 1967. Drifted like crazy but got out about 1/4 mile with a 10-foot antenna. ;D

If anyone wants a circuit that looks like it might work fairly decently, check this one out.
 
tcsnrayp said:
tradrev said:
something like a short-range or low-power AM transmitter that you can connect to your computer? Because I think such a beast would be a required peripheral in this age of gross corporate-conglomerate radio .... we'd be able to make use of all our nice vintage equipment again!
Click to expand...

I love where tradrev is coming from. I'd do it also.

My first "transmitter" was just that. I ordered it from whatever the mail order equivilant of Radio Shack was in 1962. The engineer at the 1kw daytime station hot wired it for me and I strung an antenna wire around my parents second story roof. I got out about a mile with an ok signal!
Click to expand...
What a flashback. Alllied Radio Corp. of Chicago, IL. I got mine in 1957; a KnightKit Transceiver I think it was called. Possibly out of catalog # 156 here:

http://www.daveswebshop.com/alliedradio.shtml

I never got more than about 300 yards out of mine but that was the first thing I ever built and followed the instructions word for word and never tried to alter anything.
 
tradrev said:
So I've been thinking about all these great collectible radios I've got around the house ... most of them are AM-only, and they're way too quiet these days. There must be a way to transmit to them from my computer: a DIY AM transmitter that I can connect to the sound card and have all these wonderful radios live again with my airchecks, with internet streams, you name it.

Is there such a beast out there, something like a short-range or low-power AM transmitter that you can connect to your computer? Because I think such a beast would be a required peripheral in this age of gross corporate-conglomerate radio .... we'd be able to make use of all our nice vintage equipment again!
Click to expand...


You might poke around here:

http://www.ontheair3.com
 
There are many transmitter choices for legal, unlicensed Part 15 AM broadcasting, either around the house or around the neighborhood.

The TalkingSign www.talkingsign.com and Talking House www.talkinghouse.com & www.actradio.com are good "plug 'n play" transmitters that are made primarily for realtors, and both are also commonly available on eBay at reasonable prices. The "Cadillac" of Part 15 AM transmitters is the Hamilton AM1000 Rangemaster www.am1000rangemaster.com .

For those who like to build their own equipment, Charles Wenzel's circuits are probably the best. This web page has his two different versions of the circuit: http://www.techlib.com/electronics/amxmit.htm , and this PDF file is of the first version of his circuit design: http://www.wenzel.com/pdffiles/amxmit.pdf . Here is a web page for a college student project that built a Wenzel Part 15 AM transmitter using his second version of the circuit: http://www.techlib.com/electronics/AMxmit/transmitterpaper.htm . This web page includes the Printed Circuit Board layout, photographs, and the (very clean) oscilloscope traces of its modulation. Other Part 15 AM transmitter circuits (including tube ones) are available here: http://www.geocities.com/raiu_harrison/mwa/tech/tech.html .

I hope this information will be helpful.


-- Black Shire
 
<You might poke around here: http://www.ontheair3.com >

Just a word of caution about this outfit: I ordered two of their BC-100 crystal-controlled Part 15 AM transmitters in 2003. They deposited my check but never shipped the transmitters, and despite numerous promises to do so (all in response to my queries--never by their own initiative), they never did.

Of all the Part 15 AM equipment manufacturers and vendors I have dealt with, this is the only one that I cannot recommend to would-be AM micro-broadcasters. It's unfortunate, because their equipment appears to be of excellent quality. Caveat Emptor...


-- James Jason Wentworth (Black Shire)
 
KeithE4 said:
Check the Community Radio board. They specialize in Part 15 broadcasting, and should be able to help you.
Click to expand...

Thanks, you just answered a newbie question I had ... someone had mentioned "part 15 AM" to me on another board, and I didn't know what that was!
 
Lots of great info on this thread ... and I'm happy to see that there's equipment out there that'll do just what I'm looking for.

Now it got me to thinking about a whole new idea, along the same lines. Ok, I've got my airchecks & streams & soundfiles, and it's great to play them on my vintage radios at home, but it's awful lonely being the station AND the listener ... so I was thinking that it'd be a totally great, totally awesome new format idea to try -- call it "Reality radio" -- where we can upload our airchecks and files etc to a central server at a station that actually does the broadcast, on AM or college FM ... and if you're a member of the site, you can contribute files ... so basically here's this station whose broadcast content is determined by the listeners, who are constantly uploading it ... I don't know if there would be broadcast quality issues for sound files, but I just like the idea of "OTR/aircheck/classic broadcast collectors sharing their files and having these files broadcast live over the air" ...
 
I have a similar idea for an Internet station that would have some of those elements.

tradrev said:
totally awesome new format idea to try -- call it "Reality radio" -- where we can upload our airchecks and files etc to a central server at a station that actually does the broadcast, on AM or college FM ...
Click to expand...
 
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