iyiyi said:
Couple of excellent radio sites: AM-DX.Com and V-Soft.com. AM-DX is filled with good, practical, common-sense radio ideas. There is a pre NARBA list of all New England stations just prior to 3/29/41.
OK, now you've encouraged me to look up a whole lot of history! You are, of course, correct about conditions at the time....long before Walkman, etc. The big hope was that FM would become the "big gun" but FM radios were big-time expensive and too many people believed FM stood for "Fine Music"....which is what a lot of FM stations offered, especially The Providence Journal/Bulletin's WPJB-FM.
I have to correct myself concerning the frequencies of the two FMs that were assigned to Fall River. The original station in The Durfee Theater Building (Sisson Brothers, Narragansett Broadcasting) was WCFR (City of Fall River) with somewhere between 100 and 250 Watts (I saw the old Raytheon transmitter in storage in the basement of the theater) on 100.9 MHz - not clear whether they had been licensed prior to the shift to high-band but I now believe they were not. The antenna, as previously noted, was atop the Wincharger (brand) tower on the theater roof. The brothers Sisson had high hopes of one day getting an AM license for 1400 so had the tower built with a base insulator and around 1/4 wave for 1400. They were fought tooth-and-nail by the owners of The Fall River Herald-News (K&M Publishing) but finally prevailed. As to the radials....when first I took base current readings they were bonded to copper flashing that ran along the raised edge of the roof but when I took my last readings the theater had been re-roofed with new flashing and the radials were cut off. Around that time an engineer....I know who but won't name him here....laid down a lot of steel chicken wire and soldered it (lead/tin only) to some of the radials! A little aside, the whole WCFR/WALE equipment package was purchased from Raytheon. There were face-to-face studios in the theater building, one originally used for each station. When the FM was shut down the larger of the two became a news-studio/production room of sorts...from which originated such jewels as "The Kiddie Review" (live children singing and tap dancing to a horribly out-of-tune upright piano that was slowly returning to the soil in that damp space)....Gertrudge St. Denis' "Franco American Hour" and Manny Borges "Azorean Hour". Though it was over 50-years ago I still occasionally find myself humming the themes from those latter two.
Were the stations ever on the air?? YES! I know for sure about WCFR, having heard about it first-hand from George L. Sisson, Jr. who, with brother Roger, put it on the air in hopes of getting an AM license. But, in addition, when moving out of a long-time family home in Ocean Grove I found a kitchen drawer lined with a newspaper from 1948 that contained program listings for WSAR, WSAR-FM, and WCFR but not for WALE which hit the air later that year.
iyiyi said:
Very astute observation on the SAR, JAR calls. "Legend" has WBZ 1st and WSAR as the 6th licensed stations in America. According to "Old Man" Haddad, the owners of the stations were excellent friends and decided "You take one call and I'll take the other". Calls were assigned from a book in alphabetical order in those days. I believe each also chose the frequency they wanted to run with the same way.
Ah yes, I believe the same Haddad who ran the parts store where Chuck Boitano (sp?) held forth for so many years. At the beginning WSAR was owned by Doughty & Welch Electric Company.
WTAB was owned by The Fall River Herald (NOT FR Herald/News - that came later) and started in The Mohican Hotel, likely with a rooftop longwire at 100 Watts on 1210 but shifted to 1130 sometime in 1924. The hotel burned in Fall River's "Great Fire" in 1928. Somewhere after that both The Fall River Herald and Fall River Daily News were bought by K&M Publishing which combined the papers. K&M bought WSAR from Doughty & Welch Electric in 1945 and it may have been at that time that they settled into the original 4-tower array off Walker Street (I think that was the street name) in Somerset. It's not clear whether WTAB was part of K&M's purchase of The Herald; it may have been run independently for a time or it may just have been shut down at the time of the WSAR purchase.
Thanks for the memory of Big Sherm! He, Jim Mendes, myself and a couple of others whose names I'll leave out as they are still alive, used to meet occasionally at Schwarzwald Haus (German restaurant) in Seekonk where the hosts would seat expectant mothers well away from us lest the unborn be marked by the sight of our feasting!
iyiyi said:
I babysat the 4 tower 5Kw DA2 rhombic enough. The TX was a Gates (remember the glowing neon bulb somebody taped to the PA cabinet?). I believe the phasor etal was also Gates. The two 5/8 wave pups there now are a very smart move because it gives them the best possible ground wave. Any adverse sky wave from the high spike occurs over Cape Cod Bay.
Not sure if they are skirt fed, otherwise they probably have a real low input resistance.
The original Home Street package was bought from Gates. I can't clearly remember whether there were two transmitters, as at the old site (5kW main/1kW backup) but tend to believe there was just one. I do recall that their intended 24 hour operation had to be interrupted about once a month to neutralize the finals but that may have been overcome later. I have no idea what's in there (transmitter) now though I did visit Keri a couple of years back when in town for my sister's funeral. From that same visit I vaguely recall looking from the parking lot at the base of the closest tower. There was definitely no skirt - I'm all too familiar with unipoles, the one I occasionally babysit has been the bane of my existence - and I recall a base insulator which leads me to believe it's a true Hertzian setup.
Some chance I'll be back that way in May; if you're still in the area and would like to meet and swap war stories send me a PM when convenient.
