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Old Board

S

suzukidirtbike

Can any of you techie types help me to identify the board in these photos? It was, I believe, already a relic by the time I started working with it. It had touch sensitive cue/ air triggers, and channel selectors which are the small circles above each pot. They were bare metal with red LEDs in the middle.

http://i37.photobucket.com/albums/e91/drunkenpunkin/WWGC2.jpg

http://i37.photobucket.com/albums/e91/drunkenpunkin/WWGC1.jpg

The photos were taken in 1986, when I worked at WWGC radio (now WUWG) at the University of West Georgia.

And no... I don't still have the mullet!

Thanks,
Rob
 
Don't know the model number, but it was made by Ramko. This was, I believe, a late '70s vintage board. I worked at a station that had one back in 1980. IIRC, ours was a 10-channel board and did not use the touch-sensitive buttons you mentioned and show in the photographs of the smaller version of their board. Each channel had 4 or 6 inputs. I believe it had two outputs; program and audition (where audition was an actual output). I seem to remember we used the audition to feed mix-minus or delay or something? Memory a little hazy...that was, after all, over 27 years ago. Damn I feel old. I never cared much for the board; to me, it had a cheap "feel." Though I don't remember any real issues with it during the 4 years I worked there. We had the small version like the one in your photographs which was used in a small announce booth. I believe the touch-sensitive switches in that one did have some issues. I do remember that one was replaced in pretty short time. I almost never touched that one, so I remember even less about it.
 
One more thing on that...

Why are there two boards, one sitting on top of the other? Feeding two stations from one control room? Two combined for more channels? Very odd...
 
They are both Ramko consoles, as an earlier poster said, I believe the lower one is what was the DC8. (MS?)

They were way too sensitive to static electricity.
 
They are the same board with pictures taken from different angles.

I think they were just stacked that way for more channels. I really don't remember. It was the first board that I had ever run, and I guess I just thought it was normal at the time.

I remember the sensitivity to static electricity very well. We always had to make sure that we touched a discarge pad before touching the console. For a long time after working there, I still had a habit of touching the top of the desk in front of the board (where the static pad had been) as each song was ending. I guess it was some sort of Pavlovian response!

Thanks for the info!
 
al_atl said:
One more thing on that...

Why are there two boards, one sitting on top of the other? Feeding two stations from one control room? Two combined for more channels? Very odd...
Click to expand...

I think the top unit is a 5 channel Ramko; the bottom unit is a 5 channel "extender" they sold to expand the input capability.

You see an old Ramko occasionally on EBay...they usually sell pretty cheap.

Incidentally, Ramko is short for the name of the company's founder, Ray M. Kornfeld, who passed away a few years back, I believe.
 
I remember a little community station near me had one of those back in the early 80's. The thing that struck me funny was when channels use to turn themselves on and off by themselves. I saw a similar board without the touch sensitive switches, which seemed better but I was never too impressed with those consoles.
 
One of the worst boards i have worked on.Finally convinced the owner to dump it and get an autogram.
Ramko sounds like something you'd find at Toys R Us, board was more finicky than Morris the Cat..
 
Amen to that. The IC's in them also liked to blow if hooked up to any long length of wire. Ramko were cheap to buy, expensive to run.

On the other hand, we bought an Autogram 8 channel back in 1983 for a production studio. Sold it last year to a 10 watt college station where it is in use to this day
 
I put an 8 channel Ramko in an FM. Worked OK, but had zero headroom. They provided sockets to put pad resistors in each input, If you paded the sources individually, it didn't sound too terrible. Since there weren't any undistorted voltage controlled attenuaters when it was built, the distortion spec pretty much depended on the level set. Kofeld (or KoRnfeld) had some unique ideas which he implemented in the consoles. Switching was unique as wasat the time the use of a VCA with the bias voltage on the level pot. For the price, wasn't a bad idea.
 
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