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Old Broadcast Automation

Mike Sheridan

Mike Sheridan

Wow a friend of mine asked me in an e-mail about the first station I worked for in the early '70's. It was an automated oldies station in Fort Lauderdale (can anyone guess the call letters?) Anyway I was hired a couple of months before the station was sold and greatly improved.

I'm no engineer but all of the crazy stuff we had to do with the automation to make sure everything got on the air came back to me. Are there any good automation stories out there?
 
IMHO. the simplest and most reliable was the Gates SC series. It used cherry switches to select sources, and had a time correection every 15 minutes. Coupled with four Scully 270 reels and a few cart machines, and three SMC carousels, it would run flawlessly for at least 24 hours.I had one on a "beautiful music" format, and it would equal any machine today. ( Circa Early 1980). Negatives: It had to be attended to rewind reels and for the few Cart miscues....JBI
 
Shafer 902 with a switch memopry module and some carousels. It was the only one that sensed a no-start condition and went to the next source. You used fixed stopsets and just set the peg at zero on the carousel if there wasn't a spot for that position. 250mSec and it went to the next element.
The SMC DPS 1 and the little ones (6080?) weren't bad,but the audio section picked, it had no headroom. The Harris System 90 was typical Harris - nice idea that hit the market about a year too soon. Once you sorted it, it did OK.
I've run Drake - Chenault, both beautiful music services, and the small operation that duplicated the tapes at speed - his were the best.
 
Mike Sheridan said:
Wow a friend of mine asked me in an e-mail about the first station I worked for in the early '70's. It was an automated oldies station in Fort Lauderdale (can anyone guess the call letters?) Anyway I was hired a couple of months before the station was sold and greatly improved.

I'm no engineer but all of the crazy stuff we had to do with the automation to make sure everything got on the air came back to me. Are there any good automation stories out there?
Click to expand...
WSRF...Surf 16?
 
I worked with two Harris 90 systems. Very complex brain. If it died or fried you were looking at a big expense to get it working again. To get a Harris tech to look at it somewhere around $5000+. I wonder if any SMC/Harris systems are still in service at a (any) small market station? Would like to see some old pictures of some at stations in the past.
 
My first experience with automation was with a Broadcast Products AS1000 system at WPCV, Lakeland/Winter Haven, FL.
For it's day, it was a pretty good and reliable system.
Random Access Carousels, a few Scully 270's, a pair of Time Announce cart machines, automatic Network join with a backtime playback deck which contained music cuts which were exactly 3:00 in length.
The backtime deck would start and when the automation needed the "fill" music, the system would fade the deck up.
The system also had a "Special Events" button which, when punched, would insert the event before the automation system continued with the next thumbwheel-selected event.
The "Special Events" deck was a single play cart machine.
 
BobOnTheJob said:
Mike Sheridan said:
Wow a friend of mine asked me in an e-mail about the first station I worked for in the early '70's. It was an automated oldies station in Fort Lauderdale (can anyone guess the call letters?) Anyway I was hired a couple of months before the station was sold and greatly improved.

I'm no engineer but all of the crazy stuff we had to do with the automation to make sure everything got on the air came back to me. Are there any good automation stories out there?
Click to expand...
WSRF...Surf 16?
Click to expand...

A good guess but no. It was WAXY FM 106.
 
musiconradio.com said:
I worked with two Harris 90 systems. Very complex brain. If it died or fried you were looking at a big expense to get it working again. To get a Harris tech to look at it somewhere around $5000+. I wonder if any SMC/Harris systems are still in service at a (any) small market station? Would like to see some old pictures of some at stations in the past.
Click to expand...

Wow thanks for coming up with that. We had one at WNGS (Wings 92) in West Palm Beach. It was a good system and always worked well. This one had two banks of Instacarts they were another matter entirely! They would skip their stop cues often giving us at least two things on the air at once, what a mess! Probably would have worked okay with some decent maintenance but the ones we have must have needed a lot of work!
 
WAXY-FM started with a Broadcast Products AR-1000 system with 4 Scully reels, 2 single play Spotmasters (one was the special event as mentioned above) a couple 2 carousels that were programmed by where you inserted the pins above each one. There was a matrix of 48x24 for two breaks each hour and 24 cart slots. You had to make sure to have pins for all hours and you better not have more than one pin in the 48 possible breaks otherwise the carousel would tray in and out getting confused on which cart to play!

The actual AR-1000 was very simple. It was a row of thumbwheels with numbers for each source (reels, single carts and carousels) you wanted to play in a row. There was a HCT (Hokey Cam Timer) that reset to the first thumbwheel which was the station ID cart. You couldn't exactly do a complicated format rotation but it worked well.

When RKO General bought WAXY and took control they brought in the AR-2000 Broadcast Products unit with 6 Scully reels, 4 carousels and 2 ITC triples. This one had a keyboard and you could set up different music rotations.

There was a more elaborate clock system that was programed by the old pin system where you could send the system memory to play different locations. So we'd always see all four carousels tray out and go to the proper spots as the last song before the commercial set was playing. It was a very flexible but complicated system.

The next station I worked for had a beautiful music sister station WGLO which ran on a Schaffer 903E. That was a nice system with the usual compliment of carousels and single play carts. The 4 reel decks were unlike the usual ones I saw in automation. They were LJ-10's made by LJ Scully. The were very modern you can see them in a picture at www.WFTL14.com and go to the tab marked 106.7FM.

The Schaffer system had a nice little keyboard used to program everything and there was a format file and a time file. Spots went in the time file and it was very easy to program. The only gotcha was to makes sure that one spot followed the next you had to do a "link" command. If you didn't do that and the time fell a certain way there was a chance a song could play between spots. I don't remember that ever happening though.

The WGLO Schaffer automation had a neat time announce system. Most automation systems used big carts with very automated sounding time checks. WGLO had two metro-tech reel units (remember odd time and even time?). The tapes would auto reverse, they had cue tones and also clear windows between each time announce. The time announcements were custom with the station calls or slogan on them.

Why I remember so much about this after all these years is beyond me.
 
Anyone ever work with an IGM system? Seems that they ran and ran.

I worked at one station controlled by what we called the "FERN". F****ng Electronic Repeating Nuisance.

The FERN was a simple device, taking the TTL sig from the tone decoders and starting the next event through a bunch of 2N222s which then triggered the appropriate relay driver circuit. I can't recall who manufactured the FERN. Heck it was something you could build in any shop. Obviously, it was a partial automation device.

Walk away automation didn't really become a reality till Windows was invented.
 
stacker said:
Anyone ever work with an IGM system? Seems that they ran and ran.
Click to expand...

Yup, an IGM Basic A (at KUGN-FM, Eugene). This was a mid-line machine (the high end IGMs were operated by DEC PDP mini mainframes) using 3 distributed Intel 8085's for the scheduler, a switcher and audition panel on a proprietary bus. It ran very well, and had cool features like auto music backtime to network and voice track linking to music decks. Ours made the cover of Broadcast Engineering featuring none other than Delilah Rene, the 6 to midnight personality doing only her 2nd radio gig, as the model.
 
ironbear said:
stacker said:
Anyone ever work with an IGM system? Seems that they ran and ran.
Click to expand...

Yup, an IGM Basic A (at KUGN-FM, Eugene). This was a mid-line machine (the high end IGMs were operated by DEC PDP mini mainframes) using 3 distributed Intel 8085's for the scheduler, a switcher and audition panel on a proprietary bus. It ran very well, and had cool features like auto music backtime to network and voice track linking to music decks. Ours made the cover of Broadcast Engineering featuring none other than Delilah Rene, the 6 to midnight personality doing only her 2nd radio gig, as the model.
Click to expand...

That sounds like a sweet system. What year are we talking about? Some of the early radio automation was really primitive. I caught a glance at an automation system in Miami once, all I remember seeking a rack full of knobs!
 
The System 90 was a dog. Wasn't a week gone by that something went terribly wrong. Had Harris out there 3 or 4 times. As soon as that that little beehive console would start looking like a Vegal slot machine just throw the power switch & start over. Spent a log to time reseating ICs and using Cramolin on the edge connectors.

The upgraded System 9001 was a big improvement. A real CRT terminal and printer! Ran 4x Revox A77's, 4x 48 tray Instacarts, and a pair of time carts.

All the audio was controlled with VACTEC lightbulb & photoresistors modules. Something like 18 of them in the automation and one on each of the Insticart trays.

Fun times (cought hack)
 
I worked with two Shafer systems at different stations. WXTQ_FM (Athens, OH) ran TM Stereo Rock. WHAJ-FM (Bluefield, WV) ran TM Beautiful Music. In both cases, the sister AM jocks had to change tapes. What a distraction that was!
 
I started out in the '60s with an IGM Simplimation system with the diode pins, two carosels and two 14" Scully RRs. The music was produced by IGM (IGM stood for International Good Music) as whole shows (e.g. "Music with McMasters") - the reels would run in 15-minute segments and then fired a stopset. This was replaced in the early '70s with an IGM 770. It used the PDP-8 minicomputer with an iron-core RAM. The OS was loaded via a paper tape reader on the side of the teletype logger (after you manually loaded the bootstrap program with the front panel switches, of course). It had two stereo 48-tray Instacarts and 4 Revox RRs, one of which was used to play a voice-track tape. One of the Instacarts had the current music loaded into it and worked with the voice track RR. At the top of the hour, the voice track tape would start and deadroll to a 35 Hz tone to keep it synced to the music schedule (most of the time). So if you think voice tracking is a recent development, IGM was doing it way back. The 770 was replaced with the IGM Basic A - with much improvement in reliability. If you had a tray go bad in an Instacart, you could simply tell the Basic A to substitute another tray number for the bad one without having to change the whole program log. The sister station ran an IGM MC system - this used an actual PC running DOS and the automation program was loaded on it via a single 5" floppy.
 
In 1981 I became acquainted with a SMC DP-1 that was handed down from the corporate office. Eight Carousel 250's, two Scully 270's and a Revox A-77. Did network joins with a C-size backfill cart full of 2-minute instrumentals...yuck! The punch-tape and mag tape programming facilities smoked and were not fixed, so all spots were aired manually from the control room.

At the end the system was pared down to three Carousels playing ID's and promos, and the RR decks were replaced with three Pioneer CD decks with the cartridges that held five or six CD's. The decks were connected to a TM Century interface box. The 2048 event memory held three very condensed routines, a weekday, Saturday, and Sunday sequences.

I really miss pulling out all of the circuit boards and reseating chips, getting my hand caught in the carousel drums while cleaning heads, and replacing lamps in the Sigma LDR's that were used in the switcher. ;D It was all replaced with a Computer Concepts DCS that ran for 15 years before its retirement late last year.
 
IGMs were pretty common up here, being from Bellingham & all. There was one Shaffer 903 I worked with that was pretty reliable, given how mechanical the thing was. 4 Scully's, 3 or 4 carousels & 3 or 4 single play carts.

There was a little console, where you could program pretty much everything, once you learned its language. Beyond that, it used a punch tape for the daily stuff. That part was pretty tedious & most prone to (operator input) error.

If you were lucky enough to type everything into the punch tape right, you'd then feed the tape into a reader... and if THAT read in right, it would pretty much do as it was told.

Pretty amazing, how we've taken 4 to 7 racks of mechanics, motors, relays chips & tape heads, & made the whole playback thing a fairly minor task for many common desktop computers with a little software and a decent sound card or two.
 
I just remembered the Schafer 903E we used at WSOC Charlotte. We had a home made box in the control room with buttons for the four reels on it and a stop and start button. You had to make sure to punch up another reel in time or it stayed with the reel you were on and there was lots of space between songs. We played spots from the control room but they could have been played from the automation.

The automation had a cart recorder in it that we used to record the NBC news pre-feed at :54. That way we never had to pad to get into the news. If the hour went long you could punch up the cart for the network. I did get a call from somebody one time who tried to set his clock to us! He was not happy that sometimes the top of the hour news aired at :01. You had to remember to erase the cart each hour before the :54 feed.

Overnight the station was able to run Larry King on the automation. We didn't have anything to read the Mutual tones so I guess it was all done with time commands. The FM guy could handle both stations.
 
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