I don't know what was going on this past Sunday. I live on a main power line, which is good if the power goes out because they have to restore power to a lot of people when it goes out. This has not always meant serious interference problems, but there are more problems lately than there used to be. On the way to church, no problem at all. On the way home, once I passed this new device interference got worse. I walk past one of these and at the bottom there is identifying information which seems to say where it was ordered from or something, a number that identifies it, and the term "riser".
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Saving AM Radio
- Thread starter BruceB
- Start date
We didn't even have UHF until the late 60s. I saw that Channel 18 was located at One Television Place and I wondered why this one place was the only place that could receive the signal. That turned out to be the street address.
A riser is where a feed from an underground electric line comes up out of the ground - hence "riser" - to be connected with an overhead line. Most commonly used for neighborhood distribution, or even a single drop to a household.
I don't know if that's what it is. I once asked about some equipment (the company information was on the equipment down below where I could see it) and was told it had something to do with keeping the voltage high enough after the line is many miles away from the substation. But this equipment is very close to the substation.
This was before the Internet so I got the information about the company from the library and sent a snail mail.
Might have been one or more capacitors, then, to correct for inductive factors elsewhere in the lines to ensure that current and voltage sine waves match instead of lagging or leading.
If you had health issues due to alcohol, what would be the best solution?
1- Drink more coffee, space out your drinking, take a bunch of dubious remedies that might help a little, etc.
2- Stop drinking!
I'd say 2- Stop
I looked online for something that looked like it, but couldn't find anything. Duke Energy has replaced a bunch of these recently.
Same here. FM Top 40 wasn't big in the rural area we lived.
AM was still big, but there was an out of town automated Top 40 AM. "U-102" (KSKU).
There were FM stations, but not many, and they mostly carried beautiful music.
One did come on in 1979, playing Top 40.
So things were changing in the late 70s.
You are generalizing. That is not necessarily true in every part of the U.S.
There were over 1500 FM stations by the mid-60's. In fact, in 1950 there were over 1000 FMs.
And, following the non-simulcast ruling in the later 60's, we had the beginning of Album Rock on FM, the first all-oldies FM, even the first Spanish language FM. And we had classical, jazz, religion and many foreign language stations on FM well before that.
The first Top 40 FMs of significance were ones like WPGC in DC, which upgraded the FM signal around 1969 and soon had more FM listening than on its dreadful 50 kw daytime AM.
No, by around 1972 we had FM stations like WMYQ in Miami, and its sisters in in Detroit and St Louis, WERC-FM in Birmingham and several others that pretty much destroyed AM top 40 wherever such a station came on the FM band.
Notice I said "in my area."
Please don't be so quick to misinterpret posts.
Wasn't generalizing about the whole U.S., where many cars didn't have FM radios as standard items until even the 80s.
Even if this was a significant problem in the decline of AM, which I do not agree with, that horse has left the barn. If the Part 15 standards were tightened tomorrow, today's stuff would still be in the environment for years and decades.
We've found a practical solution. To abandon AM and use newer media which delivers adequate fidelity and no noise.
Your recent posts are full of misinformation and inaccuracies. Please base posts on facts, and if you don't know them do not post.
There was a pretty wide gulf between urban and rural areas when it came to FM. And some urban areas were slower to develop it than others.
Dondd didn't specify the years he was talking about, which makes answering this point harder. In northern Missouri and southern Iowa, there was no
reliable FM activity until there was a burst of it from 1966 to 1968. The first FM station I heard as a pre-teen living near the Iowa-Missouri border at the time, was KRXL from Kirksville, Mo., which arrived in 1968. (KRXL is still around and never changed its call letters!) It was the first reliable FM signal on the Iowa-Missouri border. Otherwise, on good days, there was WHO-FM with beautiful music/pop classical and superpowered KDMI-FM, with paid religious programming. The first Top 40 station on FM in the area was KGRC from Hannibal, around the start of 1969.
Columbia got its first commercial FM late in 1967 with KTGR-FM, simulcasting its daytimer AM, also a Top 40 station with some album rock at night. No stereo, by the way. The first FM station there was a non-commercial 10-watter that wasn't actually on much.
There was more activity in the large Missouri metros earlier. But the mid-1950s were a dismal time for FM no matter where you were. Kansas City was down to one FM, KCMO-FM, for several years.
The move to the Iowa-Missouri border was a big comedown from living in Albuquerque. But a story from Albuquerque. One day I had to stay home from school sick and my mother got a friend to come to the house to watch over me. She brought along a radio to listen to classical music. Already I was interested in radio, and I saw that it had different numbers on it. "What's that?," I asked. She replied, "Oh, it's an FM radio. It only gets KHFM." Now I realized that was odd, since there were a few other FMs on at the time...KANW for the schools, KARA-FM for beautiful music, KDEF-FM, plus KRST coming on the air during that time, though KOB hadn't yet joined the FM crowd and KGGM never did.
Side note: Mark Roberts - 1967, 1968 time frame. My Dad managed Cokesbury Bookstore in Kansas City which was owned by the Methodist Publishing House. There were Methodist preacher conferences at places like Central Methodist in Fayette. On each annual conference, my transistor radio was on KTGR. Here's the question: do you know the name of the jingle package they used then. It was always a favorite jingle package of mine that was still in use on a station in Ciudad Acuna, Mexico in the early to mid-1980s on XEDH's 50% English, 50% Spanish Pop Hits format.
I've sent a private reply, but for public consumption as well, the short answer is that I don't know. I first heard KTGR in the summer of 1967, when my family stayed in Columbia so that my mom could finish her graduate degree in education at Mizzou. I was just beginning to listen to radio more as I was about to enter my teenage years, and was thrilled that I didn't have to try to bring in WHB or KXOK with a local choice being available instead. It still didn't help at night: KTGR-FM didn't enter the picture until December 1967.
The FM situation in mid-Missouri was a little weird. The small-market operators had more vision on this than Mahlon Aldridge at KFRU. While Mahlon was a good man, with admirable integrity, I don't think he truly understood the technical side of the business. When KWOS-FM gave up the ghost in Jefferson City in 1958, he had the chance to pick up what was then the 98.5 channel with a regional-class signal. Instead, a few years later, he went to 24-hour broadcasting. In the context of the time, that was a reasonable move, but it cost him in the long run. By the time Jefferson City, Moberly, Mexico, and Marshall all went on the air with their class C FMs in the 1966-1968 timeframe, there were no class C allocations for Columbia, the largest city in the region! So, until well after BC Docket 80-90 was adopted, Columbia had only class A commercial stations. I believe the only larger market that had this kind of situation was Bryan-College Station, Texas, probably due to its proximity to Houston and maybe Waco. The University of Missouri's KBIA was the only class C in Columbia, later joined by KOPN; both were noncommercial. Columbia already was a crowded market in print media; the TV situation was too complex to get into here; once the original bounds of 80-90 were breached and all sorts of allocations became possible, the radio market became very crowded as well.
Possibly of interest: the original KTGR call letters were KBIA.
Top 40 was not a big format in smaller markets, even on AM in the 50's and 60's. It was a hard sell to local advertisers who saw it as "kids' music".
That is why KOMA and a few other wide coverage Top 40 stations had huge night audiences and got their highest rates after sunset; they were the only Top 40 options for young people hundreds of miles away.
KOMA used to run ads for shows and movie openings everywhere from the Dakotas to Colorado to New Mexico. Several other big signal Top 40 stations like WKBW, WLS and WABC also did enormously well at night in far away areas.
So not having a local Top 40 in the 70's, whether on AM or FM, was mostly due to advertiser acceptance or rejection of different format.
If I haven't said it here (I might have), we got our first FM that was popular with the students I went to high school with in 1978. Broadcasting Yearbook called it AOR and it was known as Charlotte's Best Rock but the music looked a lot like what a Top 40 station would play. The real album rocker was called "adult rock" and I don't recall anyone liking it until I was in college.
So when I was a little kid, and hearing top 40 stations based out of Albany, OR; Grants Pass, OR; Yakima and Walla Walla, WA, and Eureka, Calif, I was dreaming?
There were indeed Top 40 AM stations in smaller markets, at least in the latter part of the 60's. Some had full service during the day and T40 at night. Some were T40 24-7. And although I won't disputer your statement that local advertisers may have seen T40 as 'kids music', advertising in general during the 60's and 70's had a huge chunk aimed at kids -- otherwise T-40 wouldn't have been as big in the big markets as it was, and there would have been no Saturday morning cartoon blocks, all chock full of advertising.
Circumstances varied from place to place. If you were in Iowa south of Des Moines, DA-2 KIOA went away at night. In the case of the community where I lived, well south of Des Moines, the local KCOG did Top-40 at night until it signed off at 10 pm. Then you could switch to WLS or KAAY. If your local Top-40 was a daytimer, you'd have to make similar moves.
What became frequent on FM in smaller markets during the 1970s were progressive-rock shows at night, sometimes on a Top-40 station, sometimes on a more adult-leaning station, even sometimes, as in the case of WSMI-FM Litchfield, Illinois, on a country station.
KOMA wasn't all that useful in Iowa or Missouri at night: too much of that "rotating speaker" effect as the station went in and out of phase.
One thing I noticed on these boards and elsewhere, some/many of the Top 40 stations in the big markets in the 1960s, like KRLA or in places like Tampa and Tulsa, were on smaller stations, or at the end of the dial.
KUDL 1380 was a pathetic signal in Kansas City, but then WHB entered.
The big "full service" stations, the ones that later went to talk, played music, but not "teen music," or didn't focus on that.
This wasn't everywhere, but I see a trend.
KUDL 1380 was a pathetic signal in Kansas City, but then WHB entered.
The big "full service" stations, the ones that later went to talk, played music, but not "teen music," or didn't focus on that.
This wasn't everywhere, but I see a trend.