THE OLD WARO

[kenhawk1160]

I thought they had a Nautel.

Ah...they must have upgraded. I know their engineer was glad to be rid of the Ampliphase. He HATED that transmitter.

 

[hypwr]

The Ampliphase would be great today because with the new digital technology a good exciter could be designed. That was the weak link. The theory of combinding two RF amps in and out of phase was a good idea. The only prob was they couldn't make it work with the stuff they had back then. I installed two of them and they were junk.

 

[gimmus]

I thought they had a Nautel.

Don't know about PIT but theres a 10kw Nautel Ampfet 10 sitting in Cannonsburg. Sima moved the backup to his Maryland station he derated cannonsburg for (Before Sima it was 7500 watts days- on 540 WHEW!) Went down to 5500 watts. That backup that went to MD was an MW-1 and he brought in an old BC-1.

 

[hypwr]

I was confused. I thought you meant that the Ampliphase was at WARO. WPIT had that xmtr. and WARO had the Nautel. Don't mind me.....I'm the second oldest xmtr. in Pittsburgh. Just hit the three quarters of a century mark last week.

 

[hypwr]

Of course I meant the second oldest xmtr. guy in Pgh.

 

[DanStrassberg]

The 5KW signal goes out 14.4 times as far as the 24 watt signal. On 730 24watts isn't too bad.

Wrong! You've fallen for a common misconception. 5000W delivers a signal 14.4 times as strong at any listening point as a 24W signal on the same frequency from the same tower. 14.4 times as strong doesn't go 14.4 times as far, though! To do that you would need perfectly conductive soil. Salt water is the closest thing to perfectly conductive soil that you can find in nature so, if the transmission path were salt water, you'd get close to 14.4 times the distance. With the conductivity of typical earth, which is all over the map (literally--all over the soil-conductivity map), you find values from 0.1 mS/m (parts of New England, parts of the Pacific Northwest, downtown areas of major cities in many states) to 40 mS/m (the Great Plains, most of South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas et al). Pittsburgh is close to some areas of good conductivity (a lot of Ohio, for example), but the conductivity in the Alleghenies is rather poor, which is typical of mountainous areas. The effect of soil conductivity on stations' listening radius is greater at the high end of the AM dial than at the low end. An EXTREMELY approximate rule of thumb is that the signal strength drops off as the square of the distance from the transmitting antenna. That rule will produce wildly inaccurate estimates of the listening radius, but they are a lot better than the estimates you will get by assuming that the signal strength drops off linearly with distance.

And BTW, Mr Hypwr, I'm ~six months older than you.

 

[PHIL Z]

Of course I meant the second oldest xmtr. guy in Pgh.

And BTW, Mr Hypwr, I'm ~six months older than you.

So who is the Oldest Xmiter Guy in The area?

 

[kenhawk1160]

Don't mind me.....I'm the second oldest xmtr. in Pittsburgh. Just hit the three quarters of a century mark last week.

Well, happy belated birthday...glad to have you on this board!

 

[hypwr]

14.4 times as strong. Of course I was assuming a perfectly conducting earth. Hey, I'm and optimist. What can I say?

 

[hypwr]

I mean Im AN optimist. By keyboard skills are slipping.

 

[hypwr]

I meant MY keyboard skills. Judas Priest!!! Maybe its time to hang it up!

 

[Bob E. Nelson]

I meant MY keyboard skills. Judas Priest!!! Maybe its time to hang it up!

I'd blame it on the defective, dung-eating keyboard. Damn the bad luck!

Don't hang it up...just take a break and enjoy digesting some dead animals, topped off with a packet of W and W's.

(All very much inside humor for hypwr).