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Transmitters Then and Now

The CCA was for rich stations. Those of us who were broke bought the Bauer kit. $2995, which included the Factory Guy coming by after you built it and measuring it, certifying it, and affixing a patent plate. Completely unbreakable box, right down to the toaster elements in the top for aa builtin dummy load. And, when we got a Modulimiter which was capable of assymetric audio, we found out, the little toy would do 115 - 118% on positive peaks all day long without sweating. We set it by the RCA BTA250F which was relegated to night duty on outr Class IV, and which was also capable of frighteningly good audio for the day. It had assymetric tubes though, 828s modulating 810s. The Bauer had 4-400s modulating 4-400s.
Rest his soul, Joe Dentici is gone now, but he and I had the Bauer vs CCA wars for many months in The Day.
 
It's the harmonic distortion that you liked...
 
Harmonic wasn't a great problem, the radios were reasonably good in that regard. They fell down on intermod though. Under 5% using the SMPTE signal was about as good as you'd get. There just wasn't any good way to get the reactance of that big ol' mod transformer out of it until pulse modulation came along.
 
I'll add my 2 cents to all this...

I was staff engineer at the 1260 in Boston(then WEZE)in 1979. Our aux rig at the time was a Collins 21E. Both it and the then main AEL AM-10KD were driven by a UREI BL-40 Modulimiter. That audio processing made the 21E sound sweet! Some years later I was Chief at a small station in RI which used a BL-40 driven by a Tapco musical instrument equalizer; this was fed into a Harris MW1A, then out to a 110' tower tuned to 1370. Sounded great!

Dave Gardiner

WVCH 740/WNWR 1540

Philadelphia
 
The Modulimiter shared why all the studio guys pay top dollar today for LA3s. The action of a luminescent panel and photocell is just oh so smooth. The offset in the hard limiter was the icing on that cake. For a broadband proc amp, they don't come any better. The T3 and T4 elements are becoming hard to find, but I read someplace, somebody reworks them on a custom basis with new panels and photocells. I wonder if you put soemthing like a SEP400 infront of it, and then......
 
littlejohn said:
The Modulimiter shared why all the studio guys pay top dollar today for LA3s. The action of a luminescent panel and photocell is just oh so smooth. The offset in the hard limiter was the icing on that cake. For a broadband proc amp, they don't come any better. The T3 and T4 elements are becoming hard to find, but I read someplace, somebody reworks them on a custom basis with new panels and photocells. I wonder if you put soemthing like a SEP400 infront of it, and then......
Click to expand...

When I was asst CE at KLVI in the 70s, we had a CCA 5KW driven by a LA3, then a 5 band graphic eq and then the BL40 to the transmitters (Gates 250w with 4-400s finals in it as the aux). Either one sounded sweet and loud....90miles away, 560 was louder than 610 KILT AM (which was also top40) in Houston! Only song that would trip the CCA was Minnie Ripperton's "Loving You"..those high notes just didnt agree with the audio chain and the CCA would almost always trip the plate.....(but then that was a CCA problem period!)
 
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