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Video tour of the 1230 WBLQ transmitter

W

wiggums

Before AM radio dies, the good folks at DiPonti took cameras into the highly classified 1949 transmitting plant of WBLQ in Westerly for a short tour. If your not on the technical side, this clip may make you drowsy. But, if you search our other videos, you can see one of my cyborg room mate.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTrAPDfGjdw
 
Doing some snooping, it appears WERI-LP is deleted leaving the WERI callsign without an owner! Maybe the historic call can return to its rightful home?!
 
RE: WERI call letters...

Please, my radio friends, don't take offense, but when I revived the WBLQ call letters in 1997 on 88.1, I did so because I think the staff of that station, at 99.3, did a fantastic job with serving our community. I was also honored to work there part time. When 99.3 was sold to the Urso family, they changed the call letters to WERI-FM (the 2nd incarnation). I received the CP for 88.1 in 1997 and decided to bring back the BLQ calls. Even though we were non-commercial, we still found ourselves in competition with WERI AM and FM. Those stations were sold in 1999. The opportunity of taking over 1230 AM presented itself in 2007, and in 2009, the approval was in place. All of those years, from 88.1, to 96.9, then 96.7, I kept the WBLQ call letters alive. Now I feel the circle is complete. As long as I own 1230 AM, the WERI call letters will never have a home here. I'm very passionate about that statement, and again, please, no disrespect intended.
 
No disrespect received! Just thought it might have done with the fact that the calls weren't then available. Didn't know about the backstory, which is interesting! Maybe Entercom could take it for 103.7. Sounds a lot better than WVEI-FM does!

All you need now is 99.3.
 
Gotta throw my .02 in here, as I worked for both stations. I started in radio at WERI AM/FM in 1977.Was CE, board op, you name it. Even though the equipment sucked, the station did try to pull off a decent full-service format. I was also one of the crew that helped build and put 99.3 on the air in 1988. Came back in a contract role in 2000 to help install a couple of Audioarts R60 consoles during the 99.3 Swing FM days. I'm also very old-school when it comes to heritage call signs. Were I the owner of 1230 in Westerly, I'd damn right regain the WERI calls. I'd also rather see 99.7 and 790 swap calls, putting WEAN back where it belongs. Same goes for the silent 990; at least park WLKW back there and put WWRI back on 1450 in West Warwick. Dumping long-held calls seems to be very cavalier at best. My present station, WVCH, has held its call since going on the air in 1948, and has ad its current Christian format since 1972. So for me, a call flip just for the sake of reimaging is tacky at best.
 
DG02816 said:
I'm also very old-school when it comes to heritage call signs. Were I the owner of 1230 in Westerly, I'd damn right regain the WERI calls. I'd also rather see 99.7 and 790 swap calls, putting WEAN back where it belongs. Same goes for the silent 990; at least park WLKW back there and put WWRI back on 1450 in West Warwick. Dumping long-held calls seems to be very cavalier at best.
Click to expand...

Dave:

Agree with all of your points EXCEPT the one about WLKW. At least to me, anyway, WLKW is associated with "Beautiful Music". Since the format doesn't exist anymore, I can't see the reason for the calls getting parked on 990.

However...since the WALE calls are so highly toxic...I don't think they could ever be used again.

If...by some miracle...990 ever returns to the air...the calls have to be changed. A few places to start with a bit of local heritage?...how about WICE....WRIB....WKRI...or even the newly available WERI?
 
WKRI is on 91.9 in Cokesbury, S.C. as an oldies station. WICE is being used as well I think. I'd like to think forward: WRRI for Radio R.I.! If it ever did get back on the air & going full blast it would cover just about all of R.I.! I agree with DG02816 & DR in all other points! Actually, I can see using WLKW on 990 but it does lose its true meaning at night (I doubt they could use WVKW then!).
 
Having worked at both the original (1400) WALE and the original WERI (1230) when they each ran 250 Watts day/night, I feel a little qualified to comment....

The WERI call worked well at 250 Watts as the service area was pretty much Westerly and Pawcatuck and immediate areas. Now with higher power and likely needing to cast wider net for advertisers it might prove limiting. Probably not a good idea to bring it back. Add to that the common local tendency to pronounce the call as a word (weary) with weak connotations.....

WALE would be very workable for an intensely local station for Nantucket or perhaps New Bedford (WhALE, as the Brothers Sisson presented it with a stylized "h" spouting from a whale). Could it work in Fall River again? Perhaps but when the original 1400 went ethnic and no longer was in competition with WSAR it was over. The decision to drop the call (now WHTB) was a good one but only under those circumstances.

For the Providence market....I have to agree that the call should just be retired.
 
VelvetR said:
Having worked at both the original (1400) WALE and the original WERI (1230) when they each ran 250 Watts day/night, I feel a little qualified to comment....

The WERI call worked well at 250 Watts as the service area was pretty much Westerly and Pawcatuck and immediate areas. Now with higher power and likely needing to cast wider net for advertisers it might prove limiting. Probably not a good idea to bring it back. Add to that the common local tendency to pronounce the call as a word (weary) with weak connotations.....

WALE would be very workable for an intensely local station for Nantucket or perhaps New Bedford (WhALE, as the Brothers Sisson presented it with a stylized "h" spouting from a whale). Could it work in Fall River again? Perhaps but when the original 1400 went ethnic and no longer was in competition with WSAR it was over. The decision to drop the call (now WHTB) was a good one but only under those circumstances.

For the Providence market....I have to agree that the call should just be retired.
Click to expand...

What happened to the whale the was on top of (I think) the original 1400 location?
 
HHH said:
What happened to the whale the was on top of (I think) the original 1400 location?
Click to expand...

It was on the roof of Jim Rogers Cigar Store, a single-level portion of the larger Durfee Theater Building, in the basement of which the station was located. There was a small storefront on North Main Street with a narrow set up stairs up from the crypt (which was immediately adjacent to the theater men's room). The building was taken by government to build Interstate 195 but destruction didn't take place for a couple of years. During that time the plaster whale was allowed to deteriorate and it was still in place when the building was destroyed, going down right along with it. By then Milt Mittler owned the station and had moved the studio to Rock Street with a new transmitter site in the swamp behind the Watuppa Heights housing project, now itself being destroyed. The project, that is. The original 153 foot Wincharger tower was on the roof of the theater building. Interesting structure; more steel support INSIDE the loft of the theater to support the tower and strange looking steel braces on each corner of the building to receive the guy cables. Feed was open wire. There was an FM antenna on the top of the tower; remnant of the original WCFR which preceeded licensing of WALE (1400) in about 1948. Taking weekly base current readings involved walking through the ornate theater, up through the balcony, up a vertical wooden ladder through the projection booth and out via a little shack on the rooftop. I wish I had taken pictures!
 
VelvetR said:
The original 153 foot Wincharger tower was on the roof of the theater building. Interesting structure; more steel support INSIDE the loft of the theater to support the tower and strange looking steel braces on each corner of the building to receive the guy cables. Feed was open wire. There was an FM antenna on the top of the tower; remnant of the original WCFR which preceeded licensing of WALE (1400) in about 1948. Taking weekly base current readings involved walking through the ornate theater, up through the balcony, up a vertical wooden ladder through the projection booth and out via a little shack on the rooftop. I wish I had taken pictures!
Click to expand...

You are a big man! How did you ever fit up that ladder?

When I chiefed WERI, the AM had a 1kW Collins, a 250 watt Raytheon aux and the CBS "Max twins". 103.7 ran a 5 kW Gates out of a concrete bomb shelter into a 4 bay antenna on a tower sited at the foot of a hill. The antenna just cleared the hill top with 16 (or 18 -I forget) kW, horizontally polarized erp. The studio sported a Magnacord PT6 and a couple of mono Raytheon boards. Ever see a 6J5? I never saw a Raytheon anything that didn't ooze potting compound from every transformer. I hazard a guess the Onan backup generator at Margin Street still hasn't worked since long before I was there!

I wouldn't be surprised if a (very) few stations still use a PT6 on occasion...

-
 
iyiyi said:
You are a big man! How did you ever fit up that ladder?

When I chiefed WERI, the AM had a 1kW Collins, a 250 watt Raytheon aux and the CBS "Max twins". 103.7 ran a 5 kW Gates out of a concrete bomb shelter into a 4 bay antenna on a tower sited at the foot of a hill. The antenna just cleared the hill top with 16 (or 18 -I forget) kW, horizontally polarized erp. The studio sported a Magnacord PT6 and a couple of mono Raytheon boards. Ever see a 6J5? I never saw a Raytheon anything that didn't ooze potting compound from every transformer. I hazard a guess the Onan backup generator at Margin Street still hasn't worked since long before I was there!

I wouldn't be surprised if a (very) few stations still use a PT6 on occasion...

-
Click to expand...

I was 16 years old at the time I used to climb that ladder! Biggest issue was it was nailed vertically to the wall with only about 2-inches between the rungs and the wall so all you ever got was a toe-hold. OSHA would be all over that today!

Whilst I was at WERI there was the original Raytheon transmitter; no backup. The 5 kW Gates FM was installed at Margin Street originally with a 4-bay Andrews Hi-V horizontally polarized antenna - CP hadn't been invented. Second (?) harmonic wiped out Channel 12 for miles and all attempts at filtering at the site and in people's homes didn't help, hence it went silent pretty quickly. The bunker site? I saw that being built and told Nat it couldn't work as there was NO provision for ventillation. I guess he tried, though.....

WALE (1400) had two of those Raytheon boards (along with a 250-Watt transmitter, twin to that at WERI). There was also a Raytheon FM transmitter along side it (at WALE) that had been out of service for about 10 years when first I saw it. Every station had at least one PT6 Maggi...WALE had one plus a PT63, half of which could be separated and used as a remote amplifier. Also a couple of the New-London made primitive cart machines using the super-thick Cousineau type (peep show) cartridges. WERI escaped that - used a Gates ST-101 (spawn of the devil, 18-inch wide magnetic belt). Oh yeah, while I was there WERI graduated to a Gates Studioette board for the air studio and the Raytheon fell to production use. Some years later when I visited the Studioette had been abandoned and there was a stand-up studio in the 11 Railroad Avenue (2nd floor) site. A few years later and there was an ancient Altec (no sign of the Gates or Raytheon) in what had been Nat's law office just up the street. At that time there was a second-hand RCA transmitter.

8008?

Wilkinson replacement diode stacks?

Yeah. Raytheon.
 
Would it have been WERI-FM's or WPRI-TV's responsibility to resolve the interference? Couldn't have WPRI-TV put a translator in town like WSBE-TV did with W62AB? How well did WPRI-TV get down there anyway? I am surprised a station from Rehoboth could get into Westerly!
 
N1WVQ said:
Would it have been WERI-FM's or WPRI-TV's responsibility to resolve the interference? Couldn't have WPRI-TV put a translator in town like WSBE-TV did with W62AB? How well did WPRI-TV get down there anyway? I am surprised a station from Rehoboth could get into Westerly!
Click to expand...

Apparently a disgruntled TV viewer located and repaired the problem all by himself. Unfortunately for WERI, the tool used for the repair was a sledge hammer applied to the exciter. A new RCA exciter cleared up the interference to channel 12.

-
 
iyiyi said:
Apparently a disgruntled TV viewer located and repaired the problem all by himself. Unfortunately for WERI, the tool used for the repair was a sledge hammer applied to the exciter. A new RCA exciter cleared up the interference to channel 12.
Click to expand...

Two different eras involved in this discussion.

The original Margin Street problem was very serious because the location is high-population. Technically it was WPRO-TV's problem since Westerly was outside their primary area (it hadn't been sold and become "WPRI-TV" at that time). However try to tell that to viewers who took out their frustration on WERI's local advertisers. I recall a Gates factory engineer installing a Tee-notch filter in the transmission line with no effect. Then another between the driver and final amp. No effect. Then another between the exciter and driver. No good. Then connecting the driver (around 200-Watts?) directly to the antenna; no good. Finally connecting just the exciter (10W?) to the antenna and, again, no go. I was sent out putting 300-Ohm filters (twin lead stub plus an aluminum foil slider) on the antenna input of tens of TV sets. That was able to cure a few but not enough. Appears the sledge hammer solution and RCA exciter came a lot later - maybe at the bomb shelter site?

As to translators - at the time of the original problem they weren't allowed. They did some along later and may have pretty well resolved things as WERI-FM did ultimately get back on the air but by then it had been sold and, I think, moved.

My experience in Westerly was in 1960-61. It seemed cutting-edge then but sure seems primitive today.
 
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