Photo album, or, Permit Me to Toot My Own Horn

Photo album

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Many people enjoy cruising around the internet because there are so many artifacts and nostalgic reminders of years gone by. Lots of web sites have sprung up with little to show but collections of private photos. So permit me to illustrate parts of my autobiography, in some cases using pictures taken by someone else. For example…

Here is Reddy Kilowatt, who was my TV hero when I was about four years old.

Indian Head test pattern - click to enlarge

This was my favorite Saturday morning TV show.

(Attention MySpace people! Stop hotlinking this graphic!)

This is the Ocean Hopper, an old shortwave radio that my brother built from a kit sometime around the year I was born. By the time I saw the Ocean Hopper, it was just a piece of junk on the workbench out in the garage, and although I tried and tried, not knowing what I was doing, I couldn't get a sound out of it.

At that point, the schematic wouldn't have helped me.

See also...
Supplementary photos of Knight Receiver Ocean Hopper.

Of Hoppers and Headphones: How a mail-order kit and a generous ham helped usher a teenager into the fellowship of Amateur Radio.

The Globe Chief 90

My first ham radio station used the Globe Chief 90 transmitter (like the one on the left), operating with 75 watts of input power, the legal limit for Novice-class license holders such as myself. The SP-600 receiver (like the one on the right) was on loan from WA5RZZ, who, at that time, was about to marry my sister. (That's another story.)

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40 years of ham radio experience!
It was January of 1970 when I went on the air as WN5APW, and I had only one crystal, ("borrowed" from WA5QDX, now W5QG, although I still haven't given it back!) so I was stuck on 7177 kilocycles. Yet I had hours of late night fun chatting with others - in Morse Code only - around the southern and central U.S. Most of the other guys on or near 7177 kc were similarly equipped. I had been on the air for several months before I realized that I could move the receiver up and down the dial and listen for other stations that were "rock-bound", for example on 7174. Back then, the Novice class license was good for only two years and was not renewable.

When this arrived in the mail, I remember thinking that 1972 sounded so futuristic!

No photo available

In July, 1970, my mother and my old pal Rick Gibson drove to Dallas in our family's 1962 Pontiac, to take the tests at the FCC. Rick was after a Third Class Radiotelephone License with Broadcast Endorsement, and I was trying to upgrade my ham license to General Class or better. But the code test was a little too fast for me, so as an afterthought I took the test that Rick had taken, and we both came away with "Third Phone" licenses, issued July 7, 1970. (I can still recall that the code test started with "VVV ARTICLE 17 OF THE ..." but after that it was all a blur. Taking a morse code test in the FCC office was pretty tough, especially if you had traveled almost 200 miles to get there.

The coveted FCC First Class License

In February of 1971, at the age of 16, I rode the bus to Dallas, took the test, and got the coveted FCC First Class Radiotelephone Operator License. Just like the one shown here except that it was light blue, and it was printed on rather plain paper. Today they're printed on check paper so they're much more resistant to forgery. This license was no guarantee of employment, but it didn't hurt, and it was good for an "A" in my senior physics class. That was probably the only "A" on my report card that year.

That summer I went to work for KRGV (Weslaco, Texas) where one of my duties was sign-on meter reading at the transmitter site. Back then, FCC regulations required directional AM stations to have somebody with a First Class License read the meters every day. I was perfect for the job: a warm body with a "First Phone" who worked for slightly more than the minimum wage. If I had only known, I could have asked for twice as much money, even with very little experience. Anyway it was educational although somewhat scary, and it was something that had to be done at 4:45 a.m. in a swampy field in the middle of nowhere. (Actually the site is at or near 26°12'36" N, 97°54'33" W.), just north of Mercedes, Texas.

Old RCA transmitter

The transmitter itself, an old RCA BTA-5F, like the one shown above, was as big as a small bus. It really filled the room. Behind the main body of the transmitter was a fenced-in area containing the modulation transformer and the plate transformer. The modulation transformer had a spark gap on it which would occasionally make a loud bang, depending on the program content, and it served as a "monitor" because the laminations in the core vibrated along with the program audio. This transmitter used 892R tubes, which were similar to type 892, but they had large fins for air cooling. (R = "radiator") Apparently the plain old 892 was intended for water cooling. It is interesting to note that RCA was using 892's in the much earlier 1937 model of this 5,000-watt transmitter.

This was the finest transmitter you could buy in 1947, but it was nearing the end of its useful life when I encountered it. Many other stations, including KPAC, Port Arthur, used the same model. Five-kilowatt transmitters today are about as big as a small refrigerator, because they contain no tubes and they are far more efficient.

(New) Here are some pictures of a similar transmitter at KRNT, showing
An overview of the transmitter,
The operator's console,
The 892R modulator tubes.

This transmitter had 10,000 volts of DC inside, and as a result it often made loud and unexpected noises. If you opened any of the front doors, the high voltage would shut itself off (as it should!) knocking the station off the air. This transmitter also contained huge mercury vapor tubes (673's, if I recall correctly, as well as a set of 8008's), PCB oil-filled capacitors, and numerous other things that were later determined to be hazardous, in addition to the RF radiation itself. It was a remarkably good job for a 17-year-old, even though I was making only a little more than the minimum wage.

This old transmitter was being driven by a CBS Volumax, an audio limiter that was fairly well out on the cutting edge of technology at that time. (There's one at the bottom of this picture.) The Volumax really pumped out a lot more audio than the RCA design engineers were originally counting on. Large lumped inductances don't like to deal with clipped audio waveforms, judging by the way the modulation transformer sounded.

There is another personal anecdote about my experience with the KRGV transmitter at the bottom of this page.

A major part of this job was to walk out to each of the three towers and open the "doghouse" and read the antenna current (without modulation, ideally). This involved getting up very early, walking through lots of mud, encountering spiders, scorpions, an occasional opossum, and thousands of mosquitos. The doghouse is the tiny building at the base of each tower of an AM broadcast antenna system which contains the antenna matching unit for that tower. Some doghouses are nicer than others.

Details about the station's antenna layout can be found here.

It is surprising to note that thirty years later this radio station has a web site, but on it you will find no mention of a transmitter or an engineer. And their entire web site is in Spanish. It is as if the Mexican border has moved 20 miles to the north.

Western Union clock

When I wasn't at the KRGV transmitter, I spent the rest of the week as a radio announcer, although not a very good one. One of the highlights of the job was the abundance of Western Union clocks, which until 1/1/1971 were reset at the top of the hour by a pulse (from a telephone line) originating from the U.S. Naval Observatory. These clocks were in almost every radio and TV station in the country until the Western Union synchronizing signals stopped, and other clocks began to take their places. Now the Western Union clocks are relatively rare antiques worth hundreds of dollars apiece.* If you own one, you might want to read Synchronizing Your Self Winding Western Union Clocks.

RCA TR-4 videotape machine

While at KRGV, I spent much of my spare time hanging around the TV control room, and made my first videotape edit at KRGV-TV in 1971 on one of these great old RCA tape machines. This model was about the size of a refrigerator. Back then it was an accomplishment to make a good videotape recording because the tape was on reels, not in cartridges, and the primitive recording format (analog!) made it necessary to make several adjustments to the machine every time another tape was loaded, because every tape and every machine was different. The heads clogged frequently and were usually scrubbed clean (gently!) with xylene and Texwipes. A one-hour tape, as pictured here, weighed about 15 pounds. A room full of these machines was a really noisy and hectic place, and the videotape room in a TV station was usually kept very cold and dry, and the smell of xylene and freon (head cleaners) was always present.

If you like old videotape machines, check out this page.

(TR-4 Photo Courtesy of Marc Roost, discovered at Quadruplex Park)

Updated 5/20/2006:
It was on this very machine that I made my first videotape edit.

In 1984 I went back and took a picture of it. By then, it had been teamed up with a TCR-100 cart machine, which is just visible on the right.

Back then, some commercials ran on film, some were thrown together on the air from a handful of slides and an audio cart, and the rest ran on videotape. For every commercial that ran, the videotape juggler would spend a couple of minutes finding the tape, checking the log, loading the tape, making adjustments to the machine for optimum picture quality, finding the right cut on the tape (since there might be three or four similar spots on a reel), and then parking the tape seven seconds ahead of first video. Some stations used six second preroll. With three or four commercials in each break, you'd have to load three or four machines this way. Anyway, you'd go to all that effort and the tape would only be on the air for 30 seconds — maybe less — and then the process would repeat. Years later, this task was made easier when videotape was put into cartridges and a machine loaded them. Today at many stations there is no tape — commercials play from a RAID drive, and all that loading and checking is handled by computers.

That's the end of the historical section.

Please bear with me as I continue to shamelessly toot my own horn.

Second Class Radiotelegraph License

Today I have a Second Class Radiotelegraph Operator Certificate.

(Which I recently renewed, and it doesn't look like this any more. See below.)

a General Radiotelephone Operator License, which has no expiration date,

and an Extra Class Amateur Radio Operator License
(Since August 4, 1978).
NCSL Membership

I'm proud to say that Andy's Bureau of Standards was, at one time, a member of the National Conference of Standards Laboratories.
SMPTE Membership

I'm a former member of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, and I can rejoin at any time just by paying the dues, which are now $135 a year.
SBE Membership card

I am a member of the Society of Broadcast Engineers, which is only $63 per year, and well worth it. SBE meetings are usually very informative, sometimes even educational. And in my case, the monthly SBE meetings are almost all the social interaction I ever have.

And I'm Certified by the SBE as a Senior Television Engineer and 8-VSB Specialist.

SBE certification lasts five years and then has to be renewed. You can either collect points toward renewal or take the exam again. I just got mine renewed 10/11/2007. Obviously I had to collect points, because I could never pass that test again. Except for the record-keeping, renewal is not terribly difficult -- you get 1/2 point for attending an SBE meeting, one point per year for SBE membership, one point per year for holding down a job, and so on.

Incidentally, it took about eight weeks to get my certification renewed. I was beginning to wonder if there was -- ahem -- some sort of problem, but then it arrived in the mail.

SBE Certification

And I'm also a Certified Broadcast Networking Technologist.
SBE Specialist

As of June 23, 2005, I have a GMDSS Operator/Maintainer License, which looks just like the new style of Radiotelegraph Operator license, except that the GMDSS license does not have a passport photo attached. And the two of them look a lot like ham radio licenses. I don't have any plans to use either of these licenses for anything other than bulking up my resumé and decorating my living room, unless I make an abrupt career change.

Unfortunately my experience, certifications and other credentials don't make any difference to my current employer. I make exactly the same money as forty other people in my department, including the guy whose previous employer was Dunkin Donuts. I should write a book.

Each of the FCC commercial operator licenses comes with an optional Ship Radar Endorsement (sold separately).
Ship Radar Endorsement

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