[BC] The Worst transmitter of All Time

[Scott Bailey]

This makes me think, most of these old rigs that had quirks like that were at AM Daytimers.  About 10 years ago, I had been doing work for a Daytimer that had 2 shacks (small metal storage buildings), in one shack was a Gates BC-1F, and in the other was a Collins 300G and a quarter stripped Gates BC-1G.  The owner was too cheep to have A/C buildings, so he paid the price. He had on 1 small fan for heat exhaust in the back of each storage building.  Those little buildings got up to 145 degrees in the summer. We blew 833's all the time.
This man was so cheap he wouldn't buy a decent remote control. He had a old (I'm thinking it was a Mosley Remote Control) that he refused to get repaired.  In the morning, you had to go to the tx site, turn the 1G on, and if it would work, then let it sit there with a dead carrier until you got back to the studio and sign on.  By midday, with all the heat, the 1G would crap out, and you had to run back to the tx site and turn on the 1F.  It would only do 500 watts because he was too cheap to buy the caps I needed to get it back up to a full 1 KW.  For a last resort, I would go to great lengths to get the Collins 300G to work, and I could only get 125 watts out of it with 85% modulation.
Now bear in mind this man and his wife were worth at least 5 million!

It was a blessing when he finally sold the station to retire!


>I had the 500W version of this (BC-500) on my first gig as an engineer as 
>well. One 833 in the final instead of two, otherwise the same box. Not a 
>bad unit reliability-wise, although when it got cold outside you sometimes 
>had to go out and thwack it on the side to get it going in the morning (this 
>was also on a daytimer, and the shack was unheated at the time).

>You're right about the audio quality, though. The foghorn of Elizabeth...

>Cheers!


Scott Bailey
General Manager/Owner/Operator
Classic Broadcasting of Sumner County, Inc.
WMRO-AM, Magic 1560
Gallatin, TN
615.451.2131
615.977.1408 (Cell #)