[BC] Manned transmitter sites

[Dick Pache]

Yes HCJB was still manned by a full time engineer when I was there 3 years
ago. The CE was a ham and lived with his wife and 2 boys on site. he
operated PSK 31 from a shielded cage only a few hundred feet from the big
array. HCJB may have originated The cubical Quad antenna they have an array
of them on 15Mhz pointed to Europe Rich Place W2JLR has made many trips
there recently and may have pictures and updated information.

Dick Pache HR1/K2LCT   dick at ramseymail.com
Tegucigalpa Honduras


-----Original Message-----
From: broadcast-bounces at radiolists.net
[mailto:broadcast-bounces at radiolists.net] On Behalf Of brew at theMode.com
Sent: Tuesday, August 22, 2006 11:07 AM
To: broadcast at radiolists.net
Subject: [BC] Manned transmitter sites


Nat Kayle asks:

> I'm curious if there are any stations today that still have manned
> transmitter sites or is this truly a relic of a bygone era?

And Scott Fybush adds:

> An interesting related question is whether there are any tx sites left
> that still double as engineers' living quarters.

I think if it's a very remote site (as Scott pointed out about Mount
Wilson) or one with high revenue or one that is complicated technically
(or all three) the chances are higher that it is manned.

When I worked for CCA in the seventies I was on a Field Service trip to
the Voice of Galapagos and also Radio Quito.  One of the guys from Radio
Quito and I went to visit HCJB, The Voice of the Andes transmitter site.
(Radio Guys the world over all think alike!).

The studios were in Quito and the transmitters were about 20 or 30 miles
outside of town.  The transmitters were run by Ecuadorians and a couple of
engineers from Elkhardt, Indiana, were the transmitters were built (in the
Crown plant, IIRC).  The engineers from the states lived in houses at the
site, rotating back and forth from Indiana.

They had a bunch of transmitters (most frequency variable, with knife
switches (that is, manual contactors) in the PA cabinets to change
frequency (along with switching crystals, oscillators, etc.).  They had a
matrix of thirty or forty antenna contactors in a room upstairs so they
could connect any transmitter to any of the HF (maybe nine or ten) curtain
arrays.  They followed a schedule of changing frequencies, always having
several different signals on the air, following the MUF, to reach various
parts of the world at the best time.

They also had one MF station with a vertical series fed stick for local
coverage.

And they generated their own power from a Hydro-Electric station at a dam
a few miles away (I think they told me, I didn't see it and am going by
memory) and were about to build another.

Of course it's thirty years later now, but I bet it's a safe bet that they
are still manned!  (especially if the price of labor in Ecuador is still
relatively cheap, as it was when I was there!).

But Nate was probably asking about stations in this country........ Oh,
well.

Note to Barry:  Yes, I've got pictures of the HCJB site, in with my other
CCA pictures.  Someday I'll stumble upon them and scan them alls.....

brew Bruce Schiller at CBS-TV Network NY - Master Control Maintenance and
WA2ZST

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