[BC] Re: Hello

[Johnson, Richard]

On Tue, 20 Mar 2007, Tom Bosscher wrote:

> 	It was bought through Audio Distributors, of Grand Rapids
> past, and it ended up going back to the factory. A gazillion
> engineers tried their hand with it, and even the factory
> could not make it work.
>
> 	Funny, my question on how many were still on the air after
> 18 months never got answered.
>
> 	tom

Not "funny." Paul Gregg (http://www.bauertx.com) recalls that about 26 
were built. A survey about 8 years ago showed that 15 were still in 
operation. That is over 50 percent still working after almost 30 years, 
not too bad.

I'm not sure that any-body's solid-state transmitters, designed at
that time, did any better. The major problems were the semiconductors.
If the exact same schematic was reworked today with devices available
today, you'd probably have the cat's meow of a transmitter. If the
engineers we had in those days stayed in the Broadcast Transmitter
industry, advancing the state-of-the-art as they were in the 70's
when that transmitter was designed, we'd probably have all radio and 
television transmitted from some single quartz tower  somewhere
(apologies to Ray Dowell who invented that concept). The problem
is that radio and television gave way to more modern and interesting 
technology. Any youngster, when asked by his high-school guidance
counselor what he wanted to do for a living, responding with, "I
want to design radio transmitters," would probably be sent to a
clinic for observation! No semiconductor manufacturer even wants
to make transistors anymore. They want to make whole systems-on-a-chip.

>
> Douglas B. Pritchett wrote:
>> Where did that one (WKLA) end up Tomo? At the bottom of Lake Michigan??
>>
>

Cheers,

Richard B. Johnson
Project Engineer
Analogic Corporation


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