[BC] Usefulness of EAS

[Robert Meuser]

I do not read Wikipedia, it might have too many of your contributions. I 
worked for a participating Conelrad station and, yes, we had the ability 
to switch to 640 as did many other stations.It never required autotune, 
it just required switched taps which is a lot like a HAM radio transmitter.

If you take your version, there were almost no stations on 640 since it 
was a Cuban clear channel and 1240 is a local channel. The concept would 
not work without augmentation.

On 6/14/12 7:58 PM, RichardBJohnson at comcast.net wrote:
> Do not believe Wikipedia. No station -- none, ever switched to 640 or 1240 kc/s for CONELRAD. In the days of kilocycles, there were no instant-tune transmitters. To bring up a transmitter such as a Western Electric 304-A on a new frequency required a group of engineers from Western Electric. The transmitter used custom-wound coils for each frequency and the output amplifier required precise 90-degree networks both at the input and the output to get the peak and carrier stages to operate properly. I know, I maintained one at WDEW. Even the Raytheon RA1000-A required multiple changes to switch frequency. I know, I maintained one at WARE.
>
> Earl Hewingson, the chief engineer of WTYM, who built its 5 kW transmitter from scratch, started in radio in the '20s. He told me how CONELRAD worked. The round-robin transmitter switching was to confuse bombers that used ADF. The idea was to keep everyone off the air except for a few 640 and 1240 kc/s transmitters. This included most of the 640 and 1240 kc/s transmitters, which were warmed up and ready to run.
>