(excerpted from a variety of chapters...)
THE FORTIES
The Saturday Evening Post of September 23, 1944, carried an article about WLW. Some of the technical details about the transmitters at Bethany, Ohio, were: "The tubes used in the transmitter were a foot and a half high, giants especially built for the first time by Federal Telephone and Radio Corporation. Instead of a scrap of aerial tucked in a box or hung on a roof, Bethany has rhombics anchored 165 feet in the air. Each pole at the four corners of each of these antenna diamonds is made of two telephone poles joined by a collar at the butts and pushed upright by a hundred-foot crane that was pulled down on its face three times before all the poles were up and guyed. Traveling about through the stations are some sixty miles of copper wire....
"The antenna and the transmitting station lie behind a rural mailbox which is simply inscribed BETHANY TRANSMITTERS. From the mailbox a short road leads past a barn to a fresh white building and from the building copper pipes and wires lead out across the fields to twenty-four rhombics. All of this covers about a square mile, and if it looks anything at all from the air above, it must resemble a great spider with a building for a body and wire legs ending in diamond boxing gloves. From the ground, however, the most powerful shortwave station in the world looks like nothing but a huge complication of tall orange-and-white poles, lateral wires and guy cables... Some of the nearby farmers have decided that whatever the station may be, it is an abominable desecration of a square mile of good corn land."
The gadgetry--all of it--belonged to the Office of War Information. The buildings from which the gadgetry sprouted belonged to the Defense Plant Corporation. But its operation was in the hands of WLW engineers, being the special baby of chief engineer R. J. Rockwell who took an uncomplicated approach to broadcasting. He feels that to have the "loudest voice in the world" is a mere matter of the right tubes, the right power, and the right soldering of this gidget to that gidget. Small wonder he acquired the name Tinkertoy, because, at any given moment on all given problem, he could come up with something to solve the problem, be it the world's most powerful shortwave transmitter abuilding or changing a fuse in the fusebox at home.
As noted in the article, when this marvelous engineer found himself without a resistance unit needed to test the transmitter's output, he didn't run to the catalog and order a unit that would cost the station several hundred bucks. He went to the nearest hardware store, bought one hunderd bayjroom heater elements, forty-nine cents each, and connected them in a series on a board. Thus, through the bathroom heaters flowed the power that would normally broadcast radio programming to a half dozen states. Another of his gadgets: a push-button method of switching frequencies via a miniature copper railroad track enabling the transmitter to jump--instantly--from one frequency to another.
The Post article went on to say, "There is tremendous dissipation of power in the transmission of shortwave signals. For one thing, only about a third of the electric power put into the job of vibrating the electronic equivalent of a tuning fork and imposing upon the resultant frequency the human voice ever issues from the wires of the sending aerial. then, in shortwave beamed at North Africa, for example, the signal travels in a series of bounces from the ionsphere to the earth and back again and finally showers the target area. To reach the targets and to activate the tubes of the radio sets of distant listeners overseas, Bethany's big transmitters will send a hundred quadrillion times as much power as a single receiving set aboroad needs to wake it up. That, in turn, means a heavy bundle of energy as it leaves the transmitting antenna. This power cannot be seen or felt or smelled, but sometimes it makes itself evident in curious ways..."
Before the war, when WLW was tinkering with 500,000 watts in the standard broadcast band, the engineers had to work out a system of grounding because the power played strange ghostlike tricks on the nearby communities. The tricks included never letting people turn off their houselights and barns that had tin roofs found they had become radio receivers. The higher shortwave powered transmitters caused even more of the same problems.
In January 1959, an improved transmitter went into operation at WLW. The rebuilding of the WLW transmission facilities cost about $300,000 (this was when most were moaning that radio itself was dead) and was under the direction of R. J. Rockwell, vice president of engineering. With the new facilities, including the Rockwell Cathanode Transmitter, and the new automatic gain control equipment, WLW began broadcasting with a frequency range from below twenty cycles per second to above 20,000 cycles per second with distortion of less than one percent. A microwave relay system was installed to send the WLW signal from the downtown studios to the transmitter at Mason, Ohio. That system operated with the call sign KQK59. With these engineering changes the station management began calling WLW "The Nation's Highest Fidelity Station." The WLW transmission was tested by the McIntosh Laboratory, Bighamton, New York. According to the report by Frank McIntosh, poresident, the WLW signal ranged from seventeen to 21,500 cycles per second--more than ten octaves--with a distortion of 0.3 per cent. Mr. McIntosh stated that: "it should be recognized that while FM is capable of this same order of fidelity, many stations have not achieved it because of limitations in microphones, preamplifiers, circuits, and program sources."
Mr. Rockwell, in Broadcasting magazine said, "There seems to be a prevaling misconception that AM stations are limited in their permissable bandwidth. (If an AM station used a band only ten kilocycles wide it would transmit sounds only as high as five thousand cycles because of the nature of the amplitude modulation transmition.) Actually, this is not true. The basic allocations system for the AM band was originally set up by the FCC to provide adjacent channel separation of 40 kc in the same area and sufficient geographical separation on the 10, 20, and 30 kc channels to minimize interference. As a result high fidelity transmission can be accomplished in the AM band."
If, that is, you've got a chief engineer who is a genius; and if, that is, the station is willing to back his dreams with the bucks that make such dreams come true. What can be done in broadcasting is not always what will be done in broadcasting. In every field of endeavor there is usually a standard by which all others in that field are judged. In broadcasting, most outsiders say, WLW is the standard.