The Godzilla of home raddios
 

That's a bit more than I knew about the WLW console. IIRC examples survive.

I wonder if there was any way to take advantage of that HiFi amp system.... I'm surprised there's no phonograph/record cutter in it... Especially given how enormous it is...They could have practically had a live-in Radio repair man come with each set.

Some discussion of “double wide” high fi AM stations in the 30s here:

https://www.antiqueradios.com/forums...hp?f=1&t=45066

Indeed, that is a very impressive radio. :thmbsp:

jr

Rarer than the Zenith Stratosphere and was designed "money is no object". Try listening to that with the old WLW 500K "flamethrower. The stuff that dreams are made of!

Merci Beaucoup http://www.videokarma.org/images/icons/icon7.gif

Talk about overkill. This word describes Crosley's WLW-AM in Cincinnati, Ohio to a T. WLW had a 500,000-watt (!) transmitter in the 1930s which caused no end of trouble for people living anywhere near it. The signal was so powerful the signal actually caused incandescent light bulbs to glow, even if these bulbs were not installed in light fixtures (floor lamps, etc.). I don't know if the original WLW was full-time or daytime only, but if the latter, a good number of the light bulbs which glowed during daylight hours were extinguished, only to come back on when WLW would sign on the next morning.

Other problems WLW's flamethrower signal likely caused were the signal being received on such unlikely devices as burner coils on electric stoves, tooth fillings, bedsprings, and so on. When the FCC capped the maximum power of AM radio stations at 50kW, the problem was not nearly as severe as it had been, but folks living very close to the station's transmitter tower(s) would still have problems with severe RF overload and unintended reception of the signals on devices other than radios. I can only hope WLW's current array of antennas (if the station uses more than one) are located "out in the boondocks", that is, in an area some distance (read 50+ miles) from metropolitan Cincinnati, where the chances of RF overload are very slim.

Man, but for such a powrefoul station you needed at least around 1 M.W. of power suplly. From where did they get such a lot of electricity?

1 MW is not so much compared to a typical power plant output. 1 MW is about 800 toasters or a few hundred homes. A typical power plant output would be several hundred MW.

I wouldn't be one bit surprised if anyone working for Crosley in the 1930s would ever forget the problems WLW's 500-kw signal caused, not only in the Cincinnati area, but in other parts of the United States as well. Five hundred thousand watts is a tremendous amount of signal which can create no end of trouble, especially for people living anywhere near such powerful transmitter and broadcast towers.

Crosley should have moved WLW-AM's broadcast towers to an area some distance from greater Cincinnati so that the area would not be bombarded by the signals. These high-powered signals were wreaking havoc in areas besides Cincinnati, not to mention causing real problems for people living near the towers. WLW-AM probably received complaints by the dozens (!) from folks who were receiving the station's 500-kW signal on such unlikely devices as burner coils on electric stoves, tooth fillings, bedsprings, and so on; as well, the company which now owns WLW-AM probably still gets complaints left and right from folks who are reporting hearing the station's now-50kW signal on the same devices the 500kW signal was being heard on.

This is not unusual for residents of an area very close to one or more AM or FM stations. In the early 1970s, I lived in a Cleveland suburb which had a local FM station, 27,500 watts ERP, on 92.3 MHz. I had a bedroom on the third floor of the house in which I was living at the time (long story and OT), from which I could see the station's single broadcast tower. Boy, did that signal cause me problems! I was hearing it on channel 6 of an old color TV I had at the time, the station was coming in between local stations on an AM-FM stereo radio I owned, and the list goes on.

I left that area in 1975 after graduating high school (the entire story is OT for this thread), and returned to my home town, twenty miles or so from the FM station which had been giving me grief (boy, did it ever!). I have since moved to another area which has no such interference problems, for which I am eternally grateful. There is a small AM radio station about five miles from here but, thankfully, its signals do not cause me any trouble whatsoever.

I have never forgotten all the problems that station (then WLYT-FM, 92.3 MHz) had caused me during my short time in the suburb (Cleveland Heights, Ohio) in which it was located; however, I did read in the local newspaper not long ago that the station had since moved its transmitter and tower from its former location to another town about 20-25 miles from its original transmitter site.

I know very little about the station's new location and, frankly, I don't care. As I said, I now live in a village about 30 miles from Cleveland and 40 miles or so from the area's radio and television stations' towers, so I have been trying my darnedest to forget all the problems that 27,500-watt FM station in Cleveland Heights had caused me in the early 1970s, to say nothing of forgetting about other problems, not related to radio, I had while living in that city.

Thanks for posting. It looks incredible. Those speakers would cost an absolute fortune today. I wonder what the audio output tubes are. Also, it's something else how modest the models were 90 years ago! We could learn something from that today.

It looks like they used those 6N6's that Crosley and Midwest was famous for.

Interesting vid about syncing up a little bitty plant to the Grid:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGQxSJmadm0

At that power level a 5Y3 and longwire feeding a 16 ohm speaker should be plenty, a crystal won't be enough. I will say that is one beautiful radio, imagine listening to DX with the volume up and a good lightning crash makes its way thru... might have to check their shorts!

Half a megawatt is going to get into everything within a 100+ mile radius. I had problems with the 50 KW WCCO AM830 getting into the school bus garage base stations a few miles away, the peaks would make the 20 ma needed to key the base on a 600 ohm phone dry pair and audio would swamp the dispatcher mic circuit.

Neat, I'd never heard of it before

Who all 'members XERF and Wolfman Jack in particular? Ah, them wuz the days.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuasKDRNb8c