New "Toy"...
 

Got in that Model 3000-1 Trans-Oceanic I'd ordered from the guy I got my 621 T/S, Bill Kalcik in Wisconsin, back a few months ago. I HAVE another 3K-1, but this one is far better cosmetically & operationally. I'm THINKIN' its an older set, FM was still a big enuff "Deal" that they had a nationwide log of FM stations in the owners' manual, & there was a postcard from a Chicago FM station that advertised "Beautiful Music", along w/a list of all the OTHER FM stations in Chicagoland. I wanna put in a plug for Bill-Both items I've gotten from him were BETTER condition, I thought, than he'd advertised, the packing was superb, & while I paid a little more than what maybe some would have, big deal, I'm happy. He told me that he has like 2 warehouses full of "Goodies" he's wanting to get rid of. I think I'll be back as a customer..

Well put up a dam picture..................

(Sigh...) Wish I could.. Too dam Stoopid..

Here you go.
http://i913.photobucket.com/albums/a...h/DSC_1836.jpg

And while I'm at it here is another dam picture... Hoover to be precise.
http://i393.photobucket.com/albums/p...C/DSCI1509.jpg

Enjoy.:D

The Hoover is a VERY impressive dam... Several TVA dams we have 'round here are somewhat impressive, too. NOTHIN' like THAT, though. Dated a gal back in '89 who lived in Turtletown, Tennessee, down in the FAR southeast corner of the state. LOTS of dams there, they were all built in the Thirties w/shovels. pickaxes, sweat & Dead Reckoming..

Which station was listed as the "beautiful music" station? We used to have a station in Chicago that played what most people would call elevator music. They were also the only station in Chicago that implemented Dolby FM noise reduction, and broadcast a calibration tone briefly every evening. They also had auxiliary programming on a (monaural) subcarrier with topics for doctors, sponsored by pharmaceutical companies.

It says "WCLR 102 FM", & has a line drawing of "Big John" on it, so I assume they broadcast from the John Hancock Tower.

EM; that's a dam nice Dam picture......


WPAT 93.1 in Paterson, NJ "Beautiful Music 24hrs a day" My parents listened to it all the time, until it became a
Spanish station... When I was a kid I didn't know other music existed until I got my own radio....... Good
thing that happened real early....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WPAT-FM

.

That's the one.

They put their phone # on there-312-677-5900, & their motto-"The ULTIMATE Blend-In Beautiful Music !", along w/a sampling of what they'd play-"April in Portugal"-by Enoch Light,"Close To You"- Ronnie Aldrich, "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head-Hugo Winterhalter.. "Beautiful Music" stations NEVER apparently played the originals, just "Emasculated" cover versions.

Any town of size here, about 35 miles apart had one FM station, usually with call letters identical to the original AM station.

My formative years learning electronics and general workshop practices under the tutelage of my or my friends' 40-something Dads were all set to those "nice" and "easy" FM soundtracks. It was actually strange to hear the original song with vocals later. I especially remember what they did with the Beatles' tunes.

Imagine noise of a welder, grinder, drillpress, planer, saw, hammering, banging, cursing etc drowning out all other sound which stops suddenly, punctuated by instrumentals "raindrops keep falling on my head" or "El Paso" instead of silence.
The aroma of cigar and/or pipe smoke accompanied these sessions as usual.

Just like the Blues Brothers getting into the elevator after the huge chase scene into Chicago, sappy instrumental music playing....:D

When we finally got wise and connected a good tuner to a big antenna on the roof, it was all classic rock and blues from then on, meanwhile the easy listening music faded away in the early 80's in favor of "light adult contemporary" format.
Now, I actually miss elevator music......where did I put that LP of the Longines Symphonette:sigh:

In New York City in the 60's we had about 3 or more "beautiful music" stations on FM, WPAT, WRFM, WTFM, and I think WVNJ. They probably had different flavors of this music, but it sounded the same to a kid wanting rock and roll. There's lots of elevators in NYC :D

I think it was WEVD that had an SCA subcarrier "Physicians Radio Network" that IIRC had spots similar to those drug commercials we see on TV nowadays. "See your copy of "Physicians Radio Network Journal" for the disclaimers and side effects that include death".

WNCN, today a classic rock station, was a classical music station that also broadcast a brief calibration tone.


You can find those covers on youtube...

Thanks, but they are not my dam pictures. I just grabbed them off the interwebs for comedic effect...:smoke:

Quite a few of the TVA dams I've seen leak. None leak BADLY, but about all have "Weeping" places where the water seeps out. You'd THINK they'd wanna fix that, but they don't. As most of them are approaching 70 years & older, the leaks are certainly unsightly.. The "Quick" construction they did back then made for some minor mistakes. We went to Fontana Dam, right over the border in North Carolina, it was sort of their "Showpiece" dam. The "Power House" was particularly impressive-Huge, Thirties-era machinery, kept in IMMACULATE shape. You could EAT off any of it, but they'd likely YELL at you for doing that. In '89, when I saw it, they were just putting on modern programmable logic controllers, which seemed rinky-dink & out of place in that 1939-style facility..I can't remember how many they had, but the "Generator Room", there were 5 or 6 HUGE generators lined up in a row.. There was ANOTHER dam, deep in the woods that had a HUGE culvert that a semi & trailer coulda fit in, the culvert went for something like 12 miles to ANOTHER dam. They started work on 'em on either end, & met up in the middle. Now, this was in a VERY remote area, thru mountains, rivers, valleys, that was STILL quite remote even in '89. They built this thing w/virtually NO modern equipment, & when they met, the 2 teams were only like 10-12" off...

Omigawd, am I the WORST Dam "Thread-Crapper" or what ?!? (grin)

Lol!

It's quite impressive that with non-electronic survey equipment they could dig those trenches to meet up that accurately.

Back on topic those SS transoceanics were some real impressive sets. I've been watching for one for some time now, usually they are too expensive for my taste.
One that I would buy out of pity is being used for background music all day every day in an Anit-q shop in Superior Wi. I've asked them what they'd take for it and gotten the NFS reply...

I forget which model, but IIRC one of the later SS transoceanics had an FM stereo decoder built in that would only work if you listened through stereo headphones...Now that HAD to be luxurious in the late 60's. I wonder if the models that had it proclaimed it somewhere on the front of the cabinet?

I believe the T/Os with the FM multiplex decoder were the Royal 7000 series of the late 1970s, before Zenith discontinued the Transoceanic sets altogether. There was a prototype model, the Royal 8000, that never went into production. It supposedly had a digital frequency readout and may have been equipped for stereo FM as well.

The station in Chicago with beautiful music may have been, and this is just a guess, WMAQ-FM (now WRQX-FM) 101.1. The station was operated by NBC at the time ('60s-1986), before the original NBC radio network was disbanded; it was, like most FMs of the '60s-'70s, entirely automated with elevator music.

Many FM stations carried elevator music when they first went on the air (to justify having a license, they had to put something on the air, even if it meant playing tapes over the transmitter), later switching to some other format. Here in northeastern Ohio, most FM stations in Cleveland carried automated elevator music for years before going to live rock formats. The last FM in this area to change from elevator music to rock was WREO-FM in Ashtabula, Ohio, near Lake Erie; it did so in 1990 or '91.


I don't know if any Cleveland FMs broadcast in Dolby at any time during the '70s. I think the classical station at the time (WCLV-FM, 95.5) was the only station that even experimented with Dolby; if it did, the experiments only lasted a short time.

Down here, it was ALL OVER the map. Elevator music, Kuntry Lovin', Top 40, batshit crazy preachers, you name it. Seemed like we had quite a few College stations, WOUT in Knoxville, the ETSU station, & there even was a Chattanooga station that could be picked up now & then. My Granny had a blonde wood Zenith AM/FM that was PERENNIALLY tuned to Black Mountain, NC, they played classical, & Billy Graham. It was hooked up to a genuine FM antenna, IT was the one I hooked that JVC CX-500 AM/FM/TV/Cassette that one day in April that I got such INCREDIBLE DX from all over the Southeast on... Charlotte, High Point, Asheville, Atlanta, Warner-Robins, Decatur... I can only imagine WHAT it could have done if I'd had my ICOM R-7000 back then...(Sigh...)

In this area...the BEST "beautiful music" station...bar NONE-was WLQA-fm. 98.5. This station played things I STILL have not been able to identify to this day. I have found a LOT of the tunes I loved over 34 years ago, but not nearly all of them. The station has been "warm 98" since late 1980....when it changed with NO warning...to shit rock format...

The LAST ez music station in this area...was WWEZ 92.5 FM. it also changed to rock, in 1990...also with no warning...

Now...I have "music choice" on my cable and several internet instrumental sources. But NOTHING comes close to FM 98...WLQA.

At one time, the electrical service rates, were the lowest in the US, as it didn't depend of fossil fuels, to generate the power.
Canada must have a lot of dams, as they refer to their power bills as "Hydro" bills! :scratch2:

You missed 101 Strings.
WISN, in Milwaukee, had that format for like 15 years.
Now it's all talk and maybe college football on weekends.
These stations are constantly changing formats, according to Arbitron ratings.
We have three stations on FM, that play the head-banger rock.

Yep. TVA went head over heels into Nukie power, spent 3 truckloads of money, & has really little to show for it. I maintain if they'd spent that on developing better, more efficient hydro generators, instead of shoveling it into the Nookie rathole, we'd been a LOT better off.. Maybe they could have developed mini-generators that coulda been stuck w/little cost & disruption on the myriad of streams & creeks around the Appalachians, maybe NONE of 'em could run an Atlanta, Charlotte, Richmond, but they COULD have run several SMALLER cities & towns. TVA bumps up against the top of their generating capacity constantly on hot days, & increasingly, on the Zero days like we had this past winter. No new, LARGE generating plants have been built in nearly 40 years, but DEMAND has skyrocketed.. NOT a good situation.

Ah "Beautiful Music" stations, here in Youngstown that was WKBN-FM "Stereo 99" 98.9 on your FM dial.

Now it is a crappy clear channel mix station....

I am glad I bought a "Talking House" transmitter, i run my Power Mac G5 into it through a DBX 224 type II encoder. I can play whatever i want through the house on 1100 kHz even those new fangled internet radio stations.,

I don't have a dam, but when I was a kid in Texas my uncle DID ... this one.

Its hollow inside and my uncle let us go inside it. I still have a key to
let me in ... after all these decades, they never changed the key!

Back in the early Seventies, TVA jumped in w/BOTH feet on the Nukie "Breeder" reactor business. They decided that they were gonna build one across the river from my family's farm. It was initially a $3 BILLION project. Well, they excavated, they built this, that, & the other over there, it was a truly BIG-TIME project. Then came the late Seventies/early Eighties, the economy slowed down, & they took a long, hard look at the Phipps Bend reactor. Lotsa DARK stories-Some said it was a fundamentally FLAWED design, others said they did some more site preparation, & found that it was gonna sit atop/adjacent to a HUGE natural gas dome.. Others pointed out that they were barely a third of the way done, yet had spent way more than HALF of their budget. Anyhow, the project was cancelled. The workers literally put down their tools & went home. But not everything was so neat & tidy-Both reactor cores were still being built. One, I think, was delivered at great fanfare-And expense. Actually, I think BOTH were eventually delivered-to a dead project.