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

I'm old enough to remember the Wolfman... I'm antiquating

It's a direct coupled dual triode. Cathode follower configuration. The octal base tube was either a glass tube and the metal one was the M/G type. Type 6N6!
The UX base tube was the 6B5, same basic tube!

I remember The Wolfman too.....sorta. Back in the 1970s, IIRC, I listened to a weekly syndicated radio broadcast featuring Wolfman Jack over a Cleveland radio station (WGAR, 1220, now sports-talk WKNR; WGAR-FM is now a country-western station on 99.5 MHz).

Did some reading about it - Really unusual tube. One of the few that the audio crowd hasn't latched on to. The MG tubes look neat, very mid 1930s modern.

The US was just recovering from of the Great Depression!
It's amazing what the various radio manufacturers were coming up with!

It was a good thing WLW was eventually forced by FCC rules to reduce its power output to 50kW from 500kW. That station's "flamethrower" signal probably caused more trouble (illuminating light bulbs not in sockets, not to mention bulbs in unplugged floor and table lamps, etc., being received on bedsprings, electric range burner coils, tooth fillings . . .) than it should have; people who lived anywhere near WLW's towers when the station was running 500kW...well, I would imagine a lot of folks left Cincinnati at that time, since the radio station's incredibly powerful signal may well have come close to irking them, if not driving them nuts.

Today's WLW runs 50kW; the signal doesn't (I don't think) cause the same problems its predecessor did, although, as I said, anyone living very close (within a mile or less) from the station's towers are probably having the same problems, on a much smaller scale, of course, than did folks who lived that close (!) to the original WLW's transmitter towers.

I live catty-corner upstate from Cincinnati, near Cleveland in northeastern Ohio, so I can hear WLW here only at night (when I listen to AM radio, which isn't often these days, given the fact that most if not all AM stations are running talk formats). However (more years ago than I care to remember), I formerly lived very close to a 27.5-kW (ERP) FM radio station that came in on just about everything (in fact, I could see the station's tower lights from the third-floor bedroom window of the house in which I lived at the time, in the early 1970s), so I have at least a very small idea what those folks in Cincy must have been going through when WLW had its 500kW signal.

I'm sure folks in Cincy won't forget the flamethrower 500kW signal of WLW, and I know darn well I will never forget the troubles that nearly 3-kW signal from the local station in suburban Cleveland caused me in the early 1970s. It may have been 27,500 watts effective radiated power, but it might as well have been much higher, given the problems that signal caused me in the three years I lived in the Cleveland suburb the station was in. I don't know or care what format that station has anymore; for all I care, it could have gone off the air for good last night.

Goodness knows I do not miss it. That station has since moved its transmitter and tower 20-some miles away from its former location in Cleveland Heights; I bet many folks who lived near the station's tower breathed a sigh of relief when that happened, saying, no doubt, "Good-bye and good riddance!" Goodness knows that is exactly how I felt when I left Cleveland Heights for the last time in 1975, and not just because of the local radio station (very long story and OT).

I'm curious as to what they were running in those days that could do half a megawatt even if it was a grounded grid. Half a meg out... that must have been one colossal transmitter and a serious plate supply transformer.

Here's a tour with lots of tech details:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbHjcwIoTiY

And some great photographs of the transmitters and tubes here:

http://www.theradiohistorian.org/wlw...wgallery2.html

jr

I'm not sure if anyone is familiar with this or not, but there was a Ken Burns documentary at one point in time that talked about some of the old 500,000 watt stations in the US and in Mexico where the signal was able to be heard on electric fences and what not, I think it was the documentary about the early history of country music in America.

Are you saying there were other 500-kW flamethrowers in this country (and elsewhere in the 1930s) besides WLW? My goodness, I would have thought one such station would have been enough, given the interference WLW's transmitter and towers caused in the Cincinnati area, let alone much of the rest of this country and the world.

BTW, the idea of being able to hear a radio station over, of all things, an electric fence, the burners of an electric stove, etc. seems almost incredible; this would make an excellent story line for a science-fiction book. I personally cannot see, for example, how it would be possible to hear radio signals over electric stoves' burner coils, as these are simply round spiral steel coils, with no visible means to detect an AM radio signal (let alone reproduce the audio from one). How on earth would it have been possible to hear these signals, anyway, without some way to reproduce the sound? I can understand how things such as tooth fillings could detect and reproduce AM radio signals, but good grief, I cannot see how even a 500-kW signal can be heard over a wire stove burner coil or an electric fence; after all, neither of these would have any way whatsoever of reproducing sound, even if they somehow managed to detect the radio signal.

Could be galvanic action, stainless heater coils on the stove interacting with the aluminum or other metals, at half a megawatt anything is possible

There'd have to be some degree of 'diode' action occurring to provide enough rectification of the signal. The 'demodulated' audio would then magnetically vibrate the metal stuff.

(Edit) A good example of fortuitous rectification is seen in a foxhole radio. Several vids on UTube.

Paging through Rider's vol13, Zenith made a 22 tube, 22h698 using two chassis. The output stage uses 6 6A3's and claims 50 watts output! It has the old FM band.
I often wonder how many survived!

Amazing. 500 kW stations, just massive levels of RF. To think what the microwatts per centimeter were with a couple of those on the air, along with all of the other more conventional stations also on air.

A good read is Brodeur's book "The Zapping of America", about the risks of RF and microwave radiation.

Pretty unimaginable what has happened since it was written in the late 70s.

On a more relevant note, Yeah I would love to own one of those monster rigs!

The interesting thing is that in Mexico they still have 500kW stations active to this day, and that's because Mexico's version of our FCC didn't clamp down on the maximum broadcasting power of its radio stations like we did here in the U. S. of A. and so because of that in Mexico they still have the ability to license out new 500 kW stations.

I believe that the FCC still has the ability to license superpower stations, it just has decided not to.

Our local college FM station was at one time 300 kW, but they let that lapse so as to get a taller tower. The new tower is a couple of miles farther away, but the older one calculates to have put a substantially larger signal into the lown of license. Its now only 100 kW. (Signal to noise is now limited by distortion products of the IBOC carriers, not signal level).

Ok, interesting for some reason I thought I had read somewhere (and it may have been on here somewhere) that the FCC was no longer licensing new stations that were more than 50 kW... :scratch2:

Also that aforementioned Ken Burns Documentary I talking about in one of my previous posts in this thread was talking specifically about WSM out of Nashville Tennessee (the station that was home to the Grand Ole Opry for many years and still is AFAIK, that station at one time was also a 500 kW blowtorch and that Ken Burns Documentary mentioned that WSM and it's live broadcasts of the Grand Ole Opry in the 1940s and 1950s was how most of the early Country Music Stars like Johnny Cash and his wife (when she was part of the Carter Family Singers) and others became famous outside of the USA.

Don't confuse AM and FM stations - the limits are different.

The info on WLW indicates it was the only 500 kW AM station ever in the US. I believe WSM was a standard 50 kW "clear channel" station, meaning no interfering stations on the same frequency.

Hmm, interesting. So then the Ken Burns Documentary must of been inaccurate then. :scratch2:

Can you find a clip of Burns' documentary where it actually says 500kW? It would be kind of an an easy mistake to say 500 kW instead of 50 kW.

Yeah, let me see if it's on YouTube or not, I know it was originally aired on PBS many years ago and so I'm not sure if it's something that would be available on YouTube or not for that reason. Most of what I was saying about this documentary was going by from what people told me about it as I had never seen it before (as the documentary aired on PBS way before I was old enough to be able to watch it.)

Unfortunately it seems that that Ken Burns documentary is behind a paywall even on YouTube...:sigh::thumbsdn:

That's an interesting console I'm going to have to keep my eyes open for one. It seems like one of those sleeper deluxe consoles that the Zenith Stratosphere, Magnavox Concert Grand, etc high end console collectors aren't aware of/hunting.

Yeah, I saw that. I didn't think it was on that long ago, but I erased it from my DVR after I watched it. Even if I had it, it would be hard to find the quote in the 7 or 8 hours total!