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I had a similar experience working Master Control in a local UHF independent (channel 61). The place was held together with chewing gum and bailing wire. Their specialty was putting rural local preachers on TV charging $50 for a half hour. Otherwise mostly religious paid programming came in from other stations or old public domain cartoons and Modern Television filler films were aired. They had nothing but used equipment when I went to work there in 1980. There were two 1957 RCA quad machines that had been rigged to play color tapes. One day a tape made it to air that had been sent in from a Birmingham, AL station. Nothing was every screened before it was aired and this particular tape had been spliced with duct tape- you can’t make this stuff up. That hour long shout fest came to a grinding halt about 40 minutes in and destroyed the heads. It was a while before it was fixed. Back to back quad programs were separated by long station ID’s while the next program was loaded and set up. Our logs were not timed.
The film chain was either the first or second color model RCA built and was still being used on air for ID slides until about 1982 until the camera head went down for the last time. The illustrious chief engineer never got his hands any dirtier than it took to sign his pay check but there were two assistant engineers that saw the film chain as a challenge and kept it running mainly to dub 16 MM film to ¾ U-Matic for airing. The station purchased several hundred new (new to us that is) training tapes from Ford Motors and we used them for everything. There were 8 or 9 2860’s in constant use with typically one or two broken down at any given time. In Master Control there were 4 of them run through a router & then through a TBC for juggling commercial tapes. If I was lucky and the two machines in production were working I had another 2860 for program tapes that ran through a separate TBC and could almost look like a real television station with fade capabilities. Usually production had a bad machine and used the program machine so switching 7-8 tapes in a commercial break with three machines was a pain.
After spending two years at the station it was sold but I remained with them until 1987. I left in the early days of the FOX network formation of which 61 became an affiliate. By then the “fun” was gone and the “seat of your pants” operation challenges were over but no one who had weathered the sale could really tell much difference. Only the programming changed along with some newer equipment. It consisted of standard fair for independents of the time. There were sit-coms like I Love Lucy to good quality Hollywood classic feature films. I had the 4-midnight shift where most of the money was made for a typical day so the programming was decent but if I never see Star Trek again it will be too soon.
Although not broadcast quality I collect the old half inch reel to reel helical scan machines that Sony, Panasonic, Shibaden and others put out. My Sony AV 8650 color machine is pictured below. It’s near mint condition and works beautifully. I believe it was the best you could buy in the EIAJ format with full editing capability. I currently have about 16 different models and brands that are mostly restored including a GE branded Sony skip field recorder that works quite well considering it only records one of the two vertical fields. I recently finished a Panasonic NV-8100 B&W machine that runs at 12 IPS. It was an odd format that Panasonic abandoned quickly in favor of the EIAJ standard but Concord (who bought them from Panasonic and re-branded them with their name) continued selling these odd speed machines for several more years. I have several models of the Concord brand including one capable of remote control. I’m always looking for machines I don’t have or others for spare parts.
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