More Part 15 History - The United Milliwatt Network on FM

This recollection is a loose continuation
of "The BVR Effect," that I posted recently.

My best friend who lived near me 40 years ago,
and still lives near me mow (except we are

This recollection is a loose continuation
of "The BVR Effect," that I posted recently.

My best friend who lived near me 40 years ago,
and still lives near me mow (except we are
in different houses in a different part of town)
recalled the UMN - The United Milliwatt Network.

We had all given up the idea of getting on the
AM band. Which was a shame. We just didn't
know enough to figure out how to do it. Besides,
the Lafayette 990177 phono oscillator and the
Lafayette KT-195 were giving us lots of problems.
One thing I do regret - the Lafayette KT-195 was
priced at something like $17.95. I should have
saved up another 6 dollars and gotten the LA-23
built version for $23.95. (?) Heck, I'm sure
you hams out there remember the Ameco AC-1 tube
ham transmitter. It didn't cost much more than
the LA-23.

I know some of you remember me trying to transmit
stereo on two different AM frequencies with my
KT-195 and 990177. As you may remember, my prized
Sony TC-350 tape deck was providing stereo audio
to the 2 different transmitters. When I plugged in
the second transmitter, I got a BRIGHT FLASH of
light, i.e., lots of voltage difference - REAL bad
news! A big pop and the Sony TC-350 got fried.

Fortunately, my Dad was a good guy (he still is) and
he got the TC-350 repaired. That tape deck was
originally bought for recording talking books because
of my two detached retinas when I was 12 years old.

Seeing out of only one eye since birth, and having the good
eye go blind in 1967 - having a 5 1/2 hour surgery -
100 miles away from home in Boston - coming home for
six weeks and having the retina detach again - going
completely blind a second time - laying in one position
for weeks - well, uh, I didn't mean to get so long
winded. But you get the idea. They got the Sony TC-350
deck because they thought I would never get my vision
back at all, and it WAS very touch and go.

I didn't mean to get into the eye thing - but the great
part is - I never would have gotten the Sony TC-350
if the detached retinas hadn't happened. My family didn't
have a lot of money. The TC-350 was purchased by
my grandparents. They had a little more money
hanging around.

The TC-350 is sitting in the next room. In the DOG
RADIO studio. It doesn't work either, but I still
love it.

Anyway, back to the United Milliwatt Network.

So after giving up on AM transmission, a bunch
of us were trying to figure out what to do.
I kept seeing various Tandy P-Box kits
in Radio Shack. These were kits that had
sort of a perf board box and you put the
components into them and did the soldering.

It was 1969 now, a full two years after my
blindness, and a year after the Lafayette AM
transmitting attempts fiasco.

We were desperately trying to figure out how
to get back on the air. I had already built
two P-box kits, sort of. One was a 120 VAC
to 12 volt power supply. (Exposed AC - no fuse -
yikes!) Then I attempted something called an
OTL amplifier kit. OTL stood for Output Transformerless.
I broke the lead off a transistor and never was
able to save that project. However, my family
and the neighbors were impressed by the fact
that i could spend ten hours trying to construct
something. My attention span was not great, and
of course there was the eye issue. The left good
eye had finally healed, but it had 20/70 vision at
best with glasses, with 2/3 field.

In trips to Radio Shack, I kept on seeing the P-Box
FM transmitter kit for $7.95. I kept saying to myself -
this will never work, I can't build it - so I'm not
going to save up for it.

I probably waited a half a year. And then I got one -
built it out in the garage on a Saturday - got it on
the air, and everybody was stunned at the strength
of the signal. My best friend went out, bought one
and he built his the very same day. We were blown
away!

It was an audio preamp running into a free running
oscillator. You tuned the thing by squeezing or
expanding a coil. Wow. How hard to get on a channel.
But everything was analog in those days, so it didn't
matter.

So it was me, WBVR FM, my friend on the other side of
the lake, (I can't remember his callsign) a kid on
the other side of town who ran something called
WQRM (great call), who had built his mixer board
on some kind of street sign that he painted silver -
a beautiful job - WRDS, a station in another part
of town - something called WPEP, and a couple others.
All of these little stations were running the Tandy P-box
28-109 FM transmitter kit.

That's when my best friend came out with the idea of the
United Milliwatt Network. We thought somehow we could
link all of the stations. As far as WE KNEW, the
operation was legal. It was our feeling that 100
milliwatts was the law, and we didn't exceed it.
I don't know what the rules really were then, but
lots of companies were coming out with FM wireless
mikes that went really far, so I guess we really were
OK. The FCC rule change that happened later, Part 15.239 -
wasn't a problem at that point.

There were many names discussed for the network. UMN
was what the name came to be. But we had made up
lots of other names. One I recall - NERN - stood for
the National Educational Radio Network. Gee, I really
like that one. I guess it was because we were all in
high school. Somewhere along the line, a girl got
a crush on my best friend (she lived on his street)
and started a station called WBB. WHAT KIND OF CALL
WAS THAT??? I don't know if she ever really got on the
air. But the excuse of having my friend come over to
her house - all the time - was good enough for her.
I think she just kept making up tech problems so she
could see him all the time. She was a very nice girl,
but my friend wasn't interested in her. He had eyes
om other girls. But still radio overrode all of that, and
his station was running well now.

The United Milliwatt Network, although a great idea
was really impractical at the time. We didn't have good
FM receivers to pick up signals from the other stations.

(One parent was befuddled by the attempts to make it work.
He said, "I don't know how this could possibly be legal."
We sure thought it WAS, though.)

My friend was trying to get kids from the high school to
put unattended FM repeaters in their houses. I think
there was talk of compensation from our group to the
kids. But we were not made of money, so that never
happened either. And of course, good FM tuners were
very very hard to come by. I remember drooling over
a friend's father's Heathkit AR-15 FM receiver. That's
what we needed and there was no way. (I actually have
an AR-15 in the cellar somewhere. It has problems, but
the FM section is still pretty good.)

Good FM tuners were to came into our life at least five
years later. (1974 -1975.) In 1970, I tried to relay my friend's
station on WBVR, but the receiver was just a crummy portable.
I was mostly relaying just noise. It just didn't work.

So, 42 years ago, a Part 15 cluster that didn't get off the
ground. No United Milliwatt Network. But it was fun
trying. Around 1972 or so, the FCC slammed down the
field strength regulation on FM - Part 15.239. But we
didn't even know about it, and kept transmitting on
FM. Nobody bothered us. Almost everybody involved
went into engineering careers later. And so it goes.

If any body knows about the history of the FCC rule
change for FM around 1972 or 73, I would love to know
about it. That has been a mystery to me.

One more thing, my present Part 15 station has had
a lot of names since I started it about 8 years ago.
One of the names was BVR-TWO, in honor of WBVR.

OOOOps, Gotta Go!
Bruce, DOGGRADIO STUDIO 2