(Please see the images below)
The first image below ( took this picture using Google Earth since it is 4:00 Am here and too dark to take a photo) is there to give you an idea of the type of buildings WXTZ placed our Decade MS100 transmitters in. This building holds 55 apartment units. That is a lot of people with in range of a legal part 15 FM transmitter. That should be your goal as well.
That building used to be an elementary school called Elizabeth Street School, it may look like a factory but it isn't and never was. That building is located at 120 Elizabeth Street in Norwich, Connecticut. That school closed in the early 1980's and was converted into apartments.
I figured since you all heard so much about my former FM radio station I would share a studio image of it as it was back in March of 2015.
Please see the second image below.
The transmitters used for this station were not located here at the studio.
The audio from the Behringer DSP9024 multi-band processor was feed into a Dell Power Edge SC420 Server (which is out of range in this photo below) and feed on line over a private IP# on the Internet where it was picked up at the various transmitter locations and transmitted on 87.9MHz.
Now you have an idea what WXTZ's studio looked like and what types of buildings we placed our transmitters in to get a larger listening audience.
Buildings of that type, big rectangular structures with many indoor spaces, is the kind of place that would be good for for part 15 stations.
How did the signal penetration do throughout the building from a single telescopic antenna?
Carrier current AM would probably cover that building perfectly.
WXTZ looks exactly like a radio studio, so you definitely know how to do it.
From the top of that building you can see both Groton and New London Connecticut. Which is about 7 miles south of Norwich.
At one time, AT&T wanted to erect a cell tower on top of that building.
A broadcast antenna atop that building's chimney would have a great advantage for AM part 15.
I would never be granted access to the roof, but if the owners ever allowed me to take a photo from up there, you would be impressed with the view.
For those familiar with my area, you can see down the Thames River to where Electric Boat Ship yard is and the US Submarine Base in Groton, CT.
Bruce.
Oh going back to the photo of the former school, the FM signal carried very well throughout the entire building. The view I give you is basically the back and left side of the structure. To the right side of that photo you see one white house visible, besides that house there are five others that were able to get our signal in both automobiles in their driveways and various FM radios in their homes. In the view you see, there is that very large parking lot on the left side of that photo, with the car and motorcycle in it. There is a road further to the left out of view where there is two houses. One guy put up an outdoor FM antenna on his roof to get WXTZ from this building. I'm not trying to brag guys, but WXTZ had a lot of people who loved our station. I want to share a video someone did on youtube receiving WXTZ on his radio, I want you to read the comments below the video.
There was another video up there, but it was removed for some reason.
We had some dedicated listeners.
Bruce.
There was a story of a teen who put an FM transmitter in one of the rooms of a 10 story building. He got out for Miles. The FCC inspector tried to shut him down and it actually went to court and the Boy Won the case and was allowed to continue operation. He was not breaking ANY LAWS!!! Now that I have the whole story I can see how Bruce your station could have gotten out 5 miles it could be possible under the right conditions. Its called moisture. Moisture carries Radio Waves. Science 101 here. Fog carries Radio Waves again its possible maybe not every day, but under the correct conditions FM will carry and I can see now how even a C. Crane would have carried a little bit. Those Decade transmitters are not a cheap toy like a Belkin, Scoche or some little $5 transmitter you buy your child at Wal Mart. So that said yes its possible to legally under the conditions I see in the photo carry a signal maybe a mile or 1/4 mile on legal part 15 Radio. One day I'll try and take a tour of a high place and take a part 15 transmitter and transmit from a high place. I'd do it to prove a point and see what would happens.
MrBruce, very nice studio layout. We'll have to have you do a Mini-Seminar for The ALPB on how to do it. Or perhaps one of our "How To Do It" presentations.
I'm finishing the 2nd floor of my garage and could use some pointers for setting up my studio.
Looking at those youtube videos Gorden4lfe2487 has done with his various radio receivers, it appears the music copyright holders have either muted his videos or removed them entirely, so you better watch that one I posted above while it still exists and still has the audio track intact. I seen another one that was for 87.9MHz but the audio was muted by youtube saying the music it contained was sited for copyright violation. Doesn't matter to me I used youtube downloader and saved those to my computer before those edits were done to show off to people how people found WXTZ simply by band scanning.
Bruce.
I am currently rebuilding the studio. It was totally dismantled and sold off.
It is tough sometimes to publish stuff about your business because people like to use it against you. Sometimes nothing said is better than a lot said.
I originally thought I destroyed all of WXTZ's Facebook page photos, but I found all of them hidden on another hard drive. But I'm not sure if publishing new ones is a good idea because of past issues I had with running an innocent radio station and being too open about it on line. It backfired. Other than that, yes we had a lot of cool people too, but still......
No, we did not operate a pirate station then or intend to in the future, but look where things went? So maybe the less we say the better off we are????????
Bruce.
Its very sad and that is why I don't publish (even though my station is part 15) in the newspaper for that very reason. Some hammy Ham wants to play fox hunt and kill a great station that served a small community with music otherwise not heard elseware. Album Rock is precious and almost lost due to corporate big wigs and trolls who want nothing better than to see it dead forever so they can push the Rap and crap down our adult throats. If you put it up again just do it and don't publish too much outside of the privacy of the ALPB meetings. That is all I have to say. Being an ALPB member will get you information you won't get elsewhere. It shows too you don't have to publish your station as FM scanners will find it. Some folks scan the dial all the time for new stations to pop up or DX. So you can put up a station and in time you'll be heard. You were in a great location to legally get listeners without pushing even 100mW and the fact people put up an outside antenna shows their support for your station. If you have to go carrier currect AM well that would be sad, but folks may hear you. I also like that Tecsun Radio with a DB meter. I wish there was a Stereo version of that Radio. Still may get it to measure my Transmitter as I take a walk down the street.
Man! What a great picture!
Oh, yeah - that reel to reel on
top looks like a SONY TC-350 (?)
I have one but it is worn out big
time because of zillions of hours
of use.
Great!
Brooce, DOGRADIO
Good looking dream studio, looks like it would be fun to spend a lot of time there with the music. When I hear a home station, and I know someone is broadcasting from their basement, attic, I try to imagine what the studio is like, and I think of different moods depending on the operator's attitude or choice of music.
That video on the TECSUN portable, even though they said the signal is weak, it sounds clean and lo distortion, it would be a nice sound to listen to. We had a local station that everyone understood was higher power, they had this mushy sound to their audio all the time, unless they played a quiet song, then it was clear.
I wish I could see your other videos MrBruce, I've been reading the stories about your station and what it was, and I just find this stuff to be interesting on it's own. I had that issue a long time ago too, Youtube copyrighted the music in my videos and those suckers blocked the soundtrack on trademark grounds, it was stupid, just a party video, and I don't know if they had the song right even. They wrote and said I could go to court over it, but forget that for a video. Through out copyright man, if anything it promoted the artist, I see it on videos all the time when someone asks what a song is.
Not to do an Atrain rant, but you have a great setup going there, keep building!
MICRO1700 Said:
Oh, yeah - that reel to reel on
top looks like a SONY TC-350 (?)
MICRO1700 you are correct that is a Sony TC-350 in perfect working order.
I have a lot of hardware that I make every effort to repair and maintain.
I recently purchased a used Onkyo TA-630DM cassette deck from Goodwill. They had it marked at $20.00 USD. I went on Memorial Day when everything was half price. I found an AC power outlet and plugged it in. It powered up and looked great! I obtained a cassette tape they were selling and placed it in the loading tray and pressed play. No movement of the tape was observed. Fast forward and rewind resulted in no tape movement either.
I believed I could repair the unit and I asked for the store manager, I told the lady that the unit had no tape movement what-so-ever but if they were willing to drop the price to $10.00 and add that holiday half price to it, I'd buy it and they'd never see it again.
She took the unit to the back room for a few minutes and came back with it with a new price sticker on it that was marked $10.00. I paid $5.00 for it.
Upon opening the unit at home, I observed what I expected to see, two failed drive belts. Both belts had turned into a tar like rubber substance. I was lucky to find a set of replacement belts on Ebay for $24.00 and free shipping. I was also lucky to find an owners manual and service manual on line.
Today, that unit works very well and was worth the $29.00 I paid for it. It has some very large analog needle audio meters and a lot of audio bias features and switches and the internals are unbelievable. The circuit board of this unit is packed with parts, you'd think it was an AM/FM unit as well, because I've never seen a circuit board this big and packed with parts just for a single cassette deck!
I also go to the trouble of replacing CD lens. I am totally NOT crazy about CDs, never was never will be. For what it is worth, 97% of my music is on vinyl records. 2% Cassettes and 1% CDs.
I have a Philips CDR778 which is a duel CDR/CD deck. The CD deck's laser has stopped reading discs, so, rather then throw the unit out, I go on line and look for a new lens chassis and replace the lens. I have not done so yet, but I do have several lenses bookmarked for purchase when I'm ready. Perhaps next month I will finally get around to purchasing that lens assembly and install it in the CDR-778. It's a good deck because that one unit has a two in one CD player saving space in the audio rack.
I have also have an Onkyo TA-RW404 Dual Cassette deck that works. It has auto-reverse and the ability to switch between two different cassettes on the same deck and that also saves on room in the rack as well.
In my studio photo above, to the very far, lower left portion of the photo, is a Realistic portable cassette tape recorder, that tape recorder functions in two ways.
One, we use it to cue a certain song on a cassette tape before moving to the on-air cassette deck.
Two, it doubled as our telephone conversation recorder. We have a Radio Shack telephone module, that is activated by a simple pulse on the phone line, such as when the telephone hand set is off hook. That module picks up the audio from the telephone line and feeds it into the tape recorder's microphone jack. That tape recorder has a pause jack, which pauses the tape when a microphone's pause switch is put into pause. This radio Shack module has a plug for that jack. When there is a pulse on the phone line, that module un-pauses the tape movement and the telephone conversation is recorded onto that cassette tape.
Now, the purpose of doing this is to air called in requests or listener conversations with our DJ staff, without risk of profanity going over the air when an excited or drunk listener wants to yell "Play that F'ing song by Nirvana for me please!!" It gives us time to edit the tape before it hits the air. Professional radio stations either use tape delay or a delay box, which allows them several seconds before the blooper hits the air and can press a button to bleep it out.
Although our way is cheaper, it still works just as well as an expensive box or those 4 head reel to reel tape delay decks of yesteryear.
Bruce.
Oh and one more thing, we have two 8-track record--playback decks as well for playing those old 8-track tape cartridges from the late 1960's to 1980's. Although we have never used it on air, it is still a possibility to do so.
Bruce.
I totally agree with you Bruce that a brand new vinyl record that has never been played before of the same Rock group as the CD of that very same album will sound better on vinyl. The reason for this is that the USA recordings on CD's are often mass produced and a lot of times over modulated almost to the point of clipping. A lot of the CD's made in the early 80's had to be reissued because of this very reason. Then you have the factor that not all the vinyl recorded from yesteryear is available on CD's. The engineers of Today in the USA no longer use the SMPTE standard for recording. They try and go for the Loudest they can get before over modulation often causing the shrill ringing sound you hear on CD's from the USA. I've spent the extra money (before I lost my house and everything but the shirt on my back) to by the Imported CD's instead which sound 10 times better than the USA version of the CD. I'll take Genesis Foxtrot album. It was available on Import for twice to three times the price of the USA label. I found the import at a used record store and they wanted a fortune for this CD $100 (yes you read right). I bought the $100 import of Foxtrot and compared it with the $15 USA version by switching from CD player 1 to 2 om my Classai'e (Can't remember how it was spelled) separate amp, pre amp, CD players and tuner. I had a nice pair of KEF 103.3 speakers that would make your eyes water when you heard the sound. I fed all of these devices with XLR oxygen free cables. The USA CD sounded like they were trying to hide something in the music. The highs were too bright and certain sounds were just not heard especially in the song Supper's Ready. But the Import BIG DIFFERENCE!!!!! It almost sounded like a vinyl record never played and no hiss or cracks. It was a pure pleasure to hear this CD and I even had some of my audiophile dudes hear this. Now mind you too I had a $1,000 Luxman CD (Tube Output) CD player. No USA crap for me back then. This thing could make CD's sound way better than any USA player could. Also Carver had a nice Digital Time Lense you could use to straighten out the Digital Jitters in data which causes off phase and ringing sounds of CD's of lessor quality. I cried when I had to sell all of this to pay bills you don't know how many years it took to find this equipment and the extensive traveling I had to do and get someone to drive me around was the hardest thing for a person who has poor eyesight. As far as Onkyo cassette decks with Dolby C noise reduction they sounded nice. If you used the Maxell Gold metal tapes you could achieve the sound of a reel to reel deck (well close to it). I use to record all my vinyl to cassette so I could keep all my records in tip top shape. I even had a P mount Technics direct drive turntable so I could do all of this. When I had my transmitter in Michigan I was also able to get a hold of a Radio Shack mixer and used that. I borrowed a Micmarten mixer for a bit too and used it. The Micmarten had nobs not sliders and the VU meters for the separate channels to run mics and decks into. I didn't have a audio processor back then I still need to learn how to set those up and don't have the money right now. Again helping my wife to fight cancer and when she had a massive nervous break down it took everything I had to make her well again. Now my sound system is a ghetto blaster and I use my laptop but as we get rock solid financially I'll get a nice stereo again so I can monitor my station. I do have some nice computer speakers but my wife has those right now for her desktop which needs replaced. I feel the pain of anyone who had a nice sound system or studio and had to give it up. Young folks now days just will never know how a true audiophile system is suppose to sound. You really have a dream system Bruce.
Long live Oriental Album Rock!