Engineering Heroes & Innovations

This question inspired by a thread a few of us are having on an email chain....

Curious about your memories of special innovations that engineer(s) have brought to your facilities over the years. Cases where they used some real creativity to come up with an idea that should have had more exposure than it may have received (whether they were practical or not!!)

Examples I can think of ....

a) One engineer had mounted some processing gear under the counters in a sit-down "U" configuration. He was worried about people wailing it with a rolling chair, so he devised a "chair on a rail" deal where he mounted the rolling chair on custom-made tracks. The chair could swivel and slide back and forth, but could never be pushed into the equipment along the sides.

b) One wanted to make a home-grown delay system, so used two side-by-side matching tape decks in control room. Recorded the air feed on machine #2 (on the right) ... and put the big tape loop around the control room ceiling (on rollers) back to the tape machine on the left, which fed the transmitter about 10 seconds later.

c) Don Winget (or, "Wing-nut" to many) was constantly inventing things. At KYYX he built (don't know if ever implemented) a device where you could program the caller-# you wanted and it would take that caller and isolate it ... putting rest on hold. Of course it meant having to have 15 lines if you wanted 15 callers...but the CONCEPT was cool.

What other examples have you seen??

The guys at Belo Broadcasting, Dallas WFAA, KZEW, (yes, that Belo) modified a simple 5-line Bell phone so that you could push as many as 5 buttons simultantously, and put up to 5 callers on the air.

Or, just use the phone off the air to mix callers and talk to several friends at once.
Each line with a button depressed could hear and talk to all the others with the buttons depressed.

Simple, but effective. Those Dallas engineers, Dave Hendrix, et al were the best.

They also put me on the air riding the new (at that time) "Shockwave" double-loop roller coaster at Six Flags. It's common now to do such stunts (or even passé). It wasn't in 1977.

It was technically difficult, they made it sound perfect, even while on the coaster, with no dropouts, lots of screaming, and no distortion.

Which brings to mind the sad case of Entercom trying, and failing, to broadcast Dori Monson live on a parachute jump near Harvey Field...

Any chance the engineers are creative & corrupt enough that we can rig Dori's chute?? Worth at least two ratings points and I'd be open to listening to 710 again!

Where was KYYX located in those days?

Don Winget has many innovations under his belt. Still providing broadcasters with his innovative broadcast gadgets through his company Broadcast Tools. Don could be a little testy to work with at time but a nice guy underneath. Don went from being employed by a radio station to marketing products and selling to them. And still does it today. Just thumbing through the New BSW catalog has his stuff on at least 14 pages.

Don modified many 5 line phones to Button Mash as we called it.
The early Symetrix TI-101, and Symetrix 501 compressors were his work.

But what would stand out the most would be KYYX, which Don Built. The KYYX audio chain was full of cutting edge processing technology. KYYX was pretty cutting edge at that time for Automation and Voice Tracking. KYYX was in downtown Seattle on 4th ave????

Allen Hartle also comes to mind. He was on the cutting edge with the “Now Playing” KZOK Bill Boards. He has built a business around supporting RDS technology used to scroll info across the radio display. Working with stations so they can connect the music database to spit the tittles across your scrolling radio display, on the website or store front to purchase the music. It’s not as simple as it looks.

Norm Graham from KIRO was my favorite remote engineer, next to myself.

Also from KIRO Chuck Morris Built digital remote control units for AM- FM and TV transmitter sites before they were commercially available to radio stations.

Jim Tharp built a device for the KING transmitter site that switched to the backup audio line if the main one failed. He built that in the late 70’s when I was still in High School. Jim had a lot of interesting gadgets at the KING transmitter.

As far as remotes. I did a lot of remotes when I was at KUBE. The KUBE Pirate remotes were the most inovative.
The KUBE Pirate boat remotes were 15 hours 6 days a week for about 4 weeks(I don’t think we did Sundays, been so long ago). From a moving boat using 4 Motorola bag phones. 2 were used for the 2 line Comrex back to the station (over cell phone it was a little funky sounding). 1 phone for the talk back and one for just placing calls. Had 3 cell phone antennas strapped to the boat. The people that made those automated Esspresso machines that they used at McDonalds, gave the station one to use on the boat. Tones of fun hooking it to the boat electrical system on the boat, the Coastguard didn’t know what to make of it. The boat remotes were very time consuming. I actually supplied (rented to KUBE) the walkmans, field mixer, headphone amp and mics for most remotes because at that time KUBE didn’t have any remote gear.
Charlie Brown parachutes from a plain at Paine Field. I knew I wasn’t going to get the whole jump live. At least not the out of the plain part. But we did have a high end Sony wireless unit and a Yagi antenna on the receive end. I think we got the last 1/3 of the jump. It was good enough. Charlie Parasailing on Lake Washington (boat remote days). We used the same Sony wireless mic for that as we did for the jump and it work ok. Had to point the antenna right at him. Strapped a wireless mic to Chet Buchanan at the Puyallup fair one year for a Bungy Jump. It worked great till Chet sprang back up with the Bungy, the wireless mic went dead. When Chet got back on his feet, I un strapped the mic and never did get it to work again.

Oh the fun days. Can I forget the KHIT years, yes I can….

The old KJR RCA 5 KW Ampliphase xmtr at the Duwamish site had a very cool home grown "modulation-minder" type device. It fed the processed audio through a little FET amp that was controlled by a sample of demodulated RF. The FET would constantly bump the audio gain upwards in .1dB steps until it got demodulated RF samples that were missing carrier (thus indicating modulation in excess of 100%). It would then drop back .1 of a dB and slowly start ramping up again. Thus keeping the overall mod level as consistently close to 100% as possible without any processing artifacts. Pretty cool little device.

xmtrland: great stories from pre-1990s KUBE 93, Musicradio. I think a lot of that history is forgotten now, overshadowed by the more recent incarnations of the station. I still remember going down to 110 Lakeside Ave. and hanging out with a friend of mine who was a weekend DJ. He probably wasn't supposed to have me up there. It would be 2 or 3 o'clock in the morning. I remember driving up Yesler through the CD, always nervous. Several times, stopping for a red light, people walking on the sidewalk would look over at me, and start walking across the street directly toward me! I would just drive right through the red light since they were timed and no other cars were in sight anyway.

I remember that the old KUBE had this smell - kind of like french fries - since it was directly over the restaurant below. I remember that old board - I don't know the make, but it was white. The phone hybrid was a Telemix and the reel-to-reel deck for editing calls was to the right of the board. And the million dollar view of the lake to the left (and line of sight to Cougar Mtn).

Then there was the time Chet Buchanan and I drove up to Cougar with a six pack and threw empty cans at the KPLZ tower.

I'd love to hear any other memories of KUBE, the engineering/remote stories especially (I had completely forgotten about those KUBE Pirate broadcasts - do you recall about what year that was?)

reverbonthemic said:

Then there was the time Chet Buchanan and I drove up to Cougar with a six pack and threw empty cans at the KPLZ tower.

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Not even sure you can GET up there any more without getting people's attention!! But I digress...my point being that no matter what you guys did to KPLZ tower it couldn't be worse than what they did to themselves a few years ago. Put in new generator system with awesome propane tank. Missing item on the punch list? FILL the Propane Tank. Big ice storm hits...nothing can get up there thanks to lousy road conditions ... station off the air for DAYS after the last bit of juice fizzled out of the generator tank and into the tra---------------------pffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff============

Actually that isn't quite true. The original generator for KPLZ, (installed when the site was built), was propane fired, and gave the station about 48 hours of emergency power with both RCA transmitters running full power combined. From what I understand, the plan was to replace the propane generator with a diesel one, and the new generator was approved, but the bad weather hit and lasted for more days than they had fuel. That combined with not reducing power to save fuel which was standard practice, and they ran out of gas!

I'll nominate Lee Hurley's home brew board at the old KJR-AM and his supercool studio reader-board that showed time/temp and scrolled an "Arbitron is on now" message during the book.

Regarding this post:
"Which brings to mind the sad case of Entercom trying, and failing, to broadcast Dori Monson live on a parachute jump near Harvey Field..."

This " sad fiasco" was completely Dori's fault. In test runs done prior with one of the parachute company's jumper it worked great not once but several times. When Dori went up he accidently changed the channel on transmitter- when he was specifically told - don't touch it - look at it - mess with it. Dori felt bad after but if YOU think it was sad, just IMAGINE what the engineer who had put so much time into this felt.
Considering it was Dori, not slamming him, maybe it should have been more "mess proof".

Reminiscing of the radio days and engineering brought to mind another engineer. This engineer did not work for any radio station but he supported many radio stations and their engineers. And he was instrumental in remote broadcasting in the 80’s and 90’s.

That would be Gary Hart, engineer for US/west-Qwest. Gary was in charge of setting up a lot of the equalized phone lines used to connect to the transmitter for the main STL, and for doing remote broadcasts.

Gary Hart was supper responsive, knowable and one hell of a nice guy. He went out of his way to make sure the station(engineer) was happy. Acting as a buffer between the broadcaster and the Ma-bell phone switch.

When you saw Gary on the job working on your phone loop you knew it was going to be done right and equalized the best he could get it with the copper wire in between.

I hope he is off enjoying retirement because he sure deserves it.

xmtrland said:

Reminiscing of the radio days and engineering brought to mind another engineer. This engineer did not work for any radio station but he supported many radio stations and their engineers. And he was instrumental in remote broadcasting in the 80’s and 90’s.

That would be Gary Hart, engineer for US/west-Qwest. Gary was in charge of setting up a lot of the equalized phone lines used to connect to the transmitter for the main STL, and for doing remote broadcasts.

Gary Hart was supper responsive, knowable and one hell of a nice guy. He went out of his way to make sure the station(engineer) was happy. Acting as a buffer between the broadcaster and the Ma-bell phone switch.

When you saw Gary on the job working on your phone loop you knew it was going to be done right and equalized the best he could get it with the copper wire in between.

I hope he is off enjoying retirement because he sure deserves it.

Click to expand...

Amen to that. Gary was/is the best of the best. I had the privilege of running many a remore with his setup. If Gary was on the case you knew everything was taken care of. He's a hell of a ham radio operator too.

Any of the major events, involving multiple stations, Gary Hart was the man.