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Old Broadcast Automation

I've worked with the system 90, various IGM machines BE, Prophet Wizard, and now Air Force (kind of like Storq) but the good memories are of my first sytem. College radio station WCVF, Fredonia NY. Picked up a Muzak subchannel from WBUF Buffalo for audio. Used the storecast subaudible tones to trigger large Ampex reel to reel 10 inch reels. Breaks had to be exactly X minutes long (I've forgotten how long exactly) The end of break storecast tones stopped the reel (usually!) The college was mainly a music school so in the early 60's the Muzak format was fine. Great experience learning to put together PSA's and college event announcement to exactly fit that break time. After two years of that, quit college and went to work for WBUF! Been at it now for 45 Plus years. I wouldn't have lasted this long as a music teacher!
Bill
 
First system I worked on was the SMC 3060. It had 4 Scully 270's, 3 single play carts and 3 Random Access Carousels. System was fairly simply. Controller was a 60 event slide switch matrix with ten source settings. Carousel programmers were 3 - 50 (if memory serves me correctly) 24 position thumbwheel switches, which were a pain to program. System ran reliably with the exception of momentary power bumps during storms. The darned thing would light up all ten audio sources - on the air - at once.
On the other hand, I also engineered a Schafer 700T system with thumbwheels for the programmer and everything stepper and other assorted relays. It ran very well with minor maintenance. Lightning storms? Couldn't kill the thing. Power would come back on and it would take off running each and every time! I always loved the "pinball machine" sound when the stepper relays would reset. What a beast.....but it ran well and sounded great.
 
Great stories guys, I have no experience with the IGM systems except for the Instacarts (which were horrible but maybe the just needed to be maintained).

It's funny Bilco that you wound up at WBUF. Life works out like that sometimes!

Going back to the AR-1000 at WAXY. They used 14 inch reels because the automation was at the FM transmitter. The playlist was evened out so that it would run about 6 hours between tape changes. #2 was the current reel and at the begging and end the tape was painted with silver conductive paint that would go across the connectors and make the Scully rewind and then it his the silver paint at the beginning and change direction. It kept doing that until somehow it cued up. Many times I didn't think it was going to make it in time for air and there would be rewind on the air or somehow the automation might issue a play command and spill tape everywhere but none of this happened. I used to see it cue up the tape with maybe 2 seconds to spare!

Since the station was in the process of being sold and approval took a long time the play head on the #2 deck was badly worn to the point the deck sounded muffled on the air.
 
My automation memory comes from Plough's Memphis FM, WHRK. I was doing middays on the AM, WMPS, and voice tracked all nights on "Disco Stereo K-97". Voice tracking, in this case, involved pre-recording 6 hours worth of talk breaks on a huge cart. The thing was, if you goofed up half way through, you had to bulk it and start all over! When you carted spots for the machine, there was a punched paper tape system where you entered the logging information, decoded the punched tape, and encoded the cart.

I was there in late 1977 through the AM's format change from top-40 to country in 1978. It was at the time when FM's were finally coming into their own in this market. The turning point became blaringly apparent one morning as I rode the elevator up from the lobby past Plough's second floor corporate HQ to the third floor studios. Instead of hearing WMPS in the elevator sound system, K-97 was playing. After a few days of this, I asked the receptionist what was up, and she told me that top billing was the determining factor for what station serenaded the elevator riders.

In a series of facility sales and swaps, the legendary WDIA eventually was paired with WHRK, and they moved to Plough's 112 Union Avenue facility. WMPS (680 AM) went from it's peak ratings and billing numbers during the Rick Dees days in the mid-70's, to being the automated facility, living in a rack in the engineering office at Entercom. K-97, leaving the clunky old automation behind, became the perrinial 12-plus #1. The Union avenue facility was deserted for Clear Channel's combined operation, and is being renovated into condominiums called Radio Center Flats.
 
robgrayson I wish someone would turn up some recording of Disco Stereo K 97. It's one think I would love to hear.

Early in my radio career I got to rewind a few of those reals and punch in the number codes and time for spots to play out of the cart carousels. This was at Stereo 104 which later became Jammin' 104 - WCLD Fm in Cleveland MS.

The automation system had been named Herman. I'm not sure where that name came from.
 
How good did you get at changing reels? Every three hours the three decks would run out. Added a fourth deck as a "fill". Each Beautiful Music tape played for 10 to 15 minutes.

Tapes were tails-out. What a racket if you were changing three at the same time.

SO, how many times did your automation play an hour of muffled music!
 
Somebody mentioned Surf 16 (WSRF 1580) well in the days when their FM first WSRF-FM and later WSHE was automated soft rock I would call the AM jock when they threaded a tape wrong.

At WAXY during the RKO days they liked to alternate between deck 3 and 4 at the end of the hour as fill. You never wanted one of these tapes to run out at that time, it only gave you one song to change a reel. Hearing tape fast winding on the air somebody from RKO said that will happen to each operator only once. We got it and often rewound a tape on one of the two spare decks so we could change it quickly.

As for logging commercials, I think all the automation units had encoding from paper punch tape some did a code number while others had a full english printout. The AR-1000 I used didn't have any logging.
 
I don't recall ever screwing up a reel. But I have been slapped in the face or the shoulder by the tape a few times.
 
If something went terribly wrong while rewinding the 14" reels on the Scully's you did NOT try to stop them with your hands! Hit the stop and stand back. Knew someone that ended up in the emergency room late one night requiring many stitches.
 
The only think that ever happened to me was I once got my finger pinched as the carousel was traying out.

We were always told to reverse directions rather than hit stop when rewinding. The brakes never seemed to be adjusted correctly on the old Scullys.

The newer L.J. Scullys were different. They seemed to have a much better braking system. Only saw those at one station I worked for.
 
When I was at WLEZ FM in Elmira, NY, I think that I had one of the most overworked Automation systems in the world! Well that is what the Chief Engineer told me everytime I came up with a new idea. The system was and SMC DP-3 (I believe was the model). When I first became station manager it was running a TM Beautiful Muisc (think elevator) format. The system was 3 Skully transports, (with auto rewind and cue), 3 SMC 24 cart carousels, a SMC 2 deck unit, for break liners and promos, and a single deck BE cart machine we used for news and weather. "Marvin", (short for Marvin Motormouth) has a temper and only certain people would be able to approach him without Marvin throwing a fit and starting all events and bringing them up on the air.
Marvin's comutpter had space for 3 days of programming so we used two of them for the weekend and then programmed each day a task usually shared by myself and my Traffic Person. Not long after I became Manager I deceided that the Beautiful Muisc format, while it was on in a lot of business, just could not be sold, so I landed on a modified Century 21 Lite AC format. The problem was we still had 2 years to go on our TM contract, butthe impossible happened, they, TM put the format on another station in our protected area and we were out. With the new format came a challenge, Ineeded more reel to reels and with the increase in business more cart space. As luck would it our sister station in Atlantic City, NJ was going live and there was "stuff" for the asking. So with a little bit of luck I got another equipment rack, two Revox Reel to Reel's and two more 24 cart carousels. About the same time I decided we needed a network so we chose ABC's feed at 54:30 past the hour. Problem! Our sister AM (WENY) was NBC and coroporate didn't want to spend much money to buy a second transponder, so I met with the Chief and we devised a system run by "Marvin's" clock to switch the dish, arm a recorder, (and old BE delay machine) and switch the dish back again,. It actually worked!! I must admit it was a thing of beauty to stand there and watch it all come together, the system was still operating when I left 4 years later without many problems as the Chief adopted it and gave it lots of TLC and the Traffic Manager and I did brain surgury on "Marvin" to make sure all his programs ran as they were supposed to. One all the programming was cleaned up it was easy when two years later we switched formats again to Concept Productions Easy Lisening AC. The nice thing about the SMC is there was a batch of subroutines you could program for different dayparts and for Christmas music season.
 
317C50KW said:
Scott Fybush obviously was visiting his in-laws recently in NE Indiana. Here's a recent post from his tower website. Note the Gates 55 in one of the pictures!

http://www.fybush.com/sites/2010/site-101105.html
Click to expand...

Is it true that if the lower limit switch failed in a Gates 55, the screwjack running the transport would keep going until the rack tipped over? ;D

Is that a Gates FM2.5H in the back of the old transmitter row? Loved them...the morning jock would always soil himself when he would turn the plate on and the final tube shorted...the wirewound resistor in the plate supply would flame out and stuff shot everywhere!
 
boiseengineer said:
If something went terribly wrong while rewinding the 14" reels on the Scully's you did NOT try to stop them with your hands! Hit the stop and stand back. Knew someone that ended up in the emergency room late one night requiring many stitches.
Click to expand...

Yeah...a 270 at full shuttle speed could easily lop off a finger. The station I worked at required button-down shirts and ties, which added another dimension to the potential hazards. I also reversed the direction before stopping a shuttle operation, otherwise a broken tape was a sure thing.
 
"We were always told to reverse directions rather than hit stop when rewinding."

A panic STOP in some cases wouldn't save any more tape than what was being shredded at that moment. STOP was for personal safety! :(
 
I think reversing directions was the preferred practice. The Skullys always seemed to have tension problems...even the later ones with the electronic driven auto-tension feature. Even with the old Ampex if you hit stop, you wouldn't usually have a mess, but you probably would stretch the tape. Those drawwwwn out Montovoni strings were a hoot.
 
I was rewinding a 14" reel on a 270 one time and the chromed hold down hub fell apart. The reel was running at about the highest speed it could be at the time the hub broke and went flying off the deck. The reel hit the drywall which was about 4 feet from the automation. It left two very deep grooves in the wall and was still spinning when it hit the floor. It was then I realized how dangerous these things can be. Also there was tape everywhere. I always paid a little extra attention to the Scullys after that.
 
I just remembered after Kelly's interesting post that the WSOC Schafer 903E also kicked off the pattern/power change. It worked every time.
 
For the person upthread who wondered about what years Eugene's KUGN-FM ran its IGM Basic A, 1978-1985 is about right, with the system landing at a co-owned station in Hawaii after that. All this talk of violent tape reels reminds me that touching them while on fast wind was a bad idea: I ended up in emergency getting a fingertip sewed back on after a poor quality plastic reel disintegrated while trying to speed up a tape change.

Later users of that system have reported in a trade forum that the system's name was the oh-so-polite "Mom." In fact, I named it "Mother!!" after the finger-eating episode. Otherwise it was a lovely and highly functional beast, and given careful production, sounded and worked absolutely great.
 
With all it's problems the 270 R/R was probably the most reliable
one ever...and the quality was unsurpassed. I still have a couple with old r/r formats for music in my home...they are hidden in a closet!
 
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