Long before computers, I-Pods, FM, and even Television, there was AM radio. In the era between 1920 and 1950, most people relied on radio for news, information, and entertainment. Broadcasters had to be able to reach listeners deep into the countryside, and therefore they needed power – and lots of it.
The FRC (Federal Radio Commission, the forerunner of the FCC) had set certain criteria for broadcasters based on location and power. Certain frequencies were set aside for the big boys like KDKA, WOR, WGN, WSM and KFI. These were known as “Clear Channels”, frequencies that were only occupied by the A-1 super-stations at night. They transmitted at 50,000 watts and were considered the flamethrowers of radio. The idea was complete saturation so that no listeners were left in the dark. On clear nights with little thunderstorm activity, you could hear a clear channel station 5 or 6 states away!
The A-1 Clear Channel stations were big, but there were none bigger and no one threw bigger flames than WLW in Cincinnati.
700 kHz, 500,000 Watts, 100% Modulation…No Limiter!
700 WLW Radio in Cincinnati is the king of radio. It’s rich history and storied on-air personalities could fill a book itself. The legendary call letters WLW literally mean “Whole Lotta Watts”
WLW was started by Powell Crosley Jr, a Cincinnati businessman who saw the future usefulness of the then-budding “wireless” industry in 1923 after buying his young son a primitive radio set that was built on what was called the “Armstrong Circuit“. Crosley, Jr was a visionary, and his vision was a “Whole Lotta Watts”. He wasn’t interested in being a member of the 50, 000 watt club. He wanted the biggest blowtorch out there, the king of radio…The “Nation’s Station”!
In 1932, Crosley and WLW were granted an experimental license to develop a 500,000 watt transmitter. Given the call sign of W8XO, Crosley enlisted the likes of RCA, General Electric, and Westinghouse to help design and install the components of what would become the biggest experiment in radio history. Together, they would engineer, design, and build a 500,000 watt transmitter known as “Serial Number 1”.
Soon, strange things started happening in and around Mason, Ohio. People told of lights going dim and fluctuating with the modulation from the station. With no modulation limiters, “peaks” played havoc on the transmitter. 100% modulation would all but eliminate the negative side of the system, and when you have 500,000 watts just sitting there with nowhere to go something has to give. With as many as 63 engineers on station at any given time, it must’ve been a chaotic ballet. Some engineers at Cincinatti Power & Light actually said they could watch the meters dance with the peak modulation, draining the power grid. Brownouts were common in the area at night (when the beast said “feed me”, the electric company definitely knew it!). Loud bangs were often heard in the vicinity. Tales soon arose about singing gutters, talking bed springs, sparking cattle fences, and funny tingling in various body parts. At 500,000 watts and 100% modulation without a limiter, the RF from the big Blaw-Knox tower was wreaking havoc in Southwest Ohio. (As a side note, Blaw-Knox towers are still in existence today but very rare. In the above link, Jim Hawkins only lists six Blaw-Knox towers still in existence but there is a seventh one in Columbus, Ohio at the 1460 WBNS studios on Barnett Road. It is the smallest of the still-existing towers still in use today.)
In 1938, WLW was ordered by the FCC to decrease their power back to 50,000 watts. There was a lot of jealousy from other broadcasters that the FCC would not grant licenses for other stations to go to 500,000 watts. After commission hearings, the voice from the sky was knocked down a notch. However, for a brief time during World War II, the station was granted permission to go back to 500,000 watts so as to help broadcast moral boosting programming to troops in Europe. Yup, “The Big One” was heard in Europe and actually, had been heard all over the world when the engineers increased power to about 650,000 watts! It was said that WLW could actually transmit at 1 megawatt if needed, but that, as far as anyone knows, has never happened.
Although the old transmitter is no longer in use, the engineers at WLW keep it maintained and all equipment at operational readiness. In fact, WLW fired up the old transmitters on December 31st, 1999, to usher in the new millennium.
As told by Paul Jellison, Chief Engineer at WLW:
“I spent the evening at the 700 WLW site babysitting for the dreaded y2k “crash”. As suspected it was a whimper of a situation. Since I was a captive audience I decided to amuse myself. My idea was to operate into the millennium operating WLW on the original 1927 model Western Electric 7a 50 kW transmitter. This is the original 50 kW transmitter that WLW signed on with in 1928. It has been maintained and updated quite well through the years. It is still water cooled and operates very quietly compared to a blower-cooled transmitter. After replacing a tube in the RF exciter that had failed sometime in the last month or so, the transmitter came up just fine. I put it on the air at 10:45 PM the 31st of 1999 and operated it till 12:15 am January 01,01,2000. Using a modern audio processor (Orban 9100) to modulate the rig with. It sounded fine and the news department mentioned the fact that we were operating on it in their news casts. I seemed fitting that the transmitter that carried information from the depression era, W.W.II, Korea, Vietnam, man landing on the moon, Kennedy’s assassination, FDR’s passing, and Nixon’s impeachment usher the station into the year 2000. The transmitter was taken offline as a main transmitter in 1975 when a Continental 317c1 was installed to operate in main service.”
For a more detailed look at the history of “The Nation’s Station”, go to:
http://hawkins.pair.com/wlw.shtml
The Baltimore Radio Repair Company 