WLW: America's 500,000 watt radio station (2015) | Hacker News Reader

WLW: America's 500,000 watt radio station (2015)

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> People living near the transmitter site often got better reception than they wanted; some lights would not turn off until WLW engineers helped rewire houses. Gutters rattled loose from buildings. A neon hotel sign near the transmitter never went dark. Farmers reported hearing WLW through their barbed-wire fences.

That is pretty amazing. I wonder if there were any health impacts from that level of ambient power just buzzing through the air. Still, quite a feat of engineering to think about.

I also took some interesting lessons from the story as an entrepreneur. Crosley's obsession with radio reminds me of my own obsessive periods with a particular technology. Then he took his existing business knowledge and manufacturing skills (and capital...) and acted on it. Such a great little story of being in the right place, at the right time, and having the right obsessions.

That is pretty amazing. I wonder if there were any health impacts from that level of ambient power just buzzing through the air. Still, quite a feat of engineering to think about.

It's very common, and becoming more common.

WLW was a special case because it put out so much power it affected homes a fair distance away. But even stations as low as 1,000 watts have to deal with this today.

I worked at close to a dozen different AM stations in a previous life. It's very common for AM transmission towers to be located in flat, moist areas. I'm not an electrical engineer, but from what I remember, flat is preferred so the groundwave signal travels farther, and marshy for electrical reasons.

The problem is that when vast majority of AM stations were built, they transmitters were in the middle of nowhere. Since then, the suburbs have surrounded these facilities with homes, sometimes building houses right up to the property line, and people get interference in their electronics. And they're not happy about it. If they're close enough, everything with a speaker in the house only broadcasts that nearby station. Radios, TV's, even things that don't have "speakers," but are able to pick up the radio waves and resonate.

It's like when people build a house next to an airport, and then complain about all the damn airplane noise.

For reasons I don't understand from an electrical standpoint, it was particularly bad at one 1,000-watt station where I worked in the mid-90's. The General Manager's attitude was along the lines of, "Why would you move next door to a radio station? Didn't you notice the 300-foot-tall red-and-white tower with all the blinking lights out front?" Of course, that's a wholly unsatisfying answer to a new homeowner.

Since I left radio, I've read that there are a number of AM stations that have gone off the air simply because of the angry neighbors. They get the local politicians to pass zoning regulations that end up forcing the AM stations to move their towers, but the stations have nowhere else to go for three reasons: First, because they have to be located within a certain area to fulfill the coverage requirements of their license; second, depending on the station's transmitting characteristics, they may need a pretty large piece of land for multiple towers; and third, because AM radio doesn't make a lot of money, they may not be able to afford new land. So for some, they just go dark.

It isn't just radio stations and airports. I've seen plenty of people move out into the country and build right next to a large hog or dairy farm. The first summer they find out they can't use their backyard or open their windows so they sue their neighbor! It got so bad that here in Michigan they passed a law know as right to farm act to protect the farmers.

However when they wrote the law it never occurred to them that people would be farming in existing urban areas so they exempted them. That has caused problems in Detroit where people wanted to create commercial farms with all that available land (as well as city water for irrigation) but were denied the same protection.

> The General Manager's attitude was along the lines of, "Why would you move next door to a radio station? Didn't you notice the 300-foot-tall red-and-white tower with all the blinking lights out front?" Of course, that's a wholly unsatisfying answer to a new homeowner.

Money, the land is usually cheap. Also one of the problems with the leukemia studies and the lack of proper controls as it more often than not inhabited by low income residents and more often than not riddles with (chemical) waste. Which are both difficult to compensate for.

Also these transmitters use a lot of energy which these days is pretty expensive.

>It's like when people build a house next to an airport, and then complain about all the damn airplane noise.

Not really. Buying near an airport requires explicit acknowledgement that you're doing it and that's why homeowners don't really have a leg to stand on when they complain to their local government. IIRC last time I looked at a home near a bunch of transmitters, there was no such disclosure required.

Oh, people complain about airport noise all the time. You even hear about it in the news: so-and-so investigating 10,000 complaints about noise. Interestingly (though in retrospect unsurprisingly), the vast majority of complaints come from a very small handful of squeaky wheels. For example, of 8,760 complaints about DCA, 1 home was responsible for 78% of them! Source: https://www.mercatus.org/system/files/dourado-airport-noise-...

Disclaimers notwithstanding, noise abatement requirements continue to become stricter and stricter across the U.S.

The Vatican Radio has a 500kW transmitter, plus several lower powered ones: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vatican_Radio

There was a lawsuit about it causing leukemia, but it is unclear how substantial that is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vatican_Radio_lawsuit

>The risk of childhood leukemia was higher than expected for the distance up to 6 km from the radio station (standardized incidence rate = 2.2, 95% confidence interval: 1.0, 4.1), and there was a significant decline in risk with increasing distance both for male mortality (p = 0.03) and for childhood leukemia (p = 0.036).

https://academic.oup.com/aje/article/155/12/1096/123184

Reminds me of this - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9UO9tn4MpI

Obviously don't do this. I would be concerned about standing this close as well, radio burns are super nasty.

Also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uo9nGzIzSPw

I've lit up full size neon tubes at ~150 meters with about a kilowatt into a highly directional antenna. Not the most efficient way of transferring power but quite a neat effect and wireless to boot.

Wireless power transmission and things like Tesla coils are basically magic to my brain. I "know" how they work, but seeing it happen is kind of amazing. Our little home made Tesla coil was one of our most popular gadgets we built. I should build a more reliable one... we live in a dry place now.

You would enjoy Styropyro if you haven't found his YT channel yet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TgrtA2wKaM

I wonder how that much power would affect someone with metal fillings in their teeth.

You obviously never watched enough Gilligan's Island :-) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1230840/

Sounds like a short story I read as a kid ...

I recall that it had been written in the 1950s. My memory could be wrong. I read it some time in the early 1980s. Having aged a few decades since, and experiencing much comedy and fiction in that time, I have come to discover this must have been a common theme from whatever era it was written.

The details I recall from the story are: 1) boy gets a tooth filled with a new alloy. 2) Soon discovers he can tune into different radio stations but adjusting his jaw. 3) Proves this to his friends by telling them what's on which stations, which they verify by tuning the radio. 4) Looses the ability quickly (days, perhaps?) - can't recall if by re-visiting the dentist or some other reason.

I don't recall that the plot of Fat Men From Outer Space (remove all junk food) was involved - seems like it'd be a fairly large plot to miss, but I admit the human brain is a strange thing.

I believe Lucille Ball claimed she helped zero in on a Japanese spy during WW2 as her root filled teeth chattered with the morse code sent by the nearby clandestine transmitter.

Just a tall story, of course.

Fat Men from Outer Space?

I'm from Cincinnati, and growing up my dad and grandfather would tell us how you could pick up WLW across the country on a good day. In the 90s we took a vacation to the Rockies, and were able to pick up WLW a few times, even though the power had been reduced by then. I can get it regularly and clearly in Chicago as well. That's the cool thing about AM radio; since it is transmitted at a lower frequency, it can travel longer distances, and even reflect off the atmosphere in the right conditions.

AM broadcast travels a long way not because it tends to reflect off the atmosphere (skywave propagation), but because it tends to hug the earth (groundwave propagation).

Too late to edit: I was confused... groundwave during the day, skywave at night.

Was randomly recommended a video on YouTube a few weeks ago which was a recording of a tour of the WLW broadcast transmitter facility. You get to see the high power equipment in detail accompanied by lots of history about the facility. Was a fun watch.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbHjcwIoTiY

The station’s once groundbreaking transmitter is long retired but preserved, on-site, beside its modern counterpart.

I wonder if they ever offer tours. It would be neat to see some of this history the next time I'm passing through the Cincinnati area. On a related note, it looks like there's a "National Voice of America Museum of Broadcasting" just down the street from the WLW site.

It's not quite the same scale, but another of the nation's 'mega AM stations', KMOX in St. Louis, has a few interesting articles covering the history of their transmitter / tower and associated gear:

https://www.stlmediahistory.org/index.php/Radio/RadioArticle...

I used to work as an engineering assistant there, and went to the tower site a few times. The amount of RF energy in that 50,000 watt tower was enough to cook snakes, rats, etc. which got close enough to the gear.

The tower itself is energized to the extent you wouldn't want to be within at least a few feet; see https://thenextweb.com/shareables/2016/02/11/what-happens-if...

I don't know if they offer tours at the WLW site itself, but I do know that in the VOA museum there is a lot of detailed info/history and items pertaining to WLW.

Here is a tour on YouTube https://youtu.be/CbHjcwIoTiY

100 KW tubes, those are monsters. Watercooling?

Yes. There's a pond on the site that was used for cooling the tubes.

The VoA museum near the WLW Antenna does give tours on the weekend of the VoA transmitter (Voices of America) that was located near the WLW Transmitter -- sadly, it's only open on the weekends, but, it's still a really fun tour that talks about the shortwave transmission history of VoA.

During Hamfest (usually held in Xenia now that Hara Arena is gone), you can usually get a tour of the WLW transmitter site.

> enough power to supply a town of one hundred thousand coursed through an 831-foot tower

That would mean 5W per inhabitant. In 2020, this would barely be enough to charge a phone, and in 1934 that would have been a light bulb per 20 citizens.

The power input to the transmitter is much larger than the power coming out of it. All those tubes generates a lot of heat.

So let's say this is 10% efficient, that means 50W per citizen. Clearly, there is something I'm not getting. Do power companies really budget 50W per user? I mean it's possible but that seems very low to me.

In 1934, electricity use was limited, and still fairly novel in many places. Utterly unavailable in much of the rural US (look into the rural electrical cooperatives).

Principle household uses would have been lighting and refrigeration, possibly a few clocks, a radio, and perhaps appliances.

Averaged over a day, draw per person could well have been only a few tens of watts. 50W per person for a household of four would be about 150 kWh per month, which sounds roughly reasonable.

The 2018 US average was 914 kWh/mo:

https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=97&t=3

In 1930, direct electrical use was only 1% of total household energy consumption. Coal was 69%, fuelwood still 23%. Expressed as kWh/mo (the source below has graphs giving nationwide trillions of BTU/yr electrical equivalent) the number looks closer to 80 kWh/mo, or 110 watt constant, about 28 watt/person assuming a family of four.

https://aceee.org/files/proceedings/1992/data/papers/SS92_Pa...

From experience with much smaller tube based end stages about 25% efficient.

Of course, for most broadcasters and regulators debating these broad delivery systems, “listeners” meant Americans who were white and middle or working class. Programming reinforced presumed middle class values. While some local stations offered programming targeted to ethnic groups, occupations, and even political beliefs, black Americans and other minority groups were largely left out of national radio, except as caricatures—usually played by white people—in comedy programs.

Why is this paragraph in the article? Do we have to make everything a wokeness contest? The article is about engineering, and this paragraph is a non sequitur plopped in the middle of it for no reason.

This is a history article, not an engineering article. It's published on the Magazine for the National Endowment of the Humanities. The article spends time discussing the perceived cultural potential of radio, as below:

"Since radio’s beginnings in the early 1920s, industry and government leaders promoted it as the great homogenizer, a cultural uplift project that could, among other things, help modernize and acculturate rural areas."

The paragraph you take such objection to follows that statement, and is entirely relevant in the context of the article.

Dovetails nicely with the previous paragraph, I think you doth protest too much.

"In the early days of broadcast development and regulation, Crosley and WLW sparked debate about what radio should and could be. Could a few clear-channel stations adequately serve—and acculturate—entire regions of listeners? Or would a national network system with local affiliates better target listener needs and interests?"

"The Magazine of the National Endowment for the Humanities" How is this excerpt not relevant to the stated mission of the publication? The article goes beyond the scope of mere engineering.

Half the article is about the cultural context; see also the stuff about rural access.

It's the Magazine of the National Endowment of the Humanity publication, so there you go.

Current most powerful is 2000 kW in France. How these modern ones are different from old times.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roumoules_radio_transmitter "..The longwave transmitter at Roumoules, which was inaugurated in 1974, transmits at 216 kHz (until 1988: 218 kHz) with a transmission power of 1400 kW (until 1976: 2000 kW)...."

Grew up listening to the Reds on WLW - it's current slogan is "The Big One" and it used to call itself "The Nation's Station".

I go camping once a year at the base of a 1.2 Mega Watt transmitter (It is a Navy Camping ground). Not AM, and at a Very Low Frequency, but still impressive! So far, I have not noticed any ill effects. Fingers crossed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Creek_Naval_Radio_Station

For those of you too young to remember the Crosley automobile:

http://www.classic-car-history.com/crosley-cars.htm

I remember in the sixties and seventies people dropping a small block V-8 into them to use as dragsters.

I came across a Crosley Shelvador, mentioned in the article, the first refrigerator with built-in shelves, apparently.

Built in the 1950s, by the early 1990s, the unit was 1) still functioning, 2) in absolutely beautiful condition, and 3) as or more efficient than modern "energy-efficient" refrigerators.

Home of the Reds. Been listening to it my whole life.

The last couple seasons were difficult for me to listen to Marty calling games because I thought he came across as very negative and embittered, but then his final season (this last season) was so much fun as he seemed to be enjoying it again even though it wasn't a good season for the team. I listened to games a lot more throughout the last season and then listened to parts or all of his last 20 or so games and it was so much fun. Really glad we still have the Cowboy. Baseball is such a great sport for the radio if you have good announcers.

I drive past this transmitter every day on my way to work, passing through Mason. Several times my son has asked what would happen if someone snapped on the support cables.

I grew up in western Ohio listening to WLW, and to this day, when I drive down I-75 and pass the Mason exit I say (to myself, or whoever is in the car w/ me) "Home of the transmitter" (as was the wont of 700 WLW personality Bill Cunningham to say any time Mason was mentioned on-air).

On a related note, here are actual recordings from WLW on the day of John F. Kennedy's assassination.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J75BAx4W3Zo&list=PL0O5WNzrZq...

A tour of the WLW faclility: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=3&v=CbHjcwIoTiY&...

For point of reference, the max power allowed in the US is 50kW

I don’t believe this is correct; when I look up the details of transmitters, they’re often 100kW+, e.g., https://fccdata.org/?lang=en&facid=62331 for an arbitrary example in Montana

Different power levels for different frequencies/services. Your arbitrary example is an FM station broadcasting at 94.5 MHz. AM broadcast stations are limited to 50KW. The FCC regulates ERP based on a number of factors including minimizing interference with other frequencies and a frequency's propagation characteristics. For example, UHF TV full-power transmitters power limit is one megawatt.

Can't remember ever closing an article I was interested in reading simply because I had difficulty processing the font. The narrow font face on the white background just makes it unbearable to look at, it's so narrow. It actually hurts my brain after a while.

for national security it would be best to shut this puppy down because it is broadcasting our position to extraterresterial civilizations, not all of whom may be friendly.

At AM radio frequencies, most of the radio waves are reflected back to earth or absorbed in the ionosphere. Same concept as how amateur radio HF/MF propagation allows individuals to communicate with people around the world, past the horizon. (The 160m ham band nearly backs right up to the top end of the AM radio band.) You can even sometimes hear your own echo, apparently, as the signals travel the entire way around the earth, although I've yet to experience this. (Recent Extra class licensed ham radio operator here. 73.)

Higher frequencies, on the other hand, are not reflected back by the ionosphere and go straight out into space. That's why you typically use VHF frequencies (30-300 MHz) for things like EME "earth-moon-earth" or "moonbounce" communication, or communication via satellite. So if your concern is about radio waves making our planet a beacon for aliens, you should be more concerned about FM radio towers than AM ones.

that is a good point, i always forget about the ionospheric plasma. however, there is going to be some amount of outbound re-radiation from the plasma. the sound quality by the time you get to alpha centauri is going to lousy but any alien civ capable of coming over here and sucking up our precious atmosphere is probably going to have good enough spectroscopy and computing to reconstruct our morning zoo broadcasts and judge that we are not worthy to have nitrogen.

I have a recording done long ago of my signal going around the world, I think maybe on 40m or 15m. It is pretty rare.

We'd need to blast a radio signal at about 100 million watts for it to hit the closest star with the same strength that Voyager is sending to us right now. Something like 4 light years away. If we consider how quickly signal strength decays, it's pretty easy to picture just how quiet we are. Our loudest tv stations are like 5% of that.

We think we're blasting a firehose off into space but we're spitting from a straw.

Would be true for omnidirectional transmission. Much much less for a directed transmission.

You'd have to know where the aliens are for that to matter!

Given the detection of exoplanets of approximately Earth mass orbiting in habitable zones, that's rapidly become tenable.

Laser / maser signalling would probably be about the best we could do for now.

Hitting a fixed target, from light-years away, with a signal stronger than cosmic background? Pretty sure a world-class team could get PhDs just for the attempt.

good points, but signal strength decay in the semivacuum of space really has to do more with the geometry of your emitter path vis a vis a fixed target (earth). so we get attenuation from the voyager but you can bet your sweet patootie that voyager is broadcasting our business to a gajillion other star systems even with a weak signal.

in which case deflections from the intergalactic ambient hydrogen is the only hope of mankind that they don't invert the signal back to our solar system with our primitive space force.

Do stars function as lenses for the AM band as well?

sure, they are just radio photons. i don't see why not!

Then the reach might be a lot further.

Military radars, su h as early missile warning systems, might achieve higher power signals, and their signals are much, much better focused.

that is a very good point. we should also shut down BMEWS and send a manned constellation up there to spot ICBMs visually. this is a good billet for the space force.

ICBM launch detection has been done since the 60s with satellites using infrared sensors to detect the heat emitted by the rocket engine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Support_Program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-Based_Infrared_System

> for national security

Don't you mean planetary security?

I stand corrected!

Planet America.

They'll hear the War of the Worlds prank broadcast and come rushing to our defense.

Watch Outer Limits, Galaxy Being episode!!!

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