Vintage radio broadcasting equipment

The kit was sold by a company called Ramsay Electronics. It was 1 watt and with the right antenna (which was quite visible on the roof of my friend's house. They lived right at the top of a hill) it did a good job of covering our small town. There was a brief time when we would get word of several house parties all tuning in when we started to play more dance music late at night. There would be requests from people all through the week at school to play this or that, or call a certain number because someone wanted to say something. This time also coincided with the very first MP3s and I was a "Vice President" of an irc "courier" group, so we could get all the latest stuff!

It only lasted one school year and my friends loved the notoriety, but I used to just sit there and day dream about the audio passing through the low and high pass filters that I had been constantly tweaking, and then being modulated and then re amplified before being pushed out. I still get an excited sensation just thinking about it.

Because tuning was a known "phenomenon" and having the possibility of using the radio spectrum for multiple transmission was desirable, efforts began to make transmissions more selective so they wouldn't pollute the whole radio spectrum.

Radio pioneers didn't have anything close to modern small, powerful, solid state, very close to sine oscillators at the time. They had to use what was available so they could modulate their transmission. In a simplified model, a radio transmission be thought of as an antenna whose electric potential varies with the sine of time at, for AM broadcasts, the order for hundred of kilohertz. This oscillation is then "multiplied" by the signal one want to transmit. Better results occur when the "transmitted signal" (think about it as something close to a payload) has a much lower frequency than the "carrier": the frequency at which the potential of the antenna would oscillate to transmit a constant value.

Now, early broadcast really worked around the technology available at the time. To oscillate the electric potential of the antenna, they resorted to eletromechanical methods. Very interesting solutions were developed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spark-gap_transmitter#Rotary_g...

The only reason I got the job is because I could figure out how to use the interface: the other two kids from high school who went with me couldn't manage to record audio from the interview.

I remember so many late nights running football, basketball, and other games during the summer...only to turn around and do an afternoon game the next day, then my usual 4-midnight station rotation, all while making around $5/hour.

http://oldradios.com/radios/index.htm

Not quite abandoned but not recently updated.