"And now for something completely different..."

[Mike O'Dell]

can someone explain why in the bad old days,
AM transmitters were almost always plate-modulated
in the finals? this required the modulator to have
a substantial fraction of the horsepower the
RF finals had. this was especially spectacular
for the big AM BCB stations.

why didn't they AM the signal when it was "small"
and easy to do and then just use a linear final
so all the muscle went into the signal instead
of heating the modulation transformer?

what am I missing here??

	-mo

-- 
"Of course it's hard!
If it was easy, we'd be buying it from somebody else!"