AM transmitter auction

[bbruhns at erols.com]

I have friends who set up a part 15 "talking house" station on 1620 KHz in Sterling, and made two comical ads for their gym, that played 24-7.  It coupled into the high tension lines along the WOD Trail, and it carried for miles.  They would love this transmitter, but I told them the FCC would get them if they ran any power.  Unfortunately, they moved away, so their silly ads are gone now.

I guess the funding for the traffic info stuff was cut back around 2009, because they mostly went off the air around then.  That was good, because all most of them did was broadcast useless IDs all day long, and occasional Public Address style announcements for security drills that shouldn't have been broadcast on them at all.  They got the callsigns wrong, and said "broadcasting on sixteen-forty megahertz!"  If there was a storm or power outage, they could be counted on to be broadcasting recordings of storm information from five months earlier, or just the usual constant IDs.  Useless!  I guess some big campaign contributors had been in business selling the transmitters and setting the stations up.

After they mostly went silent after 2009, sometimes one would pop up and play music all day, and then go off the air again. 

The audio is horrible on some transmitter models, too.  Ugh!!!  The one on 1630 for NOVA in Sterling (college info) has the world's worst audio compressor, and the one on 1650 in Fairfax (city info) has the world's worst high frequency response.  Fairfax County was simulcasting on 1670 until around 2009, and it sounded like shortwave selective fading.  Its audio was ok otherwise.  The info station on 1670 from the Udvar-Hazy Center has crummy compression, but not nearly as bad as the NOVA station on 1630.  The ones that popped up and played music sounded good, though.  Haven't heard that in a few years.

  Bob, WA3WDR


Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry