[geeks] While on the subject of weirdness

[wa2egp at att.net]

> today am and fm broadcasters are limited by the fcc to 50kw.  a few,
> like wgbh-fm here in boston, run more because they were already in
> operation when the rules were set.  iirc all the handful of 100kw fm
> stations are pbs...  i can personally attest that 'gbh has been dxed
> as far south as delaware/maryland more than once, as i was at the
> station on the phones two of the times.
> 
> but back in the '20s several of the three-letter am stations ran as
> much as a megawatt and sold cheap 'radios' little more than two
> stamped steel dishes back-to-back, with a little bit of corrosion
> 'diode' where they touched.  close to the towers, chain link fences
> could 'receive' broadcasts.

50 kW IS still a bit of power.  My father used to run 1 kW on the 75 mtr
ham band and we had voices coming out of the toilet (real fun with 
guests) and my mother used to get sparks off of the faucet at the
kitchen sink. This was plate modulated AM so you can imagine the
rack mounted stuff, mercury vapor rectifiers, "steering wheel" knob
on the autotransformer where you crank up the voltage until passing
cosmic rays made the rectifiers flash over, the dimming of the lights
when you modulated..(now insert Tim Allen grunting noises), well,
you get the picture.  Now fifty times the power...that's a buttload
of RF in the immediate area.  Sometimes people forget that the
signal provides the power for the crystal radio and if built right
with a lot of capture area in the antenna, you get some serious
volume.  I had one homemade job in the back of my classroom in one
school that had only a 50 foot antenna.  One girl in the back of the
room thought she was going crazy because she kept hearing music
everytime she came to my class.  I kept forgetting to "turn it off" :)

Bob