Radio In The Good Old Days

Posted in In the Trenches.

[April 2025] Radio today is very much different than several decades ago. And not just because studios have become little more than a microphone and a computer. As Ron Schacht recalls, in the Good Old Days, life was never dull. Older engineers will remember this well. Younger folks may find this taste of the way stations operated interesting or frightening.

If you are a broadcast engineer in a radio station these days, you probably have more than one station to watch over. You are also an IT expert because everything today, from the announcer to the antenna, is IT based.

There were days, though, when radio was a lot of fun: namely in the 60’s and 70’s, the days of Top 40 AM radio.

THE STUDIOS WERE FULLER

Now, not all stations were Top 40 but pretty much all stations were the same – just less hostile than the Top 40 guys.

To start out, you had turntables to play records, you had cart machines to play spots (music on carts came later) you had a couple of reel-to-reel tape machines for long form programs like news.

Speaking of news, it was supplied by a network line if you were an affiliate, otherwise a model 15 teletype machine sat in a little hot closet and chugged out news on canary yellow paper 24/7. Without plastic gloves, changing the ribbon gave you purple fingers for days, then that little piece of Christmas garland that kept the paper from building up a static charge.

As a bonus, about once a month a truck load of boxes of paper came which, you the engineer, you had to help carry.

PRESENTING THE MUSIC

In the older (post-war) days, the turntables provided all the music.

The turntables had felt glued to the top so the jocks could “slip cue” – and a little round disk to accommodate the 45’s (sometimes the disk was glued to an LP, for easier handling). They would put the record on the turntable, and run it back and forth to get the stylus (needle if you were AM) right at the first note.

Then they would hold the record and turn on the motor so the turntable rotated with the record slipping on the felt. At the precise moment, saying something like “Here is Eight Days a Week by The Beatles!” he or she would let go of the record and off it went spinning away on the air.

TURNTABLE MAINTENANCE

With all that mechanical action, you would expect there would be regular attention to the turntables. And there was a lot to do.

For example: about every 6 months or so, I would go to the fabric store to buy a couple yards of felt (“Hi, Do you have this in green?”) and cut out round circles to glue on the turntables. It was a good time to check the rubber idler wheel and the lubrication of the bearing to ensure the turntable drive as smooth and consistent.

Then there were the “needles.” Besides turning the records backwards to cue and putting nasty cue burns on the first note, the styli suffered the wear and usually got replaced when the diamond fell off – or when a careless DJ bent the stylus. Those cue burns got worse and worse. On some records were so bad, when I first heard Ruby Tuesday on FM, I was amazed to learn that Mik Jagger did not have a speech impediment, it was the cue burn on the first word “she” that made it sound like schchcheeee that I heard on every Top 40 station.

SORT OF HANDLING SKIPS

One instance where I arrived at the station, the jock told me “turntable two keeps skipping and sounds bad” but he got it working; maybe I should check it.

I walked into the control room and there – sitting on top of the tone arm – right above the cartridge was a salt shaker. Not just a salt shaker but one of those glass and stainless steel ones like restaurants use, about two pounds worth.

Needless to say, after making the turntable into a lathe, there were vinyl shavings all over. A lot of records needed replacement.

CONSOLES AND THE AUDIO CHAIN

In the Good Old Days, you had consoles with Daven rotary faders that you religiously cleaned and oiled with genuine Davenoil during overnight maintenance so the 2 dB steps were less obvious.

Then it was time to change the 6F6’s in the program amp (and burn your hands), and maybe a couple of either 12AX7’s or 6J7’s depending on the board. Also, you needed to check the key switches, especially those used to carry current to run the turntables, for dirt, arcing, or other damage to the contacts.

Then we had the “processing” which in those days was probably either an RCA BA6 limiter with a GE Unilevel or Gates Sta-Level but most likely a CBS Audimax/Volumax combo. Of course, you modified the Audimax so it had instant attack and release times and ran the Volumax “in the red” all the time.

TRANSMITTER FUN

If you were unfortunate enough to have the transmitter co-located – especially if it was a kilowatt – you usually had to contend with the GM and the PD telling you that they wanted to see the modulators, be they 4-400’s or 833A’s glowing like the sun or else the modulation was too low.

If the transmitter was remote, well, you probably had a Rust remote control with its dedicated phone lines. If it was the one with the rotary switch and the jock clicked it backwards by mistake, that took you right off-the-air. If it had the telephone dial model and the jock did not pull his finger out of the dial hole when it was returning, yes you went off-the-air. Oh, if you had the Gates remote with all of its tube oscillators, you never knew when it would go off for no good reason, you found out when the jock called to report being off-the-air.

Of course, only one station out of a thousand used STL’s. Everyone else relied on phone lines to the transmitter, which would “blow a carbon” in just about every other thunderstorm and put a huge 60 cycle hum on the air until the phone company came out.

REMOTE FUN

Then there were the “remotes.” At some stations, there were some remotes every day, even sometimes several a day. And that is not counting play-by-play local sports.

Generally, you had a couple of permanent “loops” to the local phone office. You would order a loop for Saturday morning to Sam’s Grocery and another for Saturday afternoon to a fireman’s carnival, and another on Saturday night to a fireworks display (I never figured why we did radio remotes from a fireworks display, but I was only the engineer). The phone company would put the lines in and tie them to your local loops which in most stations came up on a patch bay.

So, on Saturday morning, I would grab the little Collins remote unit – a small table with removable legs, a small 4-input board in the middle, and a turntable on either side – and take it to Sam’s Grocery, find the phone line which was never the actual place from where they wanted to do the remote, and run a twisted pair to the Collins, being careful that no one would trip on the wire and sue us. Then we would set up the off-air receiver and a PA system.

If you were lucky, not only did the jock back at the studio patch into the correct line but the line actually worked. Of course, there was no such thing as cell phones so you would tell the jock over the remote line, “if you can hear me, cut the music off for a second.” (Ahh, it cut, and it all worked!)

Predictably, the remotes started at 10 AM and the talent showed up at 10:04, a minute before the network news ends. He did not like the records you had cued up so he put his own on, probably to make sure he got his payola quota in.

And, if you were set up outside, you could be sure one of two things will happen during the remote: Either it will rain or the sun will get so hot that the records warp on the turntables which will slow down from the heat expanding the shaft in the bushings.

Something else to remember: we always carried a few spare needles for when the talent let some 5-year- old in the audience cue up a record and slide the tone arm across the label – or dig it into the felt.

MOVING ALONG … QUICKLY

As soon as that remote is finished, you generally had about 20 minutes to drive to the next remote – which is 25 minutes away.

The setup was the same thing and hopefully the jock back at the studio could find where this remote was on the patch bay.

All-in-all, I usually got back home at midnight after the fireworks remote dead tired, sweaty, ears ringing, and hoping the church remote on Sunday morning goes ok so I could sleep late.

SPORTS TIME!

So then, the sports guys have this huge championship game going on; State Champions!

Every business in the listening area has thrown money at the station to sponsor the “big game.” We checked and double checked the Collins 212 mixer and mikes, made sure the phone line was ordered and had the phone company check it back to the studio the day before the game.

The sports guys left early in the morning to get to the game and get set up, so we went to the studio to make sure it starts ok. Yup, good line, nice clean audio from the game. It is 12:30; the game starts at One.

I figured I would wait there until they got going, then head home.

Ahhh, one o’clock arrives and you hear “Live from the Bla Bla field here in downtown somewhere

this is Bob and Jack bringing you all the action in the state championship being made possible by …….. ………..”

A DIFFERENT KIND OF REMOTE FUN

What? Nothing but dead air.

Looking at the board, meters were moving, checked the program out, all is fine, but the transmitter is off.

So we ran to the remote control to find it dead, no meter readings anywhere; was the power out or the phone line out. Then it was racing on to the transmitter, slowing down to 40 to go through all the stop signs on the way.

At the site: hmmmm, filaments are on, plate is off so we put the remote in local control and turned the plates on. A nice, clean carrier, but there was no audio. The next thought: “why did that bonehead at the studio cut the audio feed” was answered when you picked up the transmitter phone to give him a piece of your mind – and found no dial tone.

I finally realized the entire phone cable coming into the transmitter was dead. Another rapid drive, back to the studio, so we could call Ma Bell. Of course, since it was Saturday they had to find a crew to get out there. Half hour later, there came a phone guy. He hooked his test set up and drove away looking for the fault.

Thirty minutes later I went out looking for him by following the cable. About two miles from the transmitter I found him holding the end of a 1000 pair cable.

RECOVERING FROM ALL THE FUN

Seems a garbage truck, the kind that hauls away dumpsters, drove through with the dumpster picking up arms sticking straight up and broke the cable. Estimated time of repair: eight hours.

The phone guy was nice but cannot help. I told him “maybe we can just find our audio wires and splice them together to get the game on.” There are 1000 pairs. He handed me his butt set and said “have a ball.” About 20 minutes later I found the station audio and was able to match up the pair running to the transmitter. He “blippied” them together, I ran back and turned the carrier on and there was the game. (The guys at the game had no idea the first 90 minutes of the game were lost.) The telephone splicers finally got there and were really upset because now they had to work around the one spliced pair – but they did until the game ended.

At least, the best part of it all: our team won the state championship!

FUN WITHOUT PHONE LINES

This brings us to Marti equipment.

Ma Bell kept raising her rates for those remote loops so management called me in to discuss ways to save money. I suggested we buy a couple of Marti RPU (remote pickup) systems and got a quote for two VHF systems and a UHF system.

While we were waiting for delivery, we got the paperwork filed to license them and by the time the gear is delivered we were licensed. I had put up a nice 10 element VHF yagi on a 30-foot tower next to the studio with a rotator (getting a permit for the tower was no easy task). We had a couple of VHF whips and a couple of 5-element yagis with masts and tripods to use at the remote location. Yes, as you might guess, no one wanted to try to set them up so it was again, my job.

WHEN THE REMOTE IS REMOTE FROM THE REMOTE

Did you ever notice that when you wanted to set up a radio remote, the one and only door or hole in the wall to get your antenna outside was on the side of the building away from the radio studio.

So, either you had to point the yagi back into the metal building you need to get a signal out of or putting the Marti transmitter a mile away and running 5000 feet of mike cable to where the remote was happening.

Ah ha, that is why I bought the UHF link. I would go from the inside of the store to the outside of the store on UHF and then feed that into the VHF back to the station. It sounded great and if all went well, it solved the issue. However, usually this relay point outside of the store had no AC power available and heaven forbid if you had to leave a door open to run a cord out. No problem, I made 12-Volt cords for the UHF receiver and the VHF transmitter.

Now, these were vacuum tube Marti’s so my last words to the talent, “go out back and start the station car about once an hour and let it run for 20 minutes or so to keep the battery from going dead.” Well, guess who gets called about three-quarters of the way through the remote with the message “the remote quit and the car won’t start.” Going back to the remote with a set of jumper cables, I decided I might as well just stay until the remote is over.

Sure. As you guessed: no one ever went out to start the car which by the way had two batteries installed for just that reason.

NEWER SOLUTIONS, NEWER OOPS

By now, the Top 40 jocks came to realize you can put music on these tape cartridges and they cue right up.

No more needles, slip cues, salt shakers, etc. This is great. And so it was until the jock who walked into the station a few minutes before his show and pulled all the carts he needed and stacked them up next to where he was sitting.

He grabbed his phones, pulled them over to put them on, the phone cord wrapped around the bottom cart, and the whole stack crashed to the floor in a blood curdling noise. He ran around, forgetting he had his phones on and snapped the phone plug off in the console jack.

Every cartridge that hit the floor had the pressure pads either broken or displaced, so every song he played sounded like it was playing through a sock – the response was flat from 50 – 300 Hz.

RECOVERY MODE

Meanwhile there was a panic call to the engineer to put a new plug on the headphones and get the broken plug out of the jack on the board.

Once on site, it alone required half an hour to get enough stuff off the board, remove the copy stand other stuff to gain entrance to the board – places where there were dust bunnies the size of house cats, as well as sticky areas where someone spilled a coffee or a can of pop.

Meanwhile the engineer has to try not to be in the way of “the show,” which is going on in spite of you.

https://www.nautel.com/products/fm-transmitters/gv-series/

<strong><a href=”https://www.nautel.com/products/fm-transmitters/gv-series/?utm_source=BDR+ROS2&utm_medium=Banner&utm_campaign=gv2+justaudio”>www.nautel.com</a></strong>

CARTS WERE GREAT, BUT …

Aside from such mishaps, music on cartridges made operations much easier for the air talent. For the engineer, not so much. For example, if I do not clean the tape heads no one will, and then everything sounds like it is going through several socks.

Then there was the ITC triple deck cartridge machine; a wonderful device. A friend once told me that if you have to change the coupling caps in the tone decoders in one more than once you have worked at the station too long. It was always a thrill when the top bearing goes bad – anything played in the top deck sounds like Tiny Tim with an overabundance of vibrato.

Considering the way the jocks slam those carts into the slots, the only effective solution was to take it all to the bearing place, where they could change the bearings in the Beau motor along with the top capstan bearing.

TURNTABLES LOSE THEIR CACHE

The advent of music on cartridge took over quickly.

It was just so easy to play music on carts. In short order, the turntables were used only for “special songs” like album cuts which generally only happened at night, or overnight, when the jock on duty knew the GM was in bed, so he dragged out the album rock like King Crimson or Spooky Tooth.

Of course, since the turntable had not been used for months, and had been left in gear, it goes “thump thump thump,” so at 3 AM my phone rang: he needed the turntable right now. I would have to run out in the dark to change the D-shaped idler wheel.

AS LONG AS YOU ARE THERE

After all that, there was no sense in going to bed, besides inhaling the funny smoke from the weird cigarette the overnight guy was smoking made me not want to sleep any more.

So, I either go into the shop and stack the tubes in alphabetical order or go out to the transmitter and clean out the air filters that are clogged with Mayflies from yesterday’s hatch. The sunlike glow of the modulators draws them inside through the air intake louvres.

It was just becoming dawn, the tower lights are all working fine, the sun was coming up on the horizon. All is well until, CLUNK, BANG, BANG, BANG … silence. It was pattern change time and the contactor out at tower 4 was stuck in night mode. A couple of clunk clunks back and forth with the controller and it finally released and made the day pattern. I would go out to tower 4 and spray some silicon on it and hope for the best.

ALWAYS SOMETHING TO DO

Not that all the above events occurred in one day, still, another broadcast day started with the Screaming Eagle morning show, you knew he was playing Suite Judy Blue Eyes because he needed to take care of some personal issues – it would take 7 minutes at least.

Taking stock of what was going on, I decided to get some breakfast and then go back to the studio to address the other needs of the day? Should I replace the bad ballast in the florescent light in the sales office, should I replace the wax ring in the ladies’ room toilet, which is leaking from the 500 pound traffic woman, maybe put a new plug on the coffee maker.

Well, as you can see, engineering at a small market radio station in those days required knowledge of everything except IT, mostly because there was no IT then!

What else can I say except those were the days when radio was really fun!

Ron Schacht (K3FUT) has been a radio engineer for over 60 years, during which he has built some 100 stations, including a dozen with directional antennas. You can connect with Ron at screamingeagle@wctatel.net.

– – –

Would you like to know when more articles like this are published? It will take only 30 seconds to
click here and add your name to our secure one-time-a-week Newsletter list.
Your address is never given out to anyone.

Return to The BDR Menu

The Broadcasters' Desktop Resource