This 100-year-old tech splits my voice in five

Geerling Engineering encounters a phasor at the 8-tower site of WSDZ-AM in Belleville, IL—formerly a Radio Disney station!

Special thanks to Aaron Cox and Relevant Radio for letting us see this tower site!

Resources mentioned in this video:

Contents:

00:00 - It splits your voice?
00:59 - Set Phasor to 'stun'
05:26 - Day and night patterns
07:33 - A 'dummy' load?
10:38 - Signal routing and monitoring
11:44 - Power and a massive grounding system
13:59 - Strange parts
17:14 - Designing an 8-tower array

[andrewweiss]

I was the ABC-Disney midwest regional engineer and this facility was one of the stations I was responsible for.

[adamosity]

Warmed my heart knowing the engineer forgot to turn on the dummy load fans and owned it. I have had plenty of big mistakes at work. Much respect for businesses that accept human element in any financial machine. That radio station has got to be a great place to work.

[networkg]

Something special about seeing a son give dad a platform to discuss his life's work. Great content too !

[blanchae]

Back in the 1980s, I was in some 100 kilowatt AM transmitter sites and the energy was so powerful you could hear the AM station through the random vibration of the building. The building was demodulating the signal through vibrations.

[CoreyThompson]

You also need to show a TX site with a "poor man's" phasor, different lengths of feedline coiled in the basement to feed the towers at different phase angles...
I've seen a couple of those at small stations.

[MrBeaker]

I have so little knowledge about radio, and electrical engineering, but I still just absolutely am fascinated by this channel and the stuff we get to see. Great work folks!

[justjoe]

This one was EXTREMELY interesting! :)
It's very rare to see the technology for transmitting at this kinds of power.
We were joking 30 years ago that some Italian HAM operators are using the heat of their power amplyfiers to heat whole towns, the contest beeing limited to 50W and they were bending our antennas a few hunred kilometers away :D

[stevepoling]

Looking at your radio propagation charts reminds me of when I tool Quantum Mechanics and my prof, a ham radio operator, told me that the same partial differential equations governing electron orbitals were used in antenna design.

[pileofstuff]

My first job out of college was with a company who (among other things) built and installed phasing&matching panels for AM stations.

It's a unique experience working with a circuit that you need to "bend from the knees" to manipulate.

[kopspijker]

The most important machine: The coffee machine.

[Egam]

I used to be a Broadcast engineer in the 80s and this bring me so many memories. Thanks for sharing. BTW my broadcast life was in South America, dealing with equipment from the 40s next to a Harris DX50. 😊

[starmap]

Love it. Such a beautiful setup. Was thinking the whole time "WHAT A BEAST".
Everything in that tower control room is a monster size component to what we usually meet in daily life.
The honesty of these people is amazing. That's how you know you are dealing with intelligent people.

[Doctorbasss]

Thanks for your great presentation Your chanel is awsome! I was not really focussed on antenna and RF but the way you transmit your passion is catching our attention for sure!!

[rvamark]

I really enjoy these videos showing the big AM radio installations. I went to college in the St. Louis area in the late 60's, and woke up to KXOK playing Aretha Franklin singing Respect...every morning for a couple of years. We listened to KMOX as well, where we tuned in to Cardinal Baseball if my memory is correct. The Topo map someone is holding at 4:46 shows the Horseshoe Lake area just south of Granite City, Il. Brings back lots of memories.

[unixgod]

I howled when your Dad said “Measure twice and cut once”. My Dad used to repeat that to me all the time! Your Dad is the bestest!!❤

[thewebmachine]

I love this video series! The way we transmit radio, in particular, is an amazing feat of physics and engineering. All the interplay of phases, directionality, wave forming, etc is intense. I used to know an old tower rigger that had been around since the AM deployment days (by contrast, my specialty is in WWAN and P2MP) and he used to show me all sorts of wild equipment at the towers we worked at.

[thallium]

LOVE these videos. AMAZING peek into things most of us will never see. Especially those interested in RF.

[ed.puckett]

Thank you, this was fascinating! Even little tidbits of information like your father's passing comment about PEP stations. I had to look that up. Cool stuff!

[BairdBanko]

Very cool, I never quite realized why I see clusters of multiple towers. Also cool to see the amount of equipment that goes into running a station like this. Thanks for sharing!

[KEZZO]

TLDR. It’s a phaser. Is splits signal into 5 identical signals and shifts the waveform ( time). So if you are between the path of 2 towers u actually receive both signals mixed are in phase and not shifted to sound hollow ( telephone voice). Reason for the extra towers is you send less power to a particular tower to shape its coverage area - you don’t want your signal interfere with another station to Ie sw on same frequency or costal city do not need to have 100 % coverage of the gulfs of mexico