Unfortunately, due to competitive advantages RCA had, there were limited opportunities for Westinghouse. It was thought it would avoid phone and telegraph costs. Of course, KDKA ended up becoming famous for being a broadcasting station. At the time, radio stations in the country were regulated with the standard practice to give call letters that start with W for those east of the Mississippi River. As one of the beginners in radio KDKA struggled a lot with sound issues.
It was later found that the tent material helped with sound. The material led to the modern studio design and noise-absorbing walls. Just months later, the station became the first to broadcast a college football game. The station played lots of big band and jazz as well as special news programming like the coverage of the St. In , live coverage of the inauguration of former Pittsburgh Mayor David L.
Lawrence was broadcasted. In , Bill Steinbach started a year career with the station. He anchored the to-6 news program. The station was still considered conservative though. Its morning show turned into more news and commercials than music. The changeover from music and news to only talk radio occurred on April 10, Three years after that, KDKA celebrated its 90th anniversary by covering the election. The anniversary was sponsored by Westinghouse Electric Company.
The rights to the Pirates were welcomed back to the station in In a bid to improve signal strength in Pittsburgh, Westinghouse moved the Saxonburg tower in to the present tower site in Allison Park, about a dozen miles closer to downtown. The Saxonburg site remained in use for shortwave under the W8XK calls until the end of the war, and was eventually donated to the nuclear physics program at the Carnegie Institute of Technology now Carnegie Mellon for the construction of a cyclotron.
After the cyclotron was dismantled in the s, the Saxonburg site became home to the high-tech firm II-VI Corporation , which remains there today. At this site, unlike WBZ and KYW, there's still an original transmitter to be seen: entering the main transmitter hall from the front door, the entire left side of the room is still taken up by the mammoth Westinghouse 50HG transmitter, complete with original control console.
I have heard - but have not confirmed - that this transmitter was actually designed to do kW, had the FCC allowed it; KDKA's application for kW that was filed in was dismissed at Westinghouse's request in The Westinghouse was eventually joined by a pair of Gates MW50s in the s, which eventually gave way to Harris DX50s and 3DX50s - and it's been many years since the Westinghouse ran.
There's an interesting story, possibly apocryphal, about how the Westinghouse gave its last performance on the night the Pirates won the World Series, when vandals shorted the tower base - and while the MW50s couldn't operate into the shorted tower, the Westinghouse saved the day, running at very low efficiency. If it's not true, it should be Behind the main transmitter room is an engineering shop, where engineer Roy Humphrey shows off an unusual air monitor: a crystal set, blasting away loudly from the workbench, complete with IBOC hiss.
There's a garage on the north side of the building, and on the south side are rooms that once housed engineers and today are used for storage. Down in the basement are the vaults where the rectifiers and power transformer for the Westinghouse once sat; today, it's used for storage, including some interesting relics of the old KDKA-FM stacked in a corner.
0コメント