Beep Beep!

No, this is not a story about the Road Runner and Wiley the Coyote or the song by the Playmates. It is a story about something that has passed into the mists of time.

In the 60s, most radio station that did not have their studios located at their transmitter sites connected them by a special telephone circuit that they rented from Ma Bell. These special circuits were routed through a master switchboard operated by the phone company that was called the Toll Test Office. Even if the studio and the transmitter were located on the same side of town and Toll Test was on the other side of town, the circuit was run from the studio to the phone office and then from there to the transmitter.

There were a few stations who operated transmitters so far away from their studios that they could not hear the transmitter from the studio. A good example of this would be the famous 50,000 watt blowtorch in Jacksonville Florida, WAPE – the mighty 690. Their daytime transmitter was located at the “Radio Country Club”, the swimming pool equipped studio building in Orange Park Florida. However at night time, they were required to protect stations in Canada and Cuba from interference. So their night time transmitter was located west of Jacksonville just off Normandy Blvd. near Baldwin. Their six tower directional array created a very tight pattern into Jacksonville so tight that it could not be heard at the studio on the St John’s River. Back in those days, the on air presenters were required by the FCC to monitor what was on the air, live. So for WAPE and other similar stations the answer was to rent a second circuit to carry the on air signal from a radio receiver at the transmitter back to the studio where it was played in the control room monitors and the DJs headphones.

This was true not only for the connections between studio and transmitter but also for inbound signals from the radio networks; NBC, CBS, ABC, and Mutual. Also most “remote” broadcasts from car dealerships, department stores and drive in restaurants used this “hub and spoke” configuration.

The reason for this is that it allowed the telephone company technicians to troubleshoot problems when they occurred.

And so, this is the background for one of the strangest events in my personal radio history.

I was in my first full time year at WCOS – AM in Columbia, SC, playing the tunes on the “Top 60 in Dixie” on the “All Night Satellite” from 1 AM until 6 AM. That was pretty heady stuff, hearing my voice running through the spring based reverb unit at the foot of the console and the hot tubes of our RCA transmitter located a few miles northeast of the Cornell Arms studio downtown. That was made possible by the fact that because the on air signal travelled to my headphones at the speed of light and it was nearly the speed of light in a toll test circuit. The little bit of atmospheric static from nearby summer thunderstorms added to the magic of it all.

One night, I was rocking and rolling the 45’s when all of a sudden, I couldn’t hear anything on the monitor except for the dead air on the transmitter’s carrier. I jumped up to check the remote control panel and confirmed that the transmitter was up and running. “Humph,” I thought, “what happened?”

Just then I heard an ear splitting “beep beep beep” in my headphones. I instantly I knew that it was a test tone coming from a telephone lineman’s test set. They used these little boxes to put a “beep beep” tone on a telephone line so they can trace it from pole to pole. Unfortunately for my tender ears and those of my audience, some lineman working the overnight shift had clipped his test box onto the telephone line that carried the audio signal from the station to the transmitter.

I quickly shut down the transmitter so as to not damage it as the test signal was significantly louder than the station’s audio. So loud that it over powered the signal processers at the transmitter. I called the Toll Test office on the number that I got off the emergency call list on the wall near our RadioTelephone Operator’s Licenses and got a quick response. I told the Toll Test technician that I heard a lineman’s test signal on our air. He knew which station because we were the only one on the air. He knew who I was from my voice because he listened to the show, but had turned down the radio in order to work on another problem.

He connected to our circuit with his test panel and said. I don’t hear anything. I opened the microphone and said “Testing 1, 2, 3, 4,” not very original, I know but he said that he could hear me. In telephone lingo that would be “The trouble is leaving here fine!” I.E. the signal is good through his monitor point. I said turn up your radio and then turned the transmitter on for a moment. “Ouch,” he said, “that’s one of our test sets alright. We have a lineman working on a circuit on Edgewood Avenue near your transmitter. I’ll call him on the two way radio.

For the next 10 minutes, I turned the transmitter on for a moment, and if I heard the tone, turned it off, until finally I was relieved to hear silence. I turned on the microphone and did a station ID, announced that WCOS was returning to the air after some technical difficulties, and spun up the 45 RPM record that has been sitting patiently on turntable number one to be played.

A short while later I received a call from the Toll Test Operator confirming the problem had been located and corrected. He also made a request that I was glad to play for him. No, it wasn’t “Wichita Lineman,” Glen Campbell would not hit our charts for a couple more years. Around four that afternoon, I received a call at home from Woody, our Program Director. He asked what the heck happened. You see, every time I turned on or off the transmitter, I had to make log entry that I had done that. Woody had just sat down to do his show and noticed the entries. He laughed and said that could happen to only you. He told me to be sure to make a log entry on that day’s log explaining what happened when I came in that afternoon. I never did hear from our grizzled old chief engineer about the log entry. He was near retirement and had probably seen that before.

These days, broadcasters no longer use analog telephone lines to connect the studios to the transmitters. On air presenters no longer listen to the output of the transmitters, they can’t. For most stations, there is a delay between what you say on the microphone and when it is transmitted over the air. Part of that is in purpose, a 10 second “delay/dump” circuit so the DJ can “dump” a naughty utterance or song lyric before it leaves the studio. In most FM transmitters, there is also a delay of about 7 seconds as it processes the digital signal it receives from the usually fiber optic connection to the studio and sends it to the antenna. Being and old school guy, I miss not being able to hear the warm live signal complete with all the processing and the shaping of those red hot transmitter tubes. Several times during my Monday morning WUSC-FM oldies show, I walk out of the control room to the drinking fountain in the hallway. I am usually a little startled to hear my voice on the radio in the lobby still announcing the song that is playing. That is one thing we could not do back in the day. Oh MY!