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Shannon’s Broadcast by Shannon Huniwell |
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There’s a radio term that some insiders use to describe powerful stations—flamethrower! Typically, it’s a euphemism for any 10,000- to 50,000-watt AM, but the nickname has also been loosely assigned to FM outlets with mountaintop antenna height and at least 50 kW of effective radiated power (ERP). To be sure, there have long been “big” stations pumping all kinds of AM radio frequency energy into some handicapped directional array that shoots a pencil thin pattern or sends much of the signal out to sea. New London, Connecticut’s now defunct WNLC (see Pop’ Comm, November 2002) serves as a case in point. Ideally, though, a flamethrower projects through a single, non-directional stick, or via a couple of towers’ worth of RF, typically yielding a simple pattern (such as a huge figure “8”), and blankets at least several states at night. The Nation’s Station Nowhere in American radio broadcast history is there a better example of an AM superpower than Cincinnati’s WLW. Dubbed “the nation’s station” during the Great Depression, WLW ran a blazing half-million watts over its assigned 700-kilocycle frequency from the spring of 1934 until early 1939. Powell Crosley, the famed baseball team owner, appliance/ radio maker, and car manufacturer who owned WLW secured Federal Radio Commission (and later FCC) permission to transmit 10 times the power of any other maximum facility (50-kW) U.S. stations. As you can imagine, coverage was extraordinary. At night, the 500 kW was so potent that regulators, bowing to pressure from radio officials in other countries, soon told Crosley he could only use his giant RCA transmitter during daylight hours when skywave propagation was at a minimum. Even Adolph Hitler could get it. The evil dictator was reportedly annoyed with WLW blasting into Berlin and, incidentally, entertaining Germans with its quintessentially wholesome American programming.
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In the tradition of a Cold War civil defense brochure,
the Clear Channel Superpower pamphlet hinted that the fate of many should
be in a few dependably strong hands. Note that the listeners depicted in
the upper right are all rural. |
