Jim:
That must have been quite the tour, for sure! I had it on my bucket list to
visit the facility when it was still up and running. Bethany VOA offered tours
for years, but on the same weekend as the then Dayton Hamfest. As youngster, we
all want to believe that such things will be there forever.
When I first started driving back in '82, I would make up reasons to drive over
that way, and tour the roads in and around those magnificent towers that
supported the many Rhombics, and Curtain antennas.
Even though the antenna farm was not a being, it was disconcerting to watch as
the towers were felled, bringing all 625 acres of antennas to the ground bit by
bit. I seem to recall that a small group of lucky hams were able to hook up to
some of the antennas, and make some QSOs before it all came down.
100 watts into a Rhombic or Curtain antenna, that was electrically steerable,
had to have been quite the hoot!
Don
On Saturday, September 10, 2022, 07:53:49 PM EDT, Jim Brown
<jim@audiosystemsgroup.com> wrote:
On 9/10/2022 4:01 PM, Donald Fox via Amps wrote:
> We all know that the internet is a mixed blessing. Lots of good stuff, but
> also very bad if one seeks it out. I find it quite amazing, to watch a VOA or
> similar class transmitters being brought up, and put online. I've lived no
> more than an hour away from Bethany, Ohio which many know was a VOA site
> until 1994.
> Near by WLW in Mason, Ohio is on the air today covering 37 states at night,
> and 9 in the daytime if I recall correctly, with 50kw on 700kc.
>
> There is quite a history there, back when WLW ran 500kw! That figure is hard
> to wrap my brain around, as we are talking brute power, before any sort of
> antenna gain came into play. The sheer magnitude of such an operation, and
> the fact that this amount of RF could be generated in one place back when
> they did it, is quite a feat in my opinion.
Back in 1964, our senior EE class got to tour that site. We'd just
finished our course in transmission lines, so it was a wonderful lab!
I'd been a ham since '55, so I knew about Rhombics (of which there were
around two dozen) but the two Sterba Curtains were new to me.
73, Jim K9YC
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