This is an overview of a 500,000 Watt radio transmitter site. It’s one of the slides shared in a guided video tour of the transmitter’s hardware. The radio station — whose call sign was WLW — called itself the Nation’s Station because of its ability to reach so much of the country.
It operated at the 500 kW level starting back in the 1930’s. The technology at the time meant that there were a lot of challenges involved with transmitting at this level of power. It took 750 kW input to achieve the 500 kW output. To reach that the station had a set of AC motors in the basement generating the 4500 Amps at 33 Volts DC needed to power the transmitter to heat each filament. Obviously there was a lot of heat generated at the same time. The system was water-cooled. An elaborate network of Pyrex pipes carried distilled water to and from the tubes to handle the heat dissipation.
The video tour lasts about thirty minutes. It’s just packed with interesting tidbits from the experts leading the tour so add it to your watch list for some geeky entertainment over the weekend.
[Thanks Jesse]
500,000kW != 500,000W. Seriously, what does it take to glance over the post before you hit “post”?
I just came here to comment on the same thing :P
http://verizonmath.blogspot.com/
This is a relevant reply and not link spam.
I BET it isn’t. I bet it’s link spam. I’m not gonna go follow it tho, but long-distance carriers, that smells like a can o’ spam to me. Those crafty spammers and their psy-ops training!
“generating the 4500 Amps at 33 Volts DC needed”
4500A * 33V = 148.500kW != 750kW
for the heating filament in one set of tubes in one stage.
Updated, thanks.
That was just filiment voltage.
Assuming it’s actually 500kW, not 500MW, that still means they need 1000 Horsepower worth of motor/generator output, which is not to shabby. Most of the big radio stations I’ve heard have been 50kW AM stations, which is enough to hear them from at least the Appalachians to the Rockies, so you can drive halfway across the country without having to retune your radio away from that station in Wheeling or Fort Wayne. (It’s not my favorite kind of programming, but country music with occasional news breaks seems to be just about right for all-day long-distance driving.)
OMG I just wanted to post a comment about how strange it is that the unit Watt is used in the US. I mean it is a metric unit and was wondering why it is used in the US there must be a non metric Unit around.
You just made my day with your Watt Horesepower conversion.
The Watt isn’t originally a SI unit. It wasn’t offically adopted into the SI until 1960.
Before that, you would have to speak in units like coulomb-volts per second to remain strictly within the SI, although most people just said “fuck it”.
Sometimes “fuck it” is the best answer.
1 horsepower = 750W thereabouts, I thought everyone knew that. They measure the same thing. There is the story that James Watt deliberately found the crappiest and most worn-out horse he could to calibrate against, so his engines would sound more impressive. Not sure it’s true.
He should have calibrated it against himself, and measure the output in Watts.
I tell you why – because this is hackaday… if it was retardday there would be more units for retards – ie. imperial units
Just for the record, Kermill, the “retards” are the folks who can’t be arsed to do simple math to put answers in their preferred units. –Tain’t that hard, Dood, a kg weighs 2.2 pounds, a pint of water weighs a pound, two pints in a quart, a liter is a tick over a quart, a liter of water weighs…? (And there’s all your weight and volume conversions, ready to be unpacked.) 4″ is 10 cm, 1″ is 2.54 cm and a meter is a yard and a tenth. None of that is totally right but it’s all close enough. Get over it.
If I thought it would help, I would convert this into BTU/hr for you.
Yes, but WLW had a million watts for a short time (test). At 500KW, the signal could penetrate mountain ranges. Remember that the later Mexican stations (e.g. XERB) boasted a million watts or MORE. But this was in the 1950s and 60s. Still the same problems remained. High power is high power!
Read about WLWs problems building a main radiating tower that could handle a million watts. This will blow your mind.
Thanks, fixed.
But not an uncommon error. You write 500.000, think something like “that’s a lot of kilowatts” and write kW. Unfortunately I made a similar mistake at one of the first tests at the university. Proofreading did NOT help as I made the mistake already when writing down the statements from the paper with the questions to the paper where I did the calculations. The result seemed way too high (by 1000, tons of storage batteries), but I thought OK, for 1000s of kWh this makes sense. :-(
Indeed. I love that they had to use DC heater power, as even modest AC ripple was enough to modulate the valve, plus with feedback, it could have spiraled out of control! My only regret in life is that I could not have been an X-mitter engineer at WLW back in the mid 1930s. GLORIOUS!
Does anyone know about the aerial tuning coils that 600 KW Radio Aspidistra x-mitter employed? What material could possibly have been used as a form to hold the main copper coils in place? It does not look like ceramic or even Bakelite. Moreover, there are odd little barrels placed throughout the tuning coils -roller inductors for fine tuning? I sure would not want to have to tune that signal while the current was flowing through the transmission line!
What FINE engineers and brilliant pioneers.
You probably wouldn’t want to live on a planet with a 500.000kW radio transmitter.
Geeze, you had me there for a second, I was waiting to see the 20 power plants dedicated to running this thing! 500,000 W is not the same thing as 500,000 kW!
AC motors as opposed to generators? ;-)
yes AC motors. running DC generators to supply filament current as they would make better DC than rectified AC. as i understood it.
At the time there really was no way to rectify DC at that kind of power. Thats why they used the same tech for street cars power supplies.
better DC and less losses than mercury vapor rectifiers. But I know many cases were tube filaments are run with AC.
the first generation RCA tubes used DC from a motor generator set subsequently 3 phase AC was used with an updated tube developed by ITT.
I wouldn’t want to have worked anywhere near that thing… that much RF exposure on a 100% duty cycle…
Interesting design to the tower, though.
They used AM, so I guess duty cycle was more like 25%.
One of the few remaining Blau-Knox diamond cantilever towers left in the world. It’s still there. We have one in Nashville as well. WSM’s tower is celebrating its 80th anniversary this year, I believe…one of my favorite Nashvegas icons.
Eddie Stubbs the man, that’s how I got country “religion”!
Until several years ago there was 600kW transmitter in Vienna too, but in the meantime they demolished it.
Disappointed in the lack of thought behind the title.
Impressed by the representation of individual call signs and amateur radio operators. Good stuff!
generating the 4500 Amps at 33 Volts DC needed to power the transmitter.
Please correct, it hurts:
1. It would give you around 150kW and thats way too less, as stated in the article (750kW)
2. These 150kW are needed for filament..
But very interesting video!
Yeah, in the video they mention the plate power supply is 12Kv at up to 1.2 Megawatts. I don’t know how they thought the transmitter was running off 33 volts.
You think you’d be able to see power like that flowing through the tube? Even a few spare air molecules in there must light up like xmas trees under that much electron bombardment. Haven’t seen the vid yet so I’ll guess they were enclosed in metal and thus unseeable.
Even 1.5 kW amateur amplifiers use ceramic tubes.
Would be suitable for a modern semiconductor transmitter.
Such a thing of beauty.
While you’re at it trace the history of RF up to the first radio stations, pretty interesting stuff like most science subjects and history.
The physics stuff is pretty boring, but the influence it had on electrical engineering and manufacturing are interesting, also on culture and social science.
I live by that radio tower. My grandfather used too say that it would make his fillings chatter. But he was also crazy.
maybe it caused a tumor making him crazy.
radio waves are not ionizing radiation.
UV light from the sun isn’t ionizing either, but can still cause skin cancer.
I grew up not far from this tower. Looking up at it as a kid is one of the many things that got me interested in engineering. I even did a project on it for my eighth grade history course. I built a scale model of the tower and everything. Incredible piece of history and an incredible piece of engineering. More great information.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WaaRRGi-jRM
http://www.ominous-valve.com/wlw.html
I was there the last three years, the RF feed line was 70 Amps at 110 ohms do the math
Ted WA8ULG
Hi
WLW is still on the air and transmiitting there. They just don’t run at 500Kw. The antenna is a huge trusswork driven element sitting on a massive ceramic insulator. Crosley designed and built the transmitters and sold them also the federal government. They built the Voice of America radio stations 1/4 mile away. VOA ran the old Crosley transmitters until the 90’s at powers up to 250Kw if I remember correctly. They had water cooled tubular copper transmission lines. A fluorescent tube put within a few feet of the transmission lines would light right up and then it would stay lit as you handed it around the room. No wires needed.
Actually there were two 500 KW transmitters the second was to go to WJZ in MD but never got authority. It was sold to the Brits and used at 650 KW as a ‘dis-information’ station against the Axis during WW!!. the transmitters were build by Westinghouse and GE under a management contract by RCA (they were RCA badged). As a point of fact it was an amplifier; a Western Electric 7C 50KW was used as the driver (one hell of an IPA). The VOA transmitters, just down the road, were build by Collins Radio. The VOA site is open occasionally for tour, The WLW site is operational at 50 KW with a Harris transmitter and has been opened for an invitation only tour around the time of the Dayton Hamvention in May. WLW= Whole Lota Watts; amen to that! Ted WA8ULG
I really love seeing old videos like this, pretty cool stuff
Dear Supplyframe, Need quote on large motor-generator set. Get used to this.
Proof positive that there’s no one on this site that’s over 50. There were a number of “Nation Stations”. I have a radio that tunes to them like a push-button car radio.
I’m 51….
There is a radio station in my home city – Gliwice (formerly Gleiwitz), built in 1934-35 is entirely made of larch wood and brass connections, 118 m (387 ft) high (including the 8 m (26 ft) long spire on its top.It is known as “Silesian Eiffel Tower”
This radio station is the place where World War II started ( The Gleiwitz incident – on 31 August 1939, the German SS staged a ‘Polish’ attack on Gleiwitz radio station, which was later used as justification for the Invasion of Poland)
more;
http://zabytkitechniki.pl/en/obiekty/o/dziedzictwo/90/Gliwice_Radio_Station
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gliwice_Radio_Tower
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYIx5KcfeNc
Great video, despite the glitches. A truly amazing feat for the time and it makes my electronics projects feel very small!
“The world’s most powerful transmitter” – sorry, you’re 100kW short: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspidistra_%28transmitter%29
It’s well worth a read too, the thing has an interesting history (especially during WW2) and some equally hardcore technology.
The Aspidistra referred to above is the sister transmitter mentioned in my earlier post, If you are a ham the chief engineer on that UK project was Ray Varney as in G5RV, The WLW 500 has been OFF since 1940..Ted WA8ULG
Drive by that tower a lot on the way for a burger from Quatman’s in Mason. Now I’m hungry!
I just picked up a old Hallicrafters S-76 which came with a 3rd edition print of a 1974 book, “The Complete Shortwave Listener’s Handbook.” Just two days ago, I read a blurb which stuck in my mind because I’ve driven past this station and was just speechless at the size of that tower and was just blown away by what they once cranked through it.
The excerpt from the book follows.
“\My greatest DX achievement on the old set occurred a number of years ago when WLW, Cincinnati, Ohio, operated with the super power of 500,000 watts on a test basis after midnight with the experimental callsign of W8X0, on 700 kHz.” -[Hank Bennett]
Thanks for this article.
Most folks smoked tobacco, the coal fired generators made the electricity and America was in the absolute forefront of the world. The vacuum tube and AM ruled, and rock and roll was about to be born. Oldsmobile the top brand after Chevrolet. We were so grand. I remember it all so well.
all the tubes had glass envelopes in 1935