At Mackin House during ‘Fair in the Square’ – Places des Arts in the Maillardville area of Coquitlam
The SPARC Museum has participated several times at the annual Fair In The Square event – over the July long weekend. We have some of our nice old radios from our collection on show. To support the display, we run a ‘broadcast remote’, transmitting music to our radios that were set up at our outside table, to the sound system for the performance stage between shows, and throughout Mackin House itself.
New, summer 2008 – we were streaming our live program direct to the SPARC Museum building! Our normal opening museum day is Sunday, and all our visitors, including the visitors from ‘KidsWorld’, could enjoy the live remote. Our connection was via the internet, using a TELUS wireless data card in a laptop. The quality was excellent, and there were no ‘hiccups’.
Here we are in these pictures (from July 2006) in Mackin House. Our “studio” was set up in the pantry, with our ‘transmitter’ site in a car parked outside. The studio consisted mostly of equipment donated by CJAV, Port Alberni. It was taken out of service when CJAV moved from AM to FM – they built new studios and a new transmitter building, and are now known as “The Peak”. SPARC even has their old RCA BTA-1S one-kilowatt transmitter, and it’s now restored and fully operational at an off-site location! (No antenna, and no licence.)
The board is a clever little eight-mixer McCurdy from the early 70s. The reel-to-reel is our reliable Revox A-77. The turntable is a Panasonic SP-10 Mk II direct-drive. Now, there’s a great broadcast turntable – starts on a dime and stops on a dime – and it’s a dream for cueing records, even 78s. In the following years, the turntable gave way to a second tape machine – either an Ampex AG-600, or a Revox PR-99. All of these, including the triple-cart deck, have remote start from the coloured buttons seen on the McCurdy board. The announce mike is an RCA BK-5B.
