SPARC has an excellent collection of vintage broadcast equipment, mostly donated by Vancouver area radio stations. It’s the gear that brings radio programs to your homes, cars, and MP3-FM players. This year we received a generous invitation from the host WABE organization to set up a display of our items on their exhibition floor, at their cost, as part of their four-day conference. Nostalgia welled up with the engineering attendees visiting our booth, comparing how far technology had come. Many promises were made to help SPARC preserve our broadcast heritage.
Our display included two of our favourite remote consoles, one made by a Canadian company, McCurdy (in the red case), and a Collins (to the right). The laptop there had an internet connection that meant we could play at our booth the audio stream from our audio server, and browse our webpages for visitors.
Three examples of early field tape recorders were there on the rear table; one of them utilized a “wind-up” motor and fly-wheel mechanism for tape motion. The electronics have not been restored, but the machine “rolled tape”.
At the lower left can be seen two units (with the four meters), and still working, that were used by AM stations (CKWX in our example) to transmit “AM stereo”, an under-rated broadcast technology from the 90s that foundered, owing to a “standards-war” such as you’ve heard about concerning VHS versus Beta – with the difference, in the AM-stereo war, that no-one won! In this case, the customer lost!
Every item we displayed had a story, and every visitor had their own stories to contribute to make the convention rewarding for SPARC.
Thanks, WABE!