Today’s featured photo of the day! The feature is: Radio

For the month of November, I will be featuring radio transmitters and antennae. Here is today’s featured photo, to commemorate with the industry of radio’s 100th anniversary of invention. Here is a photo of a view of the Chicago skyscraper landscape about 45 minutes before sunset with the bright summer sun from Navy Pier at a point near the 2/3 out point at the ChicagoFest event in the summer of 1982. I am featuring a more recent photo of the building to show a change from past to present. The John Hancock Center 100-stories tall, and stands 1,128-foot tall in the Magnificent Mile district. The building has its “lookout point” on the 98th floor, below its famous brightly lit 99th floor. It was renamed The Observatory-360 Chicago and the whole building opted to go with the 875 North Michigan Avenue Building, as a lot more business space opted to go residential in more recent years. It still will be known as the “John Hancock Center”, just like rivaling Willis Tower is commonly known as “Sears Tower”., which we will be getting into in the next featured photo segment.

Radio was taken to new avenues and limits in the years of the 40’s through the 60’s. In World War II FM Doppler radar was used to replace inferior AM radar for obvious reasons, interference and a lot of severe limitations. In 1945 the FCC moved the FM broadcast band from the 42–50 MHz to 88–106 MHz band, though later extended to be 108 MHz, making the existing radios useless unless a converter was purchased. By the 50’s, television began to get more popular whereby people tended to have someone “on the block” who had one towards the beginning, and by the end of the decade more and more families were adding one to the household. Networks took off with 4 main networks on both radio and television. FM was still not beginning to catch on and in fact didn’t become greatly popular until the late 70’s. The changeover is slated to be one of the reasons the setback stunted the early growth of FM. Other reasons for the change vary in opinion, but those times it was hard just to get equipment modifications in a changeover, as compared to out somewhat disposable lifestyle we lead these days. The new band offered far less interference, as the original FM band was before the missing channel “1” before the original channel 2 on analog television, and we all know how badly that station came in, as a revisit to the past! Channel 1 was dropped due to the fact that it just could not handle the quality needed to render the video signal. Radio went through various changes in the playlists, but Top-40 mastered the dial infusing different styles “all on one” station. FM really began to take off by the mid to late 70’s with the disco era in full swing, but AM kept it’s clientele until a little later–in the 80’s era, which we will get to in the next article. . More to follow on history in the next article . . .

Photo taken with a Nikon FE camera through a Vivitar 70-150 zoom lens zoomed in at 150 mm, filter=polarizer, Aperture=22 f/stop, shutter-speed 1/1000th second, loaded with Konica ISO (ASA) 100 Color 135-20 Negative Film processed with C-41 Processing Chemicals, and a Type C Print using the RA-4 enlargement paper process, onto a 4X6″ semi-gloss print. Date – August 1982.

A more recent photo of the 875 North Michigan Avenue Building. Photo taken with a Samsung Galaxy A20 with the factory Dual Pixel 12MP OIS F1.7 lens and 1.4µm pixels with vDIS=ON. Date – October 2019.

Another fine photograph and facts about the Willis Tower to follow very soon to celebrate the anniversary of radio!!

Anniversary of Radio Post: Celebrating The 100th Anniversary of Radio

Celebrating The 100th Anniversary of Radio

PHOTO OF THE DAY

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