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 nighttime shot of the Sears Tower taken from the The John Hancock Center’s Observatory. The tower would eventually be renamed the Willis Tower in 2009. The Sears/Willis Tower is the highest point in the Chicago metro area, at 1,450′, 1,729′ to tip, making it the prime point for all VHF transmission, no matter which frequency. It houses. In my next segment, I will go into a history of the building and its relationship with radio.

Radio was taken to even more new heights in the 70’s and 80’s. At the beginning of the 70’s, the record industry went through dramatic changes in the quality of recordings, with introduction of 4 track recording. The whole aura of the 70’s was better and best…the re-mastering of records, and also a great improvement of the quality of the vinyl used to press a record. All this led to a great turnover to the FM dial from the AM. Every year throughout the decade showed a dwindling on the AM and a surge of persons going FM, with full realization that the audio on the AM dial was only to 5 KHz, and hearing goes to 20 KHz, so there was a substantial muffled effect on the sound quality, as demonstrated by a fas.org report on AM radio. The amount of ratings went way over the persons listening to AM. More and more people liked to hear that awesome stereo sound they had going on even though the FM bands statistics are still the same as they were in the hey days- going up to only 15 KHz. still to this day transmits from 50 Hz to 15 KHz, which is demonstrated by a fas.org report on FM radio. The whole stereo still works the same way, The two channels left and right are transmitted through one channel and at the 19 kHz pilot signal from the center of the carrier frequency, which in the day was the little red light on FM dials. If you ever noticed when they made stereos with the red light, when the light went out, the stereo faded. It takes a lot of power to have the pilot light decode the multiplexing of the channel separation. Other formats that came and gone were the introduction of quadraphonic FM in the mid 70’s, but never went far because of the whole 8-Track tape fad, costs and technical problems. Then there was AM stereo…with no improvement to the muffled 5 KHz sound by the mid to late 80’s. The whole deal with that was that you needed two radios, one tuned to the left of center tuning and one to the right of center. They were trying to get listeners back to listening and reviving the listenership, but the poor quality muffled to popularity, and by 2001 the last AM stereo station ceased such broadcasting. FM always came out on top throughout the whole era in the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s, until HD AM/FM came out, of which I will be getting into in my next article. . More to follow on history in the next article . . .

Photo taken with a tripod-mounted Nikon FE camera through a Vivitar 70-150 zoom lens zoomed in at 150 mm, filter=NONE, Aperture=2.8 f/stop, shutter-speed 4 seconds, loaded with Konica Color Slide Film ISO (ASA) 100 (fine grain) processed with E-6 using Kodak Ektachrome Chemicals. Enlargement processed Type R color positive paper and R-3000 chemistry onto 3½x5″ glossy negative color image enlargement paper. Date – July 1981.

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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