The Story (this could take awhile)
It all started with a desire to be a DJ. A friend of mine, Joe, had this set up in his basement with a couple of record players and tape recorders used as mixers. He would stick his system speaker out onto his roof and play music to the neighboring houses and parts of the schoolyard (we used to live right next to the school play ground). I lived even closer to the school than he did, so I made my own set up and put the speaker out my basement window and would "play radio" at lunch break from my house. After doing that for awhile, I got this catalogue from Lafayette Electronics, which had an AM tube transmitter kit in it. I asked my dad for the money to order it, and he thought it would be a good learning experience since I wanted to be a DJ when I grew up. He, too, had built a couple of "kits" in his day. After waiting for what seemed to be forever, it finally came. I hurried to open it up and have a look at it…WOW! My own transmitter! OK... now I got to put it together...my soldering iron was bad, so in a hurry to get on with it, I borrowed my next door neighbors. I put it all together, and it was ready to be turned on! I plugged it in turned it on and...it didn't work. I was discouraged. What was wrong? I followed the instructions?? So I went through them again. "HMMM. The tubes must be bad," I thought. I put it away until I got new tubes. When I did, I tried it again and the same results...nothing! After awhile, once again very discouraged, I put it away and didn't touch it until the spring of ‘74.
In the spring of ‘74, a bunch of friends and I were into slot car racing and we each had a track set up at our houses. One day, a new kid, Steve, came to race. He was a friend of a friend and we went to his house to race. He had his track in the basement, and when I was down there I saw lots of TV sets and radio stuff laying around. I asked Steve, "Hey, what's all of this stuff?" He said, "It's my dads…he fixes TV's and things." So, I told him about my transmitter, and he said to bring it down and his dad would have a look at it. So I did. I rode my bike to his house with the transmitter and gave it to his dad to look at and then went home to eat. After dinner, the phone rang and Steve said, "Hey, my dad fixed your transmitter, come down!" WOW!!!! It worked!! Steve's dad showed me what I did wrong when I put it together. There was this big coil that plugged into a socket on the PC board and it had to be in a certain way to work and I had soldered the socket on the board the wrong way. To fix it, Steve's dad shaved off the "pin" on the coil plug, turned it and put in the right holes (think of a keyed tube, how it plugs into the socket). A HA! That's what was wrong the whole time! So we were finally on the air broadcasting from my house to the neighborhood (with the transmitter as is from the kit.). A whole couple of blocks!!
Playing with it that way was cool for awhile, but then it became necessary to "get out" farther, so I took the antenna that came with the kit and put it up on the roof and ran a wire down to the transmitter. That made it get out a little further than before (I picked up a couple more blocks of coverage). That took care of my immediate area pretty well. Next, a friend of mine built a new, more powerful power supply for the transmitter (to give it more juice). Then it went even farther!
Time went on and the summer of ‘75 rolled around. Then came the new year, 1976. During this time, I was also on CB radio(my first real CB) where I had met a few "characters" (to say the least). I got into linear's, Slider's and power mikes all of that stuff. I also learned that you can take certain old Ham Gear and convert it very easily to the top end of the AM broadcast band. I made this my NEW mission to get one of those radios. I found one, an old "Johnson Viking 2," and after learning the modifications necessary, it was my new AM transmitter. Now we're getting out! We covered a lot of area on 1610AM with a 300' long wire antenna. The Johnson was used for awhile into the fall of '76. Then we got hold of a 20 watt mono FM transmitter that someone had built (very unstable L.C. circuit that would drift when you first warmed it up). That worked great with the antenna 37' off of my rooftop plus, I lived on the highest spot in town. We ditched the AM and went totally FM, and ran it every day, for at least ten hours a day. That went on into the summer of '77 when we reached the height of our popularity… we had requests all the time, stickers and t-shirts. Then... it happened...THE KNOCK ON THE DOOR! It was the day my dad kept warning me about. There, at the front door of our house, was the Phillipsburg Police and...the FCC!!! OH NO!!! This was it!! I just happened to be standing in the kitchen when I heard the knock on the door, and when my dad said "Come in," I ran down into the basement told the guys..."NO SHIT THE FCC IS HERE!!"...Everybody ran around turning the equipment off ("Roundabout" from Yes, was playing). My dad yelled, "MICK!! Come on up here!" "Oh man, I'm F^%*&% dead," I thought.
I did "the walk" upstairs. The gentlemen that came to visit me asked if I had a license (as if they didn't know the answer to that already). I said "no," and then they asked to see the station. I showed them the studio, the transmitter…all of it. The FCC man was taking notes the whole time and said, "you can turn it off now." I'm thinking, "Shit, what's gonna happen to me?" They went back downstairs (the transmitter was in the attic) talked with me and my dad and then left. My dad got a letter in the mail about the incident, along with a fine, and the neighbors got a show that day.
Needless to say, we did go back on the air about 4 months later on
AM, but it didn't have the same spark as the FM did and not that much of an audience.
There was NO WAY we were gonna maintain a schedule like we had on the FM (that's how we
got caught). We did put the FM back on from time to time using
