T15 ARC-5 Transmitters

[Paul Litwinovich]

Back in the 70's a bunch of my highschool buddies and myself built a pirate
AM station
with a T-15 ARC5. We got about 100 watts out of it, and using a  50 ft coil
loaded vertical with a very extensive grounding system covered our home town
and the surrounding communities. Car radios were quite sensitive back then
and you could hear it about 15 miles out in a car. We operated on 640 khz
which was the old CONELRAD frequency which had just been decommissioned with
the advent of the EBS system.
    An interesting point, just two weeks ago I was able to use the same
antenna design again, this time for legitimate purposes, when I had to
construct an emergency antenna for AM station  WRIV 1390, Long Island , NY,
which had lost their tower. I had them back on the air in less than 6 hours
with full contour strength (5mV/meter) over their city of license using 500
watts TPO.  The only difference this time was to add a capacitive hat to
help cancel some of the small antenna's reactance. The performance in the
surrounding burbs isn't as good as the 1/4 wave stick, but compared to no
signal at all, it sounds pretty good.  So it is possible to get decent
coverage with an undersized antenna if you work at it.
-
Paul Litwinovich
Chief Engineer,
WSHU/WSUF/WMMM
N1MUC

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