I have been reading a lot lately about backgroud sound. David Popp in MR with his New Haven and mutiple sound. I have been in broadcasting as long as I’ve been a model railroader. Would anyone be interested in modeling a radio station on thier layout, or have you? - Several manifactures make great radio towers and really any DPM, Cornerstone or the like could be a radio station. Speaker could be mounted near the structure or could be equalized to come from 1/87th scale car radios. Fictional call letters and frequency could match the towns. I got this idea from a Department 56 buidling called WSNO radio, complete with blinking tower and disc-jockey inside my wife gave me for Christmas. The station could be any format: Jazz, Country, Rock, Adult Contemporary, Oldies etc. Complete with news, music, weather for the area you are modeling. Commercials can be written and produced for local businesses.
If you want to brainstorm this idea, please email me and I can produce the CD’s with an information sheet. Complete the information sheet with all the facts and it would take a couple of days to produce a 60 minute CD for operations sessions or your own enjoyment complete with your local station. I would do a few to get the hang of it then offer the service to a company for a small charge.
Sheesh, Chuck, no wonder you are a model railroader…workin’ for Clear Channel you must need the stress relief![;)] Sorry.
Yes I plan on having at least one radio station on my HO layout. The cool thing about radio stations is none of the six I worked at looked the same. So this gives anyone a great modelers license to make the station out of almost anything, kinda like a Subway sandwich shop.
Like you mentioned, with a modified Busch radio tower (don’t forget the guy wires if you have room) and almost any structure you can have a station. And I would make mine where you could have a pair of “walkman” type headphones inside the station with a CD player under the layout to provide the music…which of course is a great way to help set the era of your layout.
Make sure if it’s a smaller market to have plenty of near-broken-down vehicles in the parking lot. And if it’s a modern day rocker, get yourself a Trident van, paint it black with a lightning stripe and put an FM frequency on it. Trident even had a CNN van didn’t they? For the big cities?
IHC had a small satellite dish available for the radio station yard. It’s part of the countryside detail set or something.
I had planned to model a very big AM radio station in a very big city, then a couple smaller market FM stations. Not sure what the plan is anymore though.
Lionel had a “real” radio station out. It was a tower on top of a little building and you could actually tune in your local fave station. Bachmann also made a WPLA-TV ("PLAsticville) for O which of course could be easily modified into a radio station.
Too bad someone doesn’t make a little 1/87th scale Vespa for your Les Nesman newsguy to ride around on.
As for your idea of making custom CDs for folks…that “sounds” like a cool idea…but are you sure combining work and pleasure are a good thing? It may wind up costing more than folks are willing to pay for the amount of work you may end up doing on those. Real cool idea though i
You could even do a small radio station out of a slightly modified house. There used to be one over in East McKeesport,PA. called WIXZ 1360AM. Their station was inside an old three story house. I got to visit it once when my father won a contest of theirs. His prize was a small case of Cloret’s gum. Sadly the station is gone. I believe the house was levelled to make room for an Eckerd pharmacy. Anyone who knows more about it feel free to correct me.
You could use just about any building I worked almost 30 years in small market radio and worked 2nd story with a newsstand downstairs,a old gas station and a former DR. office…2nd story of a DPM building would be great then have a transmiter shack and tower out in the country…I would have to have a 1954 IH carryall painted red parked outside we called it the “Mobile Bomb” parked outside…Cox 47
modelmaker51: thanks for pointing out that Preiser makes a Vespa set! Hard as I try, they are making so much cool stuff today it’s hard to remember all of it, even if it’s part of your job. I may have to get a set of those and have it going through a house while an English couple is having tea. (I know, if “WKRP” was not your favorite TV show, none of this will make any sense!)
Cox47: did you work at station(s) in east central IL before you retired?
Cox47 mentioned about the transmitter building being out in the country…that reminded me of the one station I worked at where the shack was in the middle of a cow pasture. Every time the transmitter would not come up first thing in the morning I had to drive out there, in the dark, making sure none of the pasture owner’s cattle got out when I unlocked the gate, drive out to the shack without hitting any spooked cows, not step in anything…anyway, perhaps that would be a cool detail for your farm scene!
I haven’t done a radio station but I am a cable guy so I did model a head end with a tower full of antennaes and microwave dishes and a couple 16’ satellite dishes.
BTW-In the episode of WKRP where they had to go out to the tower because of a bomb threat (that turned out to be in the toolbox at the tower) the shot of the outside of the transmitter building was actually a shot of the KJOY transmitter in LA where the cable company I worked for had a bunch of microwave links. The KJOY tower is the next tower west of the government tower site above the Hollywood sign.
One Track …Yes I worked at WKZI a little 250 watt station With clear channel and 800 spot on the dail we had a pretty good signal…Our studio was in town and transmitter was just outside of town but power came from another company so we could be off the air from studio and transmitter would still be on power went off downtown they hooked up a mike out there but with no turntables I read UPI wire copy for almost 4 hours…Cox 47
Oh…I know this is off topic some but I just wondered. I worked with a guy with a last name of Cox farther south of you. My grandma and other assorted folks live(d) just down old 40 there in Martinsville.
I worked for KOKE AM/FM in Austin back during the progressive country days. Our studios were in a two-story office building on Lamar Avenue and the transmitter was in a concrete block structure in the hills a few miles west of town. The AM side was a 1 KW daytimer while the FM was 24/7. The AM transmitter was a Collins that was so old, we could only buy rebuilt tubes for it and we had to drive to Dallas to get them.
Don’t know about needing any broken-down vehicles in the back, but if you get the Chevy van, you should cut large holes for picture windows in the sides, so you can do remote broadcasts in mobile home lots and other exciting venues. One of the big military-style antennas from a Roco Minitanks model will work for the mobile transmitter,
Well, I guess that would solve the problem of finding HO scale air personalities, although your AM drive segment might not do too well in the Arbs. [:D]
If you model XERB, make sure you have your sound CD playing some Wolfman Jack wavs. They’re downloadable (I included some on my oldies CDs that I ripped for cruising). And don’t forget Kurt Henderson’s Citroen in the parking lot (I think that’s what he drove). OWOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!
I plan to eventually put in one microwave relay tower with dishes on my N scale layout to remind me of the days when I worked in the communications department of our power utility and spent many years visiting those sites servicing the equipment. Although if I wait long enough I might not have to because the utility is replacing many of its microwave links with buried fibre optic cable. I also want to put some VHF radio antennas at the top of the tower for the radio repeaters that facilitate communications between the utility’s trucks and their offices. And I’d better not forget some cell phone antennas–if it sticks up higher than a flagpole some cell company will want to rent space on it for their antennas. Of course, I’ll be putting in a generating station to remind me of my working days, and it will have to have a microwave dish on the roof, pointing in the direction of the tower.
As for the radio station, I hadn’t thought of that, but now I think I’ll put in one of their transmitters too. One thing I’ve noticed about the radio station transmitters in my area is that they don’t put any identification of any kind on the building. I don’t know if that’s in fear of vandalism or what, but 40 or 50 years ago they used to have the staion’s call sign on the building, but they’ve all been taken down now. Just something to keep in mind when modeling a radio station transmitter.
Something that would probably be difficult to find the space to model but is done in real life is the drop zone around the tower. There is an area around the tower that is slightly more than the height of the tower that has no buildings or power lines in it. That is in case the tower falls over it won’t hit anything and cause damage or loss of life. Of course, a good part of this drop zone is taken up with the guy wires and their anchors. And towers do fall. The power utility I worked for had a 500 ft. microwave relay tower on the edge of the city fall du
