[ Up | Prior | Next ]
Many chief engineers accumulate historic relics from their stations. Here in John Dehnel's office we saw the nameplate and and a tube of some sort from KSL's old Western Electric 407A transmitter. (The tube is obviously too small to be a PA tube—and those tubes in WECo transmitters were usually water-cooled anyway—so I'm guessing that it was part of the modulator section. In the 1930s, Western Electric pioneered the Doherty linear amplifier, later sold to Continental Electronics and forming the basis of their type 317 transmitter and successors.) Remarkably, the 407A was KSL's main transmitter, without interruption, from 1938 until 1986.
Copyright 2007-2008, Garrett Wollman. All rights reserved. Photograph taken 2007-08-24.