[Elecraft] K3 -AM Broadcast on 1800 Khz?

[Jim Brown]

On Fri, 18 Sep 2009 09:59:46 -0400, Paul Christensen wrote:

>As I recall,  harmonic energy in Part 73 AM broadcast services still falls 
>under the general emission limitations under Section 73.44(b):

Yes. 

Several things are at play here. First, when a transmitter is producing 
strong harmonic content, something is WRONG. It's either broken or 
mistuned.  Second, we have the effects of the deregulation of broadcast 
engineering of the Reagan years (remmeber the rants against big government 
and for untrammelled free enterprise?), so the requirements that stations 
have licensed engineers on duty are long gone, and the FCC lacks the staff 
and funding to do much of its work still mandated by its own rules. 
Nowadays, a single broadcast engineer is likely to be responsible for a 
half dozen or more stations, even in major markets. Contrast this with 30 
years ago when many major market stations employed 3 or more full time 
engineers, most of them competent to do transmitter work. 

For 20 years, I lived within 4 miles of virtually all the FM and TV 
broadcasters in Chicago, and had a gain antenna on the roof that fed a 
vintage Technics ST9030 FM tuner with a rock solid analog front end that 
had a four-gang tuning capacitor. Only once did I hear a spur from any of 
those stations, it was during an overnight maintenance period, and it was 
gone in a few hours. 

If you monitor the topband reflector (160M), you'll occasionally see posts 
about broadcast spurs on 160M, sometimes strong. It rarely takes more than 
a few weeks for pressure from hams on the FCC and those stations to clean 
up their act. The key words to the station are "something in your 
transmitter is broken, and is likely to fail completely. You should fix it 
soon before it takes you off the air and you lose advertising revenue." 

73,

Jim Brown K9YC