[Fwd: RE: [Fwd: [Milsurplus] Conelrad]]

[John McCarty]

I forwarded one of the earlier posts to a friend of mine, Don n9izu, who is an
ex-broadcast engineer.
What he said.....



Conelrad was NEVER tested because of the huge disruption that it would have
caused, not to mention panic.  However, the second xtal socket was mandated
and installed.  Many stations used the second xtal as a spare on their main
frequency if they weren't CONELRAD designated.  The only actual testing was
probably during the "experimental/maintenance hours" between local midnight
and sunrise because someone had to know how to tune the rig and antenna
base-tuning components.  CONELRAD was long gone before I got into the
business so this is just an educated guess.  Speaking of which...

Remember that CONELRAD was deployed in a time that all stations had to have
a licensed engineer on duty whenever the transmitter was operating.  At the
time, any engineer worth his salt would have known how to retune the rig to
operate on the CONELRAD frequency.  In some cases, the engineers had enough
foresight to actually mark on the tuning components where coil-jumpers had
to be moved and tuning/loading controls had to be set -- no doubt doped out
during testing period.  In my experience, if a rig was licensed withing a
few hundred KC of the assigned CONELRAD frequency, retuning the rig would
have been fairly easy.  Yeah, you might have to reduce power if you got past
the range of the tuning components but I doubt that it would go unusably
low.  640 and 1240 would have been pretty easy to hit for most stations.

In at least one station I was familiar with, the DA tuning houses all had
their components labeled too.  One station even had a second set of RF
relays (long out of the circuit by the time I arrived) to remotely switch
tuning house components to CONELRAD.  I know this because some thoughtful
engineer had labeled the switch positions NORMAL - CONELRAD (BTW, that
station was on 960.)

One other thing... Not ALL stations were actually assigned as CONELRAD
stations.  Those that were, shifted frequency and those that weren't went
off the air.  I don't recall what the specific criteria was for who shifted
and who went off (other than it was related to coverage area) but here's
more information on the topic: http://www.westgeorgia.org/conelrad/  Note
the first paragraph.

73,
izu