on 17/12/2024, 14:33:48, in reply to "Re: Valcom V33070CL2 power handling capability"
It's like all these gimmicky antennas like Capital Radio's hoop and Laser's balloon and possibly also the CFA, they might well work in a terrestorial environment but maybe not on a ship at sea. Previous Message
I appreciate 819 was a compromise, but it was a must to move from 963, Monique would have only suffered slightly as they closed early, but it would have been devastating to the god squad tapes and they brought in a fair amount of money.
As for the aerial, it was the wrong type but beggars can’t be choosers, it was offered and it was available at an acceptable price and risk.
We have to realise it was a clandestine operation, if normal business applied I’m sure you’d go, I don’t think so. But from the books and real time experience from the guys who were there the organisation appears to me to have been a little dysfunctional, but the guys did bring us radio for seven odd years, so it’s easy to criticise from an armchair, plus there’s been worse decisions made on the North Sea like using a balloon system for an aerial Previous Message
It did seem to go horribly wrong after it looked like it was going to work initially. Reception was pretty good from memory. Clearly the Valcom was not up to the power they tried to put into it and it just overheated and caught fire. It would have been fine for just a few kilowatts. If the Valcom could have been used for the much lower powered 558 service and the standard 'T' antenna used for 819 at much higher power it would have been fine. As for why did they use 819 anyway, there were very few frequencies to choose from at the time with local commercial and BBC county stations on pretty much every channel. As the Dutch service was daytime only I think it should have stayed on 963 as the interference from Finland was only really noticeable after dark.
I expect there was only a fairly limited tuning range for the big RCA Ampliphase rig anyway without massive modifications to inductors and capacitor values which would have been a massive undertaking and required a good many new parts and extensive re-alignment which was difficult on Ampliphase transmitters at the best of times.