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(Click
on photos to enlarge)
A remote broadcast amplifier set used by WEAF in New York,
1922. (Author’s collection)
KGW in Portland, Oregon, used this equipment to make a
remote broadcast from the Civic Auditorium, about 1922. (Author’s collection)
Graham
McNamee broadcasts a world series baseball game over WEAF in 1924. (Library of Congress)
NBC engineers check the equipment that will be installed in
the Chicago Stadium and used to broadcast the activities of both the Democratic
and Republican national conventions in 1932.
(Author’s collection, colorized by author)
An NBC remote van in San Francisco in the late 1920’s.
Backpack shortwave transmitters like this one at WWJ in
Detroit allowed freedom of movement to reporters covering live news events like
a major fire or golf tournament. A
separate FCC license was required.
(Author’s collection)
Factory-built remote transmitters.
NBC engineer George McElwain mixes audio for a remote
broadcast from the back of a vehicle in the mid-1930’s. The remote mixers are RCA’s model OP-5. . (Author’s collection)
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Early Demand:
Almost from the very beginning of radio broadcasting, there
was a public demand to hear programs originating outside of a radio station’s
or network’s main studios. These early
remote broadcasts were referred to by station engineers as NEMOs -- taken from
a telephone company abbreviation for “Not Originating Main Office.”
In the 1920’s, many radio stations were installed in high-rise
hotel buildings - a symbiotic relationship that benefitted both parties. The station obtained a rooftop location for
its towers in the city center, which was considered to be a prestigious status
symbol by the hotels of the time. This also allowed audio cables to be run to
the hotel ballroom for the pickup of nightly dance band music. This gave the station a source of free music
programming, and the hotel benefitted from the free publicity that encouraged
radio listeners to attend in person.
But there was also a need for programs to originate outside
of the building itself. Live broadcasts
of baseball, football and boxing matches were among the earliest remote fare. The first known live play-by-play broadcast
took place in October, 1921. All the
Worlds Series games that year were played in New York City as the Giants faced
off against the Yankees, so KDKA installed a wire line from Pittsburgh to the
Polo Grounds and broadcast the games live.
The next month, KDKA announcer Harold Arlin described a Pittsburgh vs.
West Virginia football game -- the first live play-by-play football broadcast.
Wire Lines:
All of those early remote broadcasts were sent via wire
lines that were leased from telephone or telegraph companies. Many stations had permanent lines installed,
connected to hotel ballrooms, churches, or to satellite studios in nearby
cities. Equalized balanced telephone
lines (which provided a guaranteed noise-free flat frequency response and
signal level) were too costly for many stations, and so many of them rented
“dry” pairs -- a simple pair of wires connected between two locations, routed through a patch panel at the central office
(“CO”). The stations then provided their
own equalizing equipment to adjust the audio quality. 
Renting a temporary line for a single event was a
complicated affair, with arrangements for installation needing to be made weeks
or even months in advance. The expenses involved might exceed the amount a
sponsor was willing to pay for the program, which drove some stations to find
more creative means. There is a story of
the enterprising station owner of KXL in Portland, Oregon, who attached a
tennis ball to an audio cable and flushed it down the toilet. He then fished it out of a manhole cover at
the remote site several blocks away.
Out-of-town broadcasts were even
more complicated and expensive. Remote lines leased from
AT&T usually ran through one or more amplifiers at intermediate
points, with operators required to be at each location to maintain
adjustments and line switching at the appropriate times. The lines were
installed days in advance, and checked for audio quality, noise and
"crosstalk" - unwanted telephone conversations leaking in from
adjoining phone lines. In 1925, WGN in Chicago broadcast
the proceedings of the Scopes "Monkey Trial" live from Tennessee, which
cost the station over $1,000 a day in line charges.
Early remote amplifiers were monstrous affairs, with heavy
tube amplifiers and storage batteries. They
contained bulky telephone company amplifiers that were never designed for easy
transport. Often, the only thing that made it “portable” was a pair of handles
on the sides of the cabinet, and it usually required two strong men to
transport it. One or more operators on site were needed to operate the equipment and make sure the batteries maintained their charge.
NBC and others dealt with this unwieldy equipment by
building self-contained remote broadcast trucks. These incorporated all the amplifiers,
batteries, microphones and cables, and required only a connection to the leased
phone line at the broadcast site.
Wireless Remotes:
Out of necessity, wireless methods of transporting programs
to the studio were soon developed. Some
early broadcasts were done using portable shortwave transmitters, but the
quality and reliability was not always satisfactory except for short
on-the-spot news reports. The famous
Herb Morrison broadcast of the Hindenberg crash was actually a recording, cut
at the scene on a portable acetate disk recorder for later broadcast.
By this time, remote broadcast vehicles
had become more elaborate, incorporating transmitters that could send
the programs back to the station without the need for telephone
lines. A vehicle could be dispatched on a moment's notice to
cover news events or specialized programs, including from locations
where wire lines might not be available. The vehicle NBC built
for its New York operations had its own gasoline generator and
transmitters for both the shortwave and VHF frequency bands. It
could transmit while in motion for close-in events, with signals being
relayed through a receiver on the Empire State Building. For more
distant broadcasts, a wire antenna could be set up, strung between
bamboo poles for shortwave transmission. The front of the vehicle
was a soundproof compartment, and there was even a trap door in the
roof that allowed an announcer to put his head and shoulders outside
for a better view.
Even when broadcasters had shortwave transmitters in their
remote vehicles, the coverage of news events was limited to the length of a
microphone cable. This led to the
development of backpack low-power transmitters which untethered the reporters,
allowing them to roam freely within a reasonable signal range. Their reports were received back at the vehicle,
from where they were re-transmitted at higher power to the studio. This simplified the coverage of on-the-scene
news events. In 1937, NBC broadcast
24-hour coverage of the Ohio River floods by sending a crew of reporters to the
scene equipped with portable transmitters.
In 1942, reporter Graham McNamee used one to broadcast from the scene of
the S.S. Normandie fire in a New York harbor.
Wireless transmitters also opened up possibilities for
novelty broadcasts. Live programs were being originated from ships, trains,
airplanes, submarines and balloons. In
1929, a parachute jumper broadcast his live observations during freefall at
12,000 feet above Long Island. In 1930, NBC made a well-publicized broadcast
from a Navy submarine submerged in Long Island Sound.
By the mid 1930’s, thanks to the development of smaller
tubes which consumed less power, remote equipment had been reduced to
suitcase-sized amplifier/mixers that could operate from the AC line or vehicle
batteries. Dozens of models were offered
by companies like Western Electric, RCA, Gates, Collins and Raytheon over the
next few decades.
Modern Technologies:
In 1960 a Texas broadcast engineer named George Marti changed
everything when he marketed a VHF FM transmitter/receiver pair that could transmit
broadcast-quality audio from any location within a reasonable distance. These units were instantly adopted, especially
by small- and medium-market broadcasters who were suddenly liberated from their
dependance on the phone company. “Marti”
transmitters were used by hundreds of broadcasters into the 1980’s for broadcasts
of live high school sports and other newsworthy events.
Starting in the 1970’s, methods were developed to improve
the fidelity of the humble dial-up phone line, which was normally limited to a
300-3,000 Hz response. (These were referred to by broadcasters as “POTS lines”,
short for “ Plain Old Telephone Service”) The advantage of a phone line was that it
provided a return communication link from the studio to the remote announcer
without the expense of an additional “talkback” line. At least two companies marketed “frequency
extender” sports mixers, which connected with the studio by sending the same
program audio on two dial-up lines. The
audio frequencies of one line were shifted up 250 Hz and then down-shifted at
the studio to be mixed with the first line, giving the program a more acceptable
bass response. In later units, the other
line was shifted upward by 3 kHz, resulting in a combined audio response of
50-6,000 Hz.
Early digital audio technology was also applied to both
voice line and cellular phone connections to improve the audio quality of
consumer phone connections. Starting in
the 1980’s, digital phone technologies such as ISDN were matched with audio
compression algorithms to provide excellent
sound quality for remote broadcasts, although some still felt it was not quite
suitable for FM music quality.
Today, the Internet and cellular networks are the most
commonly-used method of remote broadcasting, with devices like the Comrex
Access NX combining audio mixing and modem functions into a single compact
package. Special software and
reporter-style microphones can even turn an ordinary cell phone into a remote broadcast
tool.
Broadcasts from remote locations are now so common that we
rarely give a second thought to the technology that makes them possible. The long rocky road from broadcasting’s
beginnings to the present day is now smooth sailing, and only a few of today’s
broadcasters remember the difficulties of those earlier years.
RESOURCES:
- Of Mikes and Men, Jane Goodfin; McGraw-Hill, 1951
- “Brooklyn Daily Eagle”, Dec. 8, 1930, pg. 19: “Aboard U. S. Submarine”
- “Remote Pickup Equipment”, “Communications” Magazine,
January, 1938, pg. 7
- “Vintage Audio: Comrex Buddy Remote Mixer”, https://blogs.telosalliance.com/buddy-remote-mixer
- “George Marti Dies; Iconic Equipment Maker”, Radio World,
12/14/2015
- Remote Broadcasts – Audio from “Out There” by Barry Mishkind
This article
originally appeared in the June 2023 issue of the Spectrum Monitor
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