"D Peter Maus" wrote in message
...

Full of ****. Present tense.

Webster-Chicago model 181, $98, 1953.

Webster-Chicago model 80, $149, 1948.

Even Henry Ford wasn't selling cars for that.

Run back the thread... my original answer to the recording issue had to do
with tape, which is a format that endured. Wire had a short life and, in
retrospect, is nearly impossible to reproduce today. Most ETs of the
pre-60's period (and I was talking of the post WW II period) were 78's...
and the life of acetates is also limited.

Wire also was very fine (something like 2000 feet on a 3 inch reel) and it
was next to impossible to edit. The devices ran at very high foot per second
speeds and the delay while rewinding (you rembember there was no removable
pickup reel at least on all I have seen) makes, like the changing of an
acetate, the devices not quite appropriate for non-stop DXing.

And you neglect (more later) the enormous cost of supplies.


My point is that the average DXer in the era could not afford a wire
recorder. Or a disk recorder. Keyword: average.

Keyword: Horse****. Recording gear was in the same cost range as the
receivers of the period.

I'll get to it later, but I spoke of cost, not just the purchase price of
home devices (the ones you mention would never have held up to the recording
requrements of a DXer devoted enough to want to record... 60 or 70 hours a
month or more.

Many receivers were far and away more expensive. Even Bill Halligan was
building rigs costing more than the cost of a top line wire recorder. We
won't even go where Oscar Hammarlund's prices were.

An lower range Hammarlund was in the $129 range. The cheapest Hallicrafters
was about $60. I had one of each. But that was a full 15 years after the
War.

Recording technology, until the early 60's, was not accessable by the
average DXer. The receivers of the post-War period that most people used
were much less costly, in fact. The supplies, maintenance and such were not
what the average DXer was into, either. Tape allowed recorded reception
reports (where you only heard a brief piece of a station, but hearing the DJ
could net a verie out of it).

Home recorders recorded to an acetate, sometimes vinyl (higher end
blanks which were available later) coating on an aluminum substrate.
Those were also not expensive.

If you don't recall one, your experience is lacking.

By 1959, when I started, the only place we saw disk recorders was as a
fading way of sending spots to stations. When I got to Ecuardor, all
agencies sent spots out on disk; we were the only one of nearly 300
stations that did not play the disks on the air, dubbing them instead to
cart.

I'm glad I never had to have the recorders in a station.


So, you admit you don't know what you're talking about. Thank God I
lived to see that.

You continue to move from era to era to make your point.

You fail to recognize, and a horrible failure it is, that the "cost" of such
a device is not just the purchase price but also the other costs. In the
case of a disk recorder, a DXer would have to record at all times he was
listening. Let's say an average DXer listend 15 hours a week for DX... they
would spend something, at near minimum wage, all their salary on blanks in
the 40's or 50's. There were no "Acetate RW" blanks available. And then,
they would need a second recorder to dub the IDs to... not really practical
since recording was pretty much a continuous process.

As for expense...again, not VERY expensive. I have one by Meissner
that was less than $130 new.

As I said, plus the disks. I know in Ecuador, agencies charged us S/.250 for
broken disks, so the cost much have been substantial to them.

And $130 in 1946 was about, what, $1500 in today's money? Or if the year is
1950, $1200 in 2008 money.

That was when minimum wage was less than a buck. In other words, the home
recorder cost a mont's take home pay. That is not cheap.


Again, your experience is lacking. A good radio cost that, and more.
Recording toys were fairly common. Not free, by any means, but hardly out
of the price range of someone who wanted one.

Again, even the low end devices (which were delicate, temperamental, etc.,
just like early tape devices) required you run non-reusable media every time
you listened. The cost of that would make it prohibitive for all but very
rich people.

DXers who adopted tape in the early 60's first had to find a deck that did
not spit noise all over the BCB. Then, they paid a lot for them, but the
media could be used hundreds of times, and dubbing from tape to tape was
easy if you knew somebody with another machine.


The pride and joy of Charlie Stanley, and the poster station for FCC
attention. Yes, WEW. The station with more dial positions than a 40's
Zenith FM. The station with more shared frequencies than Heidi Fleiss's
cell phone. WEW. The station that had to monitor it's program line,
because WABC came over the top of the air monitor in late afternoon. Yes,
THAT WEW.

So the WABC stories are true. That is one of the daytimers that was worst
hit by an eastern clear.