Roundie used to fix an outage today

[wa2ise]

Originally Posted by 3Guncolor

There are still a few AM stations that have tube type transmitters as back up. Some of them work very well indeed they were only sidelined to save money on the electric bill and tube changes. The only problem is I don't know of any stations that have any tube production equipment left.
So if they could fire up the generator and the 40 + year old transmitter they would not have anything to feed it.

The rectifiers in most of those used to be mercury vapor and likely been replaced with solid state rectifiers.

Maybe the old transmitter has an input jack for a microphone. With a tube preamp?

And how many people will have vacuum tube portable AM radios with fresh batteries? I would assume that the poweline would be dead.