Mysterious Batwing
 

I was driving through Willamansett MA, near Springfield today and came upon a strange sight: a single batwing antenna on top of an AM broadcast tower. I tried to find some historic info, but didn't. The present-day station is WACE, which runs 5KW days, 8 (!) watts night non-directional. Anyone have any ideas about this? :scratch2:

Looks ALMOST like an older UHF TV antenna...

Looks like a 1940's Super Turnstile VHF array used for TV transmission.

Indeed it is! I have never seen a single bay version before, but it unmistakable. These antennas are actually fairly broadband, and omni-directional... they could be using it to receive "remote" transmissions from an event van, or even as a STL (studio transmitter link) on VHF frequencies. Cool discovery!

jr

Solved with help from Scott Fybush, curator of all station and tower info and very kind to help us out. You can find him at;

http://www.fybush.com/

From Scott;

Hi Dave,

I can't get to the attachment (since I'm not a videokarma member), but
I'm pretty sure what your friends are looking at is the WACE-FM antenna,
circa 1948. WACE-FM operated briefly on 100.9 and then went dark by
about 1950.

s

Sharp eyes Stromberg. Nothing like finding a 62 year old antenna on top of a stick.

Thanks Dave for the info. I was pretty sure that it wasn't used for TV, but was a TV-type antenna, as had been used all over the world for low-band broadcasting. It's in a poor location for VHF transmission, too, and that, along with the no $$$ brought in by many early post war FM'ers, led to the demise of WACE-FM. :tears:
Kevin

And apparently Jampro still sells the Super Turnstile / Batwing style antenna for Low and High band transmission.
http://www.jampro.com/tv.html
not affiliated,
jr