Alpine, New Jersey, June 11, 2005

For a radio geek and a history buff, there are a few places in the country that go beyond the merely interesting to the truly special. Mount Washington, New Hampshire is one such place; the WTIC transmitter in Avon, Connecticut is another. But the Holy Grail of radio history must surely be the laboratories of Major Edwin Howard Armstrong, who single-handedly created three of the 20th century's most important inventions: the regenerative circuit (a tube-based amplifier and oscillator circuit), the superheterodyne circuit (still the basis of nearly all radio receivers built since the 1930s), and most significant of all, frequency modulation.

Armstrong never received his due during his lifetime -- a lifetime of engineering genius which was tragically cut short by Armstrong's suicide on January 31, 1954, at a low point in one of his long-running patent fights. Thankfully, a few dedicated people in the engineering community have kept Armstrong's fight for his proper historical recognition (as opposed to the self-invented histories of men like Sarnoff and de Forest, who would have had Armstrong remembered as a crazy tinkerer). Among these people are Steve Hemphill, owner of Solid Electronics Labs of Philadelphia, and Charles Sackermann, principal of CSC Management, the company which owns Armstrong's physical legacy -- the great three-armed tower and laboratory Armstrong built in Alpine, New Jersey.

On January 31, 2004, the fiftieth anniversary of Armstrong's death, Hemphill and other Armstrong afficionados gathered to remember the Major and his contributions -- FM foremost among them. What better way to remember the inventor of FM than to build an FM transmitter to Armstrong's original specifications, and get FCC permission to operate it (if only temporarily) on one of Armstrong's channels? Since the old FM band was reallocated to public safety, and most of those users had migrated to more-predictable spectrum in the UHF band, it might be possible to use those frequencies again. Hemphill, who had the engineering and design qualifications and access to salvaged components from old tube transmitters, decided to have a go at building a Phasitron FM transmitter.

In the course of his research, Steve found out that the first public demonstration of FM by Armstrong took place in November of 1935, soon after Armstrong built his laboratory and massive tower in Alpine, New Jersey. He got in touch with the current owners of the site, CSC Management, and found in CSC's president, Chuck Sackermann, a man with equal dedication to the memory of the Major. CSC could have imploded the unique Armstrong tower long ago, and replaced it with a more conventional structure with more leasable space; they chose instead not only to maintain it, but to restore Armstrong's laboratory building (which had had many uses since Armstrong's death, including for a time in the 1980s USA Network's master control). Since 9/11, CSC has fought with the Johnny-come-lately neighbors in Alpine and Closter to improve the facility to provide emergency facilities for New York's broadcasters, including, ironically, WNBC-TV.

With the original transmitter site available, Hemphill was able to get Experimental Special Temporary Authority to operate wideband FM on 44.1 MHz with 250 watts from Alpine, under the callsign WB3XXE. Scott and I saw the facility demonstrated at the monthly SBE meeting in January, 2005; that evening, the Sackermann family announced plans for an official commemoration to be held later that year.

By the date of the celebration, Steve had received FCC approval to retune his transmitter to Armstrong's original frequency, 42.8 MHz, under the new callsign WA2XMN -- recalling Armstrong's original callsign, W2XMN. (Armstrong's station also operated on the new FM band, at 93.1 MHz, under the callsign KE2XCC.)

WA2XMN now has a full five-year experimental license. Keep on monitoring 42.8!

The galleries for this trip are organized by state: