Chapter 17.
While he was still in El Paso I activated internet service, natural gas, and trash pick-up at the farm, and purchased some household things. I also figured we'd need some new appliances because he said he was going to leave most of our appliances in our house in El Paso.
I drove to Lowe's in Beaumont and purchased a new refrigerator, washer, dryer, dehumidifier, window air conditioner, and tons of power strips and temporary lighting. I priced a riding mower but thought I'd let him make that decision. It all got delivered in one huge truckload two days later at the same time David was leaving our empty house after seeing the pod locked and sealed shut, and loaded onto a flatbed semi. David texted me to tell me to get a landline turned on in the house and buy a fax machine too, so after the Lowes truck left I drove to the city and took care of that stuff too. I also got an inflatable mattress, sheets, and bathroom stuff. The very next day the septic tank guy pumped the tank and replaced the leach field and after that the house was okay to live in.
My first day at the farm I made three trips to Target to buy stuff I needed just to make it livable, like beach towels to cover some windows and to use in the bathroom. I got a shower curtain and all the stuff we needed in the bathroom until our stuff arrived from El Paso. I got a cheap microwave oven and a portable CD player with AM FM radio, a coffee machine, and lots of temporary kitchen stuff.
Our telephone would be a virtual line via cable internet. I loved talking to the office babe about why we didn't want cable-TV service. I told her the channels sucked and I wasn't going to pay anyone to watch commercials. We got 50mb service with no data cap and phone service with free long distance but no voice mail. I tried to tell her all we watched on TV was NFL football and movies, but she ignored that.
The office lady could not understand why I didn't want voice mail, so I reminded her that if you had VM all you got was recordings from criminals, so why bother? She just said, `Oh.' My thought was she was either an actual moron or a liar. But I have heard people say that telemarketer calls to some lonely folks were the only calls they got, so they actually looked forward to them.
David called me while he was 90 miles west of Fredericksburg about the stuff he packed and what he left behind. Basically the only stuff he packed from the basement was our clothes, the projector, the screen, and the sound gear. He left the furniture, clothes washer and dryer, but packed the two treadmills. He left the weight lifting stuff since we rarely used it. He left the kitchen appliances and everything outside except the gas grille and the outdoor table and chairs. He got our living room furniture, bedroom, and dining room furniture and all our personal stuff. He left all the furniture in the tac-room but put all the bundles of cash in the truck with him! All his tools and electronic gear got packed and then he hired a maid service to clean the entire house, both floors, one time. He left the front door keys in the box on the front door knob and turned off the security and home automation. David told me if the realtor called, the manual for the security system was in a kitchen cabinet.
David described packing to me. He said he went to the U-Haul store and bought a bundle of big boxes and tape. He put them together and set them in each room. In our bedroom he grabbed hangars with clothes and pressed them into boxes. They dumped drawers into boxes, and yanked bedding off the beds and stuffed them into boxes too. As each one was full they taped it shut and carried them to the garage. He said it took about 30 minutes to pack their entire bedroom and bathroom.
David said the worst part was carrying the treadmills up the basement stairs and out to the driveway. Their bed frame came apart with a screw driver and a hammer. I asked who helped carry and David said he hired two young illegals from the parking lot at Home Depot. They were great workers and nice guys. Two days he paid them cash for about ten total hours of work, Four hundred bucks cash each, about twenty five bucks an hour for unskilled labor which was high compared to what they'd get harvesting cotton or olives. (Yes, lots of cotton was grown around El Paso).
He said he was going to miss our backyard and the hot tub most of all. I told him we could have all those here and even set-up an outdoor theater like a drive-in since we had acreage now. He told me he was doing 83mph most of the time and he drove through severe storms with tornado warnings 170 miles west of Fredericksburg and expected to arrive at the same hotel in about an hour, unless it was blown away.
I called him twice a day on his way back, one night in a hotel room near Houston we tried to do phone sex where we both wanked and came at the same time over speaker phone. It was kinda hot but not as good as the real thing, because during sex I used my mouth a lot.
David arrived at the farm on Sunday with this truck and some furniture, like our mattress, our clothes, and our computers and boxes of kitchen and bathroom stuff. He also said he remembered to pack the boxes and bundles of cash in the tac-room.
We closed on the farm on Monday and the purchase of the radio station on Tuesday. The FCC lawyer called and said they did one formal approval meeting every two weeks, that's when ours would be signed and overnighted to us, but it was already approved in the database. Then he jokingly asked if we were getting junk phone calls yet.
On Wednesday we located a suitable retail building (40x100 ft) that had been a car repair shop and was in great shape. It was also on Texas Highway-12 just east of Vidor on a busy four-lane road, fifteen minutes west of our farm and on the same street. That place was a pole building with a five inch concrete slab, with city water, sewer, natural gas, 240v power, with cable internet and would sell, as a lease to own. The best part was the car repair shop, our farm, and the radio station were all on the same street, each about four miles apart. Can't beat that! It was nice that as Texas Highway-12 crossed into Louisiana it was still called Highway-12, but the locals all called it, `Root-12.' In some places it also had a street name but it was different town to town.
On one day David got three calls from India that his social security number was suspended because of criminal activity and he needed to pay Social Security $900 now or risk immediate arrest. He played along and gave them a phony credit card number and sounded thankful and hung up after keeping them busy while he pretended to fumble with his wallet and search for his credit card. He even set the phone down and used the bathroom while the idiot on the phone waited for those last digits of his fake credit card number.
Early Thursday morning I drove David to the airport in Houston again, he flew to Washington, DC, to appear before a commissioner with our FCC lawyer for the rare application to own 670khz across North America. That was an action they hadn't done since the 1940s and also required the approval of Canada, Mexico, and the Organization of Caribbean States. The meeting was like the lawyer told us, he had to smile, shake hands, be humble, act trustworthy, and impressed. Then he was whisked away back to Reagan National Airport and flown back to Houston. On our two hour ride home he suggested I should trade in my tiny sports car for a truck, because of how it looked in the community.
On Friday our Pod arrived. Since our gravel driveway was too soft from sitting un-used for months all they could do was set it down half inside the property line, which meant it was eighty feet from the front door, so we hired two local day workers to help carry everything into the front half of the living room. It was actually a standard shorter shipping container. David confessed he had to throw out my Cool Whip along with all the food in the kitchen. He said we'd need trash cans and some kind of screen room outside because of all the bugs here. He also mentioned something about an above ground pool or a hot tub, but it was just talk. We took one legal pad and marked it Wish List and left it on the kitchen counter for things we needed in the new home. I wrote riding mower, extension ladder, lawn chairs, Tiki torches, and propane tank refill on the list right away. He added Smoker, Pool, tiller, bug whacker, gardening equipment, and trees/bushes planted across the front of the farm to hide our yard from prying eyes on the street. He suggested we plant some type of fruit trees, whatever was appropriate in southern Texas.
During our second week at the farm we got an overnighted packet from the FCC that contained our broadcast license and a letter that said the station could immediately return to the air as `670-AM KYAZ'. We'd already paid a five thousand dollar deposit to turn the power back on at the radio station and hired the same engineering company to re-inspect everything, the building, the tuner at the base of the tower, along with the tower itself and the ground radials because we were putting it back on the air. Four days after the FCC packet arrived we got the call that the station was ready to re-activate at low power and asked if we wanted to be present to watch, so we drove over.
The station was only four miles east of the farm. I turned on the car radio to 670 but there was no signal, just noise from the power lines along the highway. David looked at the wires and said he counted four runs of three phase wires and local lines of 7.3kv on the lowest cross arm, but those poles carried enough juice to light several large towns.
While workers were packing up equipment around the tower base David called a guy (Bud Likens) to deliver loads of crushed limestone and spread them out on both driveways. We saw that the field inside the fence had been mowed, the weeds around the guy wire anchors (and along the fence) had been sprayed, and a crew near the tower base had just finished re-checking measurements of the ground radials. So far everything was normal. That morning a climber replaced all five tower light bulbs. I wanted to watch someone climb a 500 foot tower but we were too busy at home talking to a flooring specialist lady about getting rid of all the carpet in our house.
We asked them to turn the transmitter on at low power. The engineer told us our wattage choices, and so the engineer turned a knob to bypass the final amplifier racks so it went from the second intermediate power amplifier directly into the big nitrogen pressurized feedline. We switched on the air monitor and the EAS box, he had a little tone generator hooked up to the exciter to send a 700hz tone and pressed the start button. We heard clicking sounds as it powered on each amp in sequence but the wide refrigerator sized racks never fully powered on. He left the air conditioning off too because the 500 watt amplifier had its own fans. He pointed to sections of the first rack and said, "In here your 25 watts becomes 100, and in here it becomes 500. This part is where it's routed around the amplifiers then out to the tower."
He watched the meters move as different sections of the transmitter self checked then turned on and self-adjusted. After twenty seconds he turned and smiled at us and said, "There you go, you're on the air," he said with his hand on top of the cabinet looking proud of himself. I looked at the cabinets and tried to figure out what everything did. We went out to the car and turned on the radio and there it was, 670am with a steady tone. It was back on the air after two years of silence! I wondered how many people would notice it as they tuned across the dial. He said at 500 watts during the day it could be heard marginally in Houston and southwestern Louisiana, maybe in Galveston and part way to Dallas, but it would be weak everywhere except Beaumont, Vidor, Starks, Port Arthur, and Lake Charles where it would sound like full power. Then he added that was over a million people.
The engineer guy had some friendly advice for us, "You realize this used to be the most listened to religious station in the southern US, they had a huge audience. Any programming you put on here that doesn't quote the King James Version could offend a lot of people. Granted it's been off the air for two years and a lot of car radios probably got re-programmed but you need to be ready to get a lot of grief if this is less than a conservative Christian station again."
We thanked him and assured him as long as we owned it KYAZ would play oldies by day and rock all night. Then David asked if he had any of those Motorola C-Quam boxes, we wanted her to sing in stereo. He said he had a used one he could re-tune for 670 and install it. I asked how much and he said nine thousand installed, I told him I'd write him a check now, we wanted it installed as soon as possible. We shook and everyone else was packing up their stuff and getting ready to leave.
Out in the driveway the tower crew was about to leave and the broker already left, and all that was left was me and David and the two broadcast engineers. David got the checkbook out on the hood of the car and wrote him a check for the used stereo exciter with installation ASAP.
We also got an update about the ground wires and he said they were thick braided copper good for decades, the resistance of the tower and the radials was perfect, very low, nothing to do except make sure the grass cutter guy knew to stay clear of the tower base wires and the guy wires, but they were fenced-in. We looked up at the tower and saw the lights were on as the end of the day neared, they had replaced all the bulbs earlier in the day and quoted us a price on painting the tower, which was past due. They reported there was no other work due on the tower hardware at this time, including the guy wires and their anchors. It had been checked for vertical and was spot-on perfect, same as last fall. One of the tower crew guys said our tower was strong and properly installed, one of the best he'd ever seen.
Then we noticed the engineer guy unplugged and removed his little tone generator, so now the station was on the air transmitting 500 watts of silence, aka: dead air. The engineer said it should be stereo next week. He said the C-Quam box had the required audio limiter built-in so he'd take the Inovonics box out of the rack. He said that function was required by law to prevent the station from over modulating or transmitting audio wider than allowed by law. He added that the Continental Transmitter was a work of art and would last almost forever, he said it was one of the finest ever built and cost a fortune when it was built in 1941. He'd always heard it was a gift to the church (in Beaumont) from the Moody Family Trust in Galveston.
As he walked to his truck he offered us one nice comment, he said the audio bandpass on AM mono was 40 hertz to 5,500 hertz. That sounds narrow compared to FM, but the real restriction on AM radio was in the crappy receivers around today, not in the transmitters. "With the new Motorola AM boxes and a decent car radio after a few minutes you won't even notice you're not listening to FM stereo, it's that good. The new rules for C-Quam are 40hz to 11khz." David told him we were going to promote the hell out of it after the box was installed. We were already watching for used stereo radios on eBay, but the engineer said the oldest ones were poorly designed, best to investigate before buying or suggesting a radio to listeners. Some of the early AM stereo radios were total crap.
David asked what the Inovonics box did and the engineer said it was like a doorway for broadcast audio. It only allowed sound up to a certain width and certain height, beyond those limitations everything else got blocked. That made perfect sense to us, we said we'd appreciate it if he texted us about the progress of installing the stereo exciter. We shook hands and left for home.
That evening the crushed limestone guy (Mr. Likens) did both driveways, $450 for three truckloads of crushed limestone from his quarry, we paid cash which made him happy.
We went to the hardware store and bought extension cords and lights and stuff and drove home. We had to make a cable since the Inovonics box had XLR connectors and the iPod Nano didn't! About ten minutes with a wire stripper, solder iron, he made a cable that would work and combine left and right audio into one channel.
When it looked like we were ready to go he said, "Wait, we need a playlist with oldies music to repeat until tomorrow. We sat in front of his laptop at the kitchen counter using iTunes and programmed two five-hour long playlists, one a day for two days. We had a huge collection of music (over eight thousand songs) our parents listened to back then and both of us liked that stuff so we did thirty minutes of drag and drop into two playlist folders, then it was ready.
But I stopped him again and had him record legal IDs and two promos using his laptop microphone, which would sound like crap, but it's all we had.
Using the laptop I had him record:
'Slowly returning to full power, this is KYAZ-AM 670, Deweyville, Texas.'
And the other was just a legal ID: 'KYAZ Deweyville.' I had David say it four times until he relaxed his voice so it got deeper and more chill, more 'lay-back.'
We actually recorded him doing six of those short MP3s.
After that was done I had him record them all over again in the bathroom to get rid of all the background noise, like the refrigerator running and the central air running.
We got the files edited and saved as MP3s and dumped copies into both playlists about one every eight songs. We discussed how to pronounce the name of the town like a local because lots of locals pronounced it: DO-ill-VILLE.' So he recorded one that said, From the Lone Star State, this is KYAZ, DOillVILLE.'
Then David asked if I wanted to play anything special before we formally went on the air and he said sure, "Let's make her first sound something written by a gay man, Capriccio Italien by Tchaikovsky, then Green Grass by the Outlaws. Together that's twenty five minutes, we'll start at 7:35pm." That was twelve minutes from now.
"God, those songs always make you cry, you really want to play 'em? Then what?" he asked with his eyes glued to the laptop screen, his hand on the mouse.
"Then your ID, then we start the first playlist with an ID every eight songs." I answered.
"What do you want to be the first official song?"
"You mean in the first playlist?" he asked.
"Yes, in the first playlist."
"Why not make it something by the Doobies, they were popular back then."
A moment later he started to sync the Nano and said, "You realize that The Outlaws are not a gay band?" I laughed and walked behind him, bent over and kissed his cheek and reached down and gently pinched his tits, "You are so smart David, where would we be?"
We sync'd the iPod and grabbed the cables and drove back to the tower site and with flashlights went back inside the windowless steel building. This trip we took my car because it had the best sound system. He plugged it into the audio processor box and the other wire into the USB charger. David made sure it was set to shuffle replay just the one playlist, but he started with a one-time playlist that had Capriccio Italien, one short ID, then Green Grass (and High Tides), then the big playlist started with a proper legal ID, then it played a song that was also in the playlist, the Doobie Brothers, Listen to the Music.
After it played those it would repeat and shuffle them all night and tomorrow until one of us drove over and switched to the next playlist. We looked at each other, because this moment had been a long time coming, we risked our lives to make the money to make this moment happen. He started Capriccio Italien then we went out to my car and cranked up the radio, it was very dark outside, all we could see was some small amount of light from the starry night sky and that majestic 500 foot tall steel tower with the red lights slowly going on and off.
I got a tissue from the glove box because those songs always made me cry.
David took my hand and told me he loved me even though I was a total sissy. I noticed how nice it sounded even in mono-AM and was excited about turning on stereo next week. We stood beside the car and sort of paced around the driveway as my car stereo blasted the fifteen minute song. I told David I was certain we were the only AM station that played this song anywhere on the planet today.
He asked, "How old is it?" I answered, "Eighteen eighty. About a hundred forty years ago, this recording is probably thirty years old."
"Did you notice how quiet this station was in the background?" David asked.
"Yep, no hum or buzz or nothing, just silence, that's the mark of a properly installed radio station. I read it's actually hard to accomplish, especially on AM."
After a moment I added that we should reserve judgment to see if it was still dead quiet when it was running fifty or one hundred thousand watts, we both chuckled, then I shushed him.
With no other humans for a couple miles around us I reached back inside the car and cranked up the volume. We both reclined on the hood of my car, like chaise loungers, and stared at the tower lights and the stars and held hands. He glanced over at me and chuckled because he knew my tears would start soon.
Several times during the first ten minutes I was so happy I reached for his hand and held it to my lips and kissed it over and over while I watched the tower lights slowly blink on and off.
At a quiet part of the song I turned to look at him, "We made it! This was our goal and here we are!" Then more tears flowed. With his hand at my lips I told him, "You have no idea how happy this makes me." He stayed quiet and kept watching the sky with a very satisfied smile on his face.
Ten minutes into the recording my chin had already started to quiver and my eyesight was blurry with tears. I told him "Its songs like this that made me glad I never took up playing an instrument. Picture the string section and the effort it took to perform their parts, it's just brutal, and that's why I call this one of the most violent songs ever written."
Then his comment made me laugh and cry at the same time, "Gays Rock!" I dropped his hand and folded my arms across my chest to brace for the coming flood of emotions.
Slowly the orchestra inched closer to the final four minutes of the song where it started to build in intensity.
The huge ending actually started with 3:45 left in the song. At 2:45 left my body trembled while I sobbed. The car stereo vibrated the car beneath us. At one minute left I closed my eyes and visualized the orchestra and the individual musicians. I always wanted to play the big bass and kettle drum parts, and wail on those drums and go bonkers so everyone in the auditorium felt the pounding on their chest.
As Capriccio Italien ended my car stereo blasted his voice: 'Broadcasting to North America from Deweyville, Texas, this is KYAZ 670-AM, America's radio station.'
I slid off the hood and used the paper towel to wipe my face dry.
David became perfectly still while Green Grass started to play. "Oh my God! That was me?"
I just nodded yes as he laid there dumbfounded hearing his voice on the radio for the first time, as a joke I told him he didn't sound gay at all. Under his voice we heard the first few seconds of our second song start, that slow Fender bass guitar lead at the beginning of Green Grass by the Outlaws to be followed by Listen to the Music by the Doobie Brothers. After Green Grass David made sure the iPod was set to play just that playlist, shuffle play, and repeat. Then he came back out and locked the door and the gate.
We stood by the car in the dark and slow danced for the first two minutes of Green Grass. Then we got in my car and I started the engine and we drove down Highway-12 with the windows down, with the sound of crickets on both sides of the road. In fact, in this area on both sides of this road was nothing but trees in standing water.
We drove home at 9 mph with the radio blasting. In the mirror I saw a truck roar up behind us, I swerved onto the shoulder to let them pass. We saw two cowboys with hats on waved as they raced by, one of them hollered `YAHOOooo!' out the window they tossed an empty beer can that went BANG BANG on the pavement then rolled into the weeds. When they drove past us we heard the exact same song blasting on their stereo, Green Grass by the Outlaws. Those were our first confirmed listeners!
We kept going down the highway with my foot off the gas pedal so we could hear the entire song and the next playlist start.
We rolled into our (new) driveway he asked if my car received AM stereo and I said I thought that's what the little AMAX icon on the faceplate meant, it worked with C-Quam stereo. "And that's not digital?" He asked, I looked him as Listen to the Music was starting and said, "Fuck digital!" David immediately laughed then we got out of the car and went inside, stripped down and took showers together. Our new bathroom had a tub with a shower head so now we had room to shower together.
That night before bed he went to the ASCAP website and paid for a rights license, which cost $600 for the year.
In bed we chatted for a bit with my face planted into the back of his neck. "You spoze the bayou has a lot of really big snakes and our radio station is right in the middle of it?"
"Ohhh, we probably should come up with a plan for the occasional Eastern Diamondback Rattler sunning itself on our steps."
"Fucking wonnerful. I hate snakes."
On Saturday we finished emptying the moving container and called them to come get it. Some people were very curious about the new faces, we saw lots of cars slow as they drove by and stared at us as if we had a group of circus freaks doing acrobat stunts in the yard. I reminded David we were deep in the Bible belt, as a married gay couple we needed to tread lightly about our private lives, he agreed to keep quiet about fuckin.' Luckily the farm was rural so neighbors were very spread out and distant. The only thing across the street from our driveway was another field that appeared to be home to a few horses and a pond. And to the east and west of us on `Root-12' was just trees and ponds.
We slept each night with a radio playing our station softly in the kitchen.
The next week, our fourth week in Deweyville we'd closed the sale of our house in El Paso and got new driver's licenses and a new insurance agent and had a policy on the farm and the radio station too.
We learned lots of people were very curious about KYAZ, what it was going to be. Word had spread around the area that the new guys at the farm on `Root-12' owned the station. We were asked in stores, parking lots, and at the Stateline Diner. We told people it was going to stay this way for months and after that we had no concrete plans. We expected it would take nearly six months to build a temporary studio.
Word spread fast, we heard the locals called it the 'iPod station.' But the kids in school had a totally different name because of comments we made around town about digital broadcasting. The high schoolers called it `F-Digital.' This town was so religious that the F-Bomb was rarely used in public or in school.
Four local preachers actually knocked on our door and introduced themselves and asked about buying airtime on Sunday mornings. David explained we had no ability to put anyone on the air, we had no studio or microphones, no telephone, or anything except a laptop computer, iTunes, and an old iPod Nano. They all said, "Oh," and seemed to understand that it would take time until we got set-up for more than just an iPod connected to the transmitter. I don't think many of the locals knew what an iPod Nano was but they all had iTunes on their cell phones.
One savvy preacher said he could record their service and burn it to a CD and we could rip that and transfer it into the iPod Nano, but we said it wouldn't work because we only went to the station once a week where the Nano was plugged into the transmitter. He sensed we were just being lazy and thanked us and said he knew an old electronics guy he would send out way to help out.
So far most of the feedback about KYAZ was positive, it appeared the Christians were already listening elsewhere. I was surprised that many people would listen to music on the AM band, especially young people. I had the belief that most young people never heard of the AM broadcast band.
The next week the engineer guy installed our Motorola exciter and after he turned it back on my car radio now said it was in stereo, and I could hear the difference immediately, it sounded a whole bunch better than regular AM. While he was switching out the old exciter for the stereo unit David was at home building a new audio cable with fork connectors to match the terminal strip on the exciter. Three connectors for each audio channel because in a transmitter site everything was grounded to eliminate hum.
We also asked him to crank it up to 1,000 watts and we added more playlists to the iPod, one for each day of the week. David recorded more IDs and promos. He signed up for a gmail account and we gave that out for listener feedback but the in-box stayed pretty quiet, except for a few messages a day. He wrote each one back to ask where they were listening, seven out of ten were around Houston and the rest were scattered around small towns in Louisiana. Over the next two weeks we got emails from Pensacola, Shreveport, Little Rock, and San Antonio, while we ran at 1,000 watts. David said we'd get a lot more listener feedback if we gave out a cell number they could text since lots of younger people totally stopped using email. We signed up for a G-Voice number to give out on the air for people to text us, but that got out of hand with in a month.
I got an old Sony SRF-AX15, which was a small transistor radio that received AM stereo too, we hooked it up to our surround stereo in the living room to demonstrate to visitors the difference C-Quam made on AM, everyone was surprised with the brilliant highs and deep lows, of course FM sounded better but FM only went to the horizon and we'd eventually cover everything north of southern Columbia to the Arctic Circle. Almost the entire northern half of the western hemisphere!
We signed a lease on the commercial building near Vidor that would become our music store and radio station office. We registered three domains and hired someone to set up web sites for the station and the store for the sale and purchase of used vinyl albums, and commercial CDs. (No tape of any kind, no 78 or 45 rpm records, no DVDs, or homemade discs in any format. No posters, no autographed stuff, and no collectables) About the only thing we sold by the register was cleaner for acrylic plastic to improve scratched CDs and DVDs, it could be used to clear fogged headlight covers too.
We researched other music stores to see how they worked and hired a carpenter to build-out the inside front of the car repair shop, the front 1/4 of the building would become a small music store with a sign by the street. We hired a local high school age kid to help staff the place and called KYAZ the 'voice of the music store' and slowly our business started. Soon after the sign went up by the highway people carried in boxes of CDs and records to sell. CDs were easy, if they were badly scratched we said no, but records had to be listened to, both sides.
We also had to buy a nice stereo and turntable for the store and we spent a lot of money fixing up the place. I think people expected it to also be something like a 1970s head shop with black light posters, pipes, papers, lighters, copies of High Times Magazine, and maybe some paisley clothing but we had none of that stuff. Within three weeks of turning on the sign it was getting twenty customers a day. Using tall neon green stickers we put the call letters in the front windows: KYAZ-670 and under it in smaller letters it said: AM STEREO. F-DIGITAL!
The number of people bringing in CDs to sell was so big we had to start taking reservations because people were getting pissed having to wait so long. For the first few months we had a vast amount of cash going out but very little coming in. The good part of the music store was people stopped appearing at our front door with questions about the radio station, and we changed the web site to list the music store as the address and phone number to call, then we updated the FCC too.
With all the shopping mall record stores gone we had all the business sewn up for a hundred miles in every direction, except for one store in Houston's 9th Ward which most people wouldn't go to. Some of the locals described us a pawn shop for CDs and vinyl records.
The building (which we intended to buy eventually) was a four bay auto repair shop in back, up front it had two offices, one bathroom, and a nice open waiting area with big plate glass windows that looked out on our unpaved parking lot. We hired a second high school age boy to scrape and de-grease the concrete floor in the back of the building so we could use it without stepping in oil. It took him a month to get it clean, then he quit! We used a huge fan, opened all the doors, gallons of Simple Green and Dawn dish detergent and a power washer to clean the concrete floor in back. It was a very slow process but most of the black coating came up.
We got one touch screen computer and a bar stool so customers could come in, sit on the stool and browse our inventory. We kept all the CDs in paper sleeves with any original album artwork, but the plastic jewel cases were all thrown into boxes. Records went into bins on folding tables for now. We had them organized by artist name. Within the first two weeks we had to buy another touch screen computer and another stool. We also added a pop machine and some benches for customers to sit on while they waited their turn at a terminal. We did not yet have our inventory online but the guy we hired was working on it. Everybody else was slowly typing in the name, artist, year, label, and cover photo for every CD in our collection. We agreed to limit us to two copies of each CD because almost everyone in America had a Backstreet Boys CD they wanted to get rid of.
David concentrated on the music store and I concentrated on the radio station business. He said he was going to research doing microscopic repairs to damaged records using a microscope and very fine hand tools, fixing big scratches on records one spot at a time. He had no idea if it could be done. We already knew it could be done electronically, but I never heard of someone repairing vinyl records before. He also started investigating buying used record stamping equipment, so maybe we could start our own record label and maybe someday a recording studio, which could also be used for the radio station.
Two months after we turned on the transmitter an old guy came in the music store and introduced himself. He said he was a retired engineer and lifelong radio hobbyist. He said he could locate used equipment to link our home studio to the radio station by radio. It was very low power and didn't need a license, and was called an 'STL' or studio-transmitter link. It would give us a one-way stereo connection from our farm to the radio station, so we hired him, $4,000 bucks to make it work with used equipment. David specified it could not add any hearable noise.
The broadcast engineer also sold us a used box so we could read the transmitter meters over the internet from home, and it would text us if the security alarm or smoke alarms were triggered.
Two weeks later we had two boxes and a weird looking antenna strapped to the chimney, it aimed at the radio tower. Using cell phones I hooked up my laptop and played music into the link at home, then he played the music back to me on the receiver at the station, he showed me both channels worked fine and should work fine even in a heavy storm, snow, or fog. The guy that hooked it up showed us the signal meter was full scale at the tower site despite four miles of bayou. Both antennas were re-purposed DISH-TV dishes aimed at the horizon instead of at a satellite. He said if we needed to move the studio to the store we may need to mount the antenna on some sort of a pipe or pole so it was just above the treetops.
That evening we drove to the site and switched the exciter audio inputs over to the link outputs, then drove home and connected the iPod and it sounded fine. We could not tell there was another stage in our audio by listening on my car stereo.
We got on eBay and ordered some used studio gear, like microphones, studio mixer, a Teac reel to reel tape deck, and two Marantz turntables with top notch stylus and cartridges installed. We also purchased used AM stereo radios for home and to use in the car for demonstration purposes, we used the Sony SRF-A100 portable most of all, despite the fact that both of us didn't care for the brand or the company. We had more than one radio geek stop by that told us Sony was banned from many radio and TV stations due to reliability issues that started back in the 1990s. Another one we started collecting was the Radio Shack TM-152 stereo AM tuner, we bought every unit in working condition that appeared on eBay. We cleaned them up, tested em, and sold em at the store.
Within two weeks we were ready to broadcast from the third bedroom. I spent a week assembling the new studio, which was: two desktop computers with Windows 8.1, two very nice USB microphones with wind screens, sound editing software (Audacity), iTunes 8, and two new external USB drives -- one was a back-up, a sound compressor/limiter, speakers, four pairs of headphones, and two standalone CD players. That evening when David got home we switched from using the tiny iPod Nano to the desktop computer. He recorded ten new IDs and three fifteen second promos. So far his voice was the only announcer on KYAZ.
We discovered the best acoustics for recording was inside our bedroom closet with the door closed. Recording him there made him sound like NPR.
We made an appointment with the radio engineer guy to come back and crank us up to 5,000 watts and within a week we got emails from listeners all over Houston, up into DFW, and all the way into Mississippi. That night we stopped playing oldies and played progressive rock daily after 7pm, Led Zeppelin, the Who, Beatles, Hendrix, Joplin, Airplane, the Dead, and about everything else from back then, but before the sun came up we went back to Top-40 oldies. We also recorded a thirty second promo for our music store and started to play it once an hour just before the legal ID. It just said this hour's music was sponsored by (Highway-12 Music) our store location, hours. It also gave our email address, web page, and SMS number (which now had our used inventory online but not ordering yet).
According to the emails the thing that amazed listeners was the absence of commercials and talking. Every few hours we played a 60 second recording about what AM-stereo system we used and offered information about buying a car radio or home portable. David recorded a short promo mocking digital AM radio and how it failed around bridges and frequently dropped out and barely worked at night, but plain old analog AM stereo worked great, then he'd say "F-Digital!"
One Sunday we drove to Houston and used his truck radio to record one of the HD AM stations, we drove on I-10 where it met I-69. We also recorded HD stations while driving on the 610 Loop where it met I-45. We used the headphone jack to record how the digital signal cut out repeatedly around bridges and high voltage power lines. When it cut out it went back to analog AM, but the two signals were never synchronized. So if a 30 second commercial was almost over, when digital faded you were suddenly most of the way through the next commercial! When you got away from the bridge suddenly it was 90 seconds into the next song! We edited those parts together to make a promo for why digital AM sucked, because it really did! We made no friends pointing that out about HD AM, and we got angry calls from stations in Houston but hung up when they started threatening us. But no brands or call signs were ever mentioned. I think they got lied to about how HD on AM would actually work in a moving vehicle on an actual highway.
An artist in Lake Charles made us a logo, it was a cartoon pig face wearing cool sun glasses and big headphones. Since this area was heavily into pork BBQ having a pig as the logo was considered very appropriate. To some people the round smiling pig face looked stoned despite wearing sunglasses.
We expanded our night time music library to include jazz, blues, country, and reggae. In our fourth month we hired the engineer guy to come back and crank us up to 10kw which would cover the entire south-central USA, basically from Alabama to El Paso and Havana to Saint Louis. The feeling of sitting in our tiny 10x10 studio playing songs on the computer on iTunes and we could be heard on portable radios over a huge chunk of the western hemisphere was mind blowing. But we rarely talked or even said what was playing and we never gave out the studio fax number but it was on our web page.
We located a man online named Chris that had a couple hundred add-on car radios. They tuned AM only and sent their audio to the regular car stereo on a regular FM channel. They just screwed to the bottom of the dashboard and connected to any car radio.
The engineer came to our house with his laptop to demonstrate radio station automation software, which worked similar to iTunes but with tons of added features, most of them were designed for a live DJ. He also showed us a free program that ran on Linux that did most of the same stuff as Simian did in Windows.
The day he turned us up to 10kw we dedicated one of my most favorite classical songs to both our parents, we played the 1812 Overture first thing to an entirely new audience as our signal extended further and further. As far as we knew we were the only radio station in the west playing music like ours, and without commercials. David played us at the music store after all the customers were gone. He said one of his customers offered to loan him a retro looking pinball machine for the front room for customers to play while waiting for their turn at the touch screen terminals, he said okay and three days later a classic old machine was delivered and set-up, 25 cents for five balls. The deal was we split the money 50-50 for no rent on the machine, and with free maintenance.
While they were setting up and leveling the pinball machine I was there setting up the radio station office in the music store, which was just two tables, 3 chairs, a stereo, and two computers. There were a lot of people that wanted to talk to us (mostly sales) and this gave us a place to meet instead of sitting on lawn furniture outside our house.
Some of the visiting sales people were relentless: special insurance policies, employee benefits, computer software, special telephone services, signage, promotional items (we did eventually order bumper stickers), alarm systems with monitoring services, uniform service, sanitation services, and on and on. 98% of them were irrelevant for our business. We left nothing of value in the building overnight. More than a few had to be asked to never come back.
I was also researching hiring a company to build custom car radios and adapter panels for all the weird dashboard openings. The one we were designing was a basic AM/FM radio with buttons and knobs, memories and rather high wattage for a plain car stereo, but we insisted on good audio quality on AM, suppression of engine and manmade noise. It was still months away from deciding if we were going to hire them to build car radios or not. Dealing with Taiwan for manufacturing was a slow process. From our informal survey online a few auto manufacturers included stereo, otherwise nobody on the planet was building stereo radios.
We came up with a process to put church services on the air for money, we told them to buy a reel to reel deck and record it, then run the tape over and we could play it. Someone suggested as a cheaper and easier alternative we could use a standard VHS recorder and use the video input to record sound, same for playback at the studio, and the sound quality would be fantastic. We tried it and it worked on older machines that didn't inspect the picture for quality to adjust tracking. I had no idea VHS tape would work as an audio recorder! Mostly, we used reel to reel.
The churches that wanted to be on the air were the same ones that were on KYAZ with the former owner. Those were the Catholic Church in Vidor and a Lutheran church in Beaumont. When the Baptist and Apostolic churches stopped in David told them what happened to his parents when their church found out he was gay. Those preachers quietly left after he told his story.
After we saw the first electric bill ($694) at 10,000 watts we called a wind power designer to see what could be done in our situation, if we could add wind power to our site. He had to coordinate with the broadcast engineer to see if it was feasible. The problem was if you added metal structures near a broadcast tower depending on the distance and size it could act as if it was connected to the transmitter and distort your signal, creating dead spots in the coverage area. They hired an RF engineer with modeling software to experiment with different wind generator support designs on the property, at different locations, closer or further, taller or shorter, and different materials too. It took them thirty hours of research to design a support structure for the generator.
The two companies worked together to design a system that could power the station in a 6mph or greater wind. What they came up with was a 90 foot tall wooden tripod made of three utility poles. Three legs leaned together and on top would be a turbine that generated 480v three phase AC, up to 110 amps continuous, and we would build a large power convertor by the transmitter building with battery storage. We had no neighbors to complain since we were surrounded by state owned bayou. He suggested we might try to copper spike some of the trees off our property to kill them over time to increase the wind above sixty feet in the air. Because of the hurricanes most of the trees in the Bayou were less than sixty feet tall.
Their research showed no matter what material they used there would be some effect on our signal pattern, the windmill would create some loss in that direction, our choice was to pick the direction. We picked south-east towards western Venezuela. After the generator was installed we might disappear from the radio there and possibly in western Jamaica too. On the modeling software he moved the windmill across the south side of the property to put the null in that direction then made measurements to properly locate it to so the contractor could do his construction estimates. There was an issue with taking down fencing during construction and possibly constructing a ramp for dump trucks and cement trucks too.
It would take three weeks to erect the platform and three weeks to install the generator and the blades, the power switches, and batteries for the transmitter power. He rated it would survive a Cat-5 Hurricane (sustained 160mph wind and rain) easily because the entire structure would be very aerodynamic. We paid cash for the entire thing, about $400k bucks. We had to be really strict about who could drive on the field because it was easy to not see the overhead guy wires. During construction it would be my job to guard the tower and guy wires. Liability insurance would be a big issue to solve before the project started. We also budgeted for 24 hour security at the site since the fence would be down for several weeks.
The spot we agreed on was along the south fence, about 2/3 of the way towards the southeast corner. The closest leg of the platform would be about 90 feet east of the gate. The contractor came out and sprayed three big X's on the ground for where the three support legs would go.
The hole for the foundations of the poles would be large and take a lot of rock and concrete. The plan was to use an aerial pumper so the cement trucks didn't have to drive over the buried copper radials. We were required to lower our power on days anyone worked at the site, so the engineer taught us how to crank the power down and back up again. The transmitter controller actually had a built-in timer to lower the power at sunset and back up at sunrise, but we were licensed for one power level all day. We were authorized to lower the power at night at our choice, but we never did.
We'd been running announcements for weeks prior that we were building on the site and would be running very low power during the day for a month. The entire south fence was taken down, along with the gate so the trucks had room to back up to the holes to dump stone, concrete, steel parts, and three of the longest wood utility poles I ever saw. One of them had big bolts sticking out like a ladder so technicians could climb up to the turbine house on top. It looked like a big three legged tree house for a couple days before they mounted the propeller and the blades. I was tempted to climb it myself.
The project was done in six weeks and six days. We needed to have the broadcast engineer come over to supervise the first tests running the station on wind power and how it handled the switch back and forth to commercial power.
The turbine and all its parts were delivered before they even started digging for the three leg bases. With one carefully positioned crane they lowered the three poles into their mounts in the holes and buried them in concrete. They sat for a week to cure while the other crew built the turbine and the blades, then the same crane came back to lift the custom built mount on top of the poles, then they bolted on the turbine house and ran the four heavy power cables, while another crew attached the three propellers. Another crew ran cross bracing between the legs at two levels. They told us it was designed to flex in strong winds.
The turbine itself was not that big, maybe the size of a small U-Haul truck. It sat on a pivoting mount to always aim into the wind. Once the propellers were attached the stuff in the air was pretty much finished. It took another day to assemble the switch gear, but I insisted they test and adjust it all at night so we could run on low power. It required just one adjustment then it worked perfectly. They mounted the switch gear on the old concrete platform for the old propane tank.
The propellers made a weird sound in the wind. We delayed the actual switchover to wind power for a special party we'd planned for the day we tried to run the transmitter at full power.
It required the engineer's presence because the transmitter sat un-used for two years. We didn't know if there was any damage done by the humidity during that time, and since there were extremely high voltages used to operate the final amplifier sections that boosted the signal from fifty thousand to one hundred thousand watts we wanted someone with experience with this transmitter on hand for the first hours at full power on wind power. Days before the full power test they had a technician over with special gear to clean the inside of the high power amplifier cases of any dust or carbon that might suddenly conduct electricity. We had to go totally off the air for half of one night for that job and I stayed at the station with the tech until he was done.
Most of that time David was busy with the store, and since the radio station office was now inside his store he often handled our business too. There was a constant trickle of sales people coming in the store for the radio station. Some of them said they recognized his voice from the hourly ID recordings.
David had also been working on something very secretive for months now and I could tell it was coming to an end soon. I had a few ideas but I patiently waited for him to decide when it was best to tell me what he'd been working on all this time. I had no reason to think it was serious like cancer or that he wanted a divorce, but I was sure it had something to do with somebody we knew, probably his father or his parents.
Contact the author: borischenaz gmail