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DX Delight: Rare Recordings Of WSB Atlanta As It Marks 100 Yrs. On Air
A lot of radio stations in the U.S. are celebrating 100 years on the air in 2022 - including the powerhouse WSB, 760 AM in Atlanta. They've set up a page to mark the occasion and it contains a few interesting nuggets.
WSB's call letters apparently stood for "Welcome South Brother," which I'd never heard before.
They claim the station had a series of I.D. chimes that NBC later stole to use as their theme. (In the case of the latter, the notes G-E-C for the General Electric Company are still used today, even though GE no longer owns the network.)
And here's a great idea - in the very early days of the station, it would offer what it calls a "quiet hour," a 60-minute period where it would sign off so that listeners could try to hear other radio stations on their frequency! As a long time DXer, I wish most AM stations did that today!
They also offer two samples of what the Georgian giant sounded like back in 1925 (including those chimes), while the pic below is from 1929. Not local, but a neat bit of radio history.
WSB History - The 1920s
[img](jpg):quality(70)/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/cmg/HAWDD27K7E5ANMPF7BRRD6SLLQ.jpg[/img]
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Re: DX Delight: Rare Recordings Of WSB Atlanta As It Marks 100 Yrs. On Air
Thanks Bill. Damn those typos!
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Thread Starter- Dale Patterson
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Re: DX Delight: Rare Recordings Of WSB Atlanta As It Marks 100 Yrs. On Air
The call letters were randomly assigned, and several sources say they stand for "Welcome South, Brother."
"Life without echo is really no life at all." - Dan Ingram
- mace
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Re: DX Delight: Rare Recordings Of WSB Atlanta As It Marks 100 Yrs. On Air
I did not know that the NBC Chimes originated at WSB.
- Ale Ont
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Re: DX Delight: Rare Recordings Of WSB Atlanta As It Marks 100 Yrs. On Air
Many years ago, WSB had the Braves rights. As I love listening to baseball on the radio< I remember when they paused for station identification, their slogan was "When news breaks out, we break in."
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Re: DX Delight: Rare Recordings Of WSB Atlanta As It Marks 100 Yrs. On Air
Just down the dial, WGY Schenectady, N.Y. is also marking its 100th birthday this month, with a big on-air special Feb. 20th. You can check out the website to see what they have in store. There's also a special podcast already on the site, which you can hear here.
The station claims a lot of firsts for radio, and lists them on a separate page. Among them:
- First station in New York State
- First presentation of a radio drama in August 1922
- First broadcast at 50,000 watts of power in 1925. At various times, WGY also transmitted at 100,000 and as much as 200,000 watts with reports of reception from as far away as New Zealand
- First World Series coverage as WGY joined with WJZ in New York in October 1922 to carry the game announced by Graham McNamee
- First remote broadcast: Yale-Harvard game, 1922
- First use of the condenser microphone
- First trans-world transmission via short-wave to the Netherlands and then to Java, to Australia and back to Schenectady
100 Years of WGY
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