Saving History From The Dumpster

These pages are dedicated to preserving a historical record of broadcast equipment. Others are doing an excellent job in recording other aspects of the history of broadcasting. As we find them, we'll add links to them. This site consists of scanned manuals and catalogs of broadcast equipment. In October 2005, the site was changed from hand coded HTML to a wiki so you can now edit pages, add pages, add scans, etc.

Broadcast Equipment

Historic Papers - Papers by the people who made broadcasting possible. A collection of papers on technology. Quite a few early papers on AM, FM, and TV.

Photo Gallery - Contributed photos of historic equipment and installations.

Station Histories - Contributed station histories and links to others.

Other Manual Archives

Other Broadcast History Sites

Television

Marine Radio

MilitaryRadio - Descriptions of military radio equipment and networks.

Police Radio

Recording (audio, video, etc.)

Telephone and Telegraph History

Receiver History

Computers, Calculators, Digital Electronics History

Data Communications

Other Historic Sites



NOTE - Some files are more than 100MB and may fail an HTTP download. If you find a file fails, let me know (harold@hallikainen.org), and I'll set up an FTP link to the file. It may be slow, but it will work!

Contribute
Wiki pages allow users to easily correct, edit, and contribute material. I look forward to user contributions! To edit or contribute to the site, you'll have to log in using a WikiName. A WikiName is your name in the form of a WikiWord, which is a "bumpy word". A bumpy word starts with an upper case character, switches to lower case, then includes another upper case character followed by more lower case characters. You'll notice that a lot of the links above are WikiWords. So, create a username, perhaps of the form FirstnameLastname. Once you are logged in, you can edit and contribute.

Each page includes an edit button at the bottom of the page. Hit this button the edit the page. The wiki format is pretty easy to use. You can generally just copy the format of stuff already on the page. If you need to create a new page, just enter a WikiWord on an existing page. When you save the page, a question mark will appear after your new WikiWord. Click on the question mark to create and edit the new page. More info is available at AboutWiki.

Scanned contributions are most appreciated! Ideally, they should be PDF files using 300dpi. Use an appropriate bit depth for each page. If a page is just text or line art, use 1 bit per pixel. For black and white photography, use 8 bits per pixel. For spot color, try to use 8 bits per pixel. For full color, use 24 bits per pixel. Very large files (more than 50M) should be broken into sections (pages 1 through something in one file, more pages in another file, etc.). Finally, try running "Paper Capture" on the files with the OCR text "in the background." Use File - Preferences - Paper Capture - Original Image With Hidden Text. The user sees the scanned image. The OCR text is available to copy and paste and to search engines.

If you did not scan the material yourself, please obtain permission and credit the person who did. If you find appropriate information on another website, it'd be best to link to that site instead of copying material from it (especially without permission). You can easily form a wiki link to a site by just putting the full URL in the wiki text. A link will be formed off that full URL.

The bottom of each page will include an upload dialog. Select the local file to be uploaded, then click upload. If successful, the file will show up on the bottom of the page as upload:filename.pdf . Copy this filename (highlight, then control-C). Edit the page, adding the upload link and associated text using existing text as an example. If your contribution is for a company not listed so far, use this template for the new company page.

If you have any trouble, drop me an email!

About Copyright Some of the material on this site may still be under copyright. Use of material here is intended to be fair use allowing researchers to study the history and evolution of broadcast equipment. If, however, you hold the copyright on material on this site and you would like the material removed, please let me know. The material will be removed immediately.

Thanks!

Harold Hallikainen
harold@hallikainen.com