The WCOV-TV Engineering Department has employed as-many-as nine First Class licensed broadcast engineers, and as few as one.

The all-time high in personnel was reached in 1969, when AM, FM, and TV operations were staffed on a full-time basis. With the advent of remote control and the increasing use and reliability of solid-state equipment, the number of engineers began to decrease. Beginning in 1985, and after the sale of the AM and FM stations, the engineering staff had dwindled to two, and, in the late eighties had dropped to the present level of one.

The WCOV-TV television operations began in the spring of 1953. The station first used an RCA TTU-1B transmitter, an RCA TFU-24G Pylon antenna, and a 425ft. Stainless, Inc. tower. At some point, shortly thereafter, 12 kilowatt final amplifiers (6448 tetrodes) were added to the transmitter, making it a TTU-12A.

In 1955, a fire brought operations to a temporary halt. The control room and co-located transmitter were gutted. The cause of the fire was officially said to be the fault of a Western Union clock although many thought it might have been a carelessly discarded cigarette. The station was quickly rebuilt.

Typically, the station was almost 100 percent RCA-equipped.

• Transmitter: RCA TTU12A
• Antenna: RCA TFU24G
• Tower: Stainless G-36 425ft.
• Film: RCA TP16 projectors, Iconoscope
• Studio cameras: RCA TK31 Field units
• Sync generators: RCA TG-1 and TG-10
• Switcher: RCA TS-2 and the field companion to the TK31
• Audio console: RCA BC-2
• Video monitoring: RCA TM-6's mostly
•  

Things progressed rather smoothly back in those days - a burnout of the three inch transmission line once in a while found us cleaning transmission line and replacing bullets, not unlike loading long-barreled cannon, I suppose. Once in a while the heat exchanger would freeze up and require a lot of silver soldering. Our main job, however, was to change tons of tubes. Rarely could we get on the air at sign-on without changing a dozen tubes (in those days everything was turned off from sign-off to sign-on).

In early 1965, the station sold to the Gay-Bell Manufacturing Company of Lexington, Kentucky. The same company owned WLEX-TV, in Lexington. The new owners, anxious to improve the station's coverage, immediately ordered a new tower and antenna. In the summer of 1965, the project was completed and WCOV was broadcasting from a 793' (overall) Stainless G-5, with an RCA TFU25G, the Cadillac of the pylons. Shortly thereafter the old TP-16 projectors were replaced by TP-66s to the delight of the engineering staff (we also switched, you see). By late 1968 the equipment situation had improved to this extent:

• Transmitter: RCA TTU-12A (12 kw still)
• Antenna: RCA TFU25G Pylon
• Tower: Stainless G-5 793ft.
• Film: RCA TK21 Vidicon TP-66 Projectors
• Studio cameras: 2 RCA TK41C (color-3 I/O) One bought used from KSL.
• Sync generators: 1 900 series Grass Valley (still the only one in use today!)
• Switcher: TS-11, then Grass Valley 1600-3D (also still in use)
• Audio console: RCA BC2
• Video tape: RCA TR-2 (monochrome - liberated from an aircraft carrier!)

Soon thereafter, we added a heterodyne color rack to the TR-2 and purchased an RCA TK-26 color film camera. For a short while we were the only station in the state of Alabama with color film, tape, and live. That was a rather short-lived distinction, however. When WLEX-TV upgraded their video tape equipment, we inherited two RCA TRT-1A tape machines.

In 1973 we purchased an RCA TTU-30A. It had been used by a station in Ohio that went dark, and I remember that we had some difficulty getting it from the sheriff. Over the next few years we picked up several VTRs - an RCA TR-4 and a pair of TR-22s. Finally we purchased a couple of traded-in Ampex AVR-3s (they had been used by Complete Post, a production house in California). The TR-4 was a Clint Free highband job, done on site by the master himself.


We did pretty well in the late '70s and the early 80's. Our ERP was about 620kW and our Grade B extended to 38+ miles. Somewhere along the line we retired the TK-41s and the TK-26. We purchased three IVC-500A's and a Telemation TCF-3000 film camera. The IVC's were retired in the late '80s after we dumped news. From that point we relied entirely on our three Sharp XC-800 ENG cameras for what little studio work we did. These were finally replaced in 1994, with a couple of Sony 537s. We married a Microtime ACT3 and a PC with a Targa card to our venerable Grass Valley 1600 sometime around 1986-87.

At about the same time, we abruptly shut down the 2-inch operation and switched the entire operation over to Sony Type-5 machines. What a difference and I won't elaborate on the good and bad points. H.A. Solutec provided the limited automation in our Type-5 "sequencer." Satellite dishes were added beginning in 1986 as our affiliation changed from CBS to Fox and we began recording the majority of our programming.

And now for the more interesting stuff! If you've already read some of the WCOV-TV pages then you know that, on March 6, 1996, a tornado blew through the city of Montgomery, causing the collapse of our tower. We are located in a residential area with homes located within striking distance of the tower in all directions. By no small miracle, the tower curled up in the middle of the parking lot, doing no damage with but two exceptions - the two lowest sections sliced two 20ft. satellite dishes in half and the transmission line did its best to try and pull the filterplexer from the building, damaging it severely.

We quickly ordered a 1kw transmitter from Acrodyne, an LPTV antenna from Andrew, and transmission line from Harris. We were back on the air in a couple of weeks and might have been on sooner had it not been for some indecision regarding a temporary tower. Ultimately we erected a 350ft. tower to use while we considered whether to rebuild on site or find another location altogether. Being located in the city has its advantages as the local cable companies were able to restore us to their systems within a few hours.

In September of 1996, we began building a new, remote transmitting facility. We co-located with Montgomery's WSFA, at their existing site 25 miles south of Montgomery. WSFA's tower is 1935' tall and is perched on hill, resulting in an AMSL of more than 2400'. Our antenna is a Dielectic TFU-25JSM, side-mounted at 2139' AMSL. It uses a skull pattern aimed almost due north over Montgomery. We constructed a new building on the site and installed a Harris 120KW IOT transmitter, hoping that we would be able to realize the requested 4 megawatt E.R.P. Unfortunately, we were forced to limit E.R.P. to 2.6 megawatts due to overlaps with co-owned WDFX-TV in Ozark, Alabama. This does provide us with superb redundancy in that we are only running two of the three amplifiers at any one time, and the coverage is still outstanding.