KALX Engineers

Spectrum

Past Engineers of KALX talk about the development of the station and its challenges. Features Sam Wood, Ron Quan, David Josephson, and Susan Calico. Also, past Music Director and Station Manager Doc Pelzel provides his insights.

Transcript

Speaker 1: Spectrum's next

Speaker 2: [inaudible] [inaudible].

Speaker 1: Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley. We have a special show this week to highlight the [00:00:30] 50th anniversary of calyx and the kick off of the fundraiser. We look back over the 50 years by talking with past engineers of Calyx, those key people who made it possible for radio to happen. Our guests, our previous engineers, Sam Wood, Ron Kwon, David Josephson, Susan Calico, and to pass station manager Dr Pell Cell. We wanted to give you an idea of how Calex struggled and evolved into its current form through the eyes of the engineers that made it happen on with the show. Rick and I [00:01:00] are here with doc pell, Zelle and doc. What was it like early on in the 60s here at Calex? Yeah, I started it. Yeah.

Speaker 3: [inaudible] about six months after it became an FM station and about um, oh six and a half years after it was an am station as usually a case with a college radio station. A bunch of engineers get together and decide, hey, let's do a radio station. And they put Patti page records in the library and they want you to play [00:01:30] music to study by. Okay. And then they go and fiddle with the wires, everything and get the stuff going. And then the, uh, then the firies come in and uh, and radicalize everything musically and, and make the engineers all nervous and depressed and then start building an audience. So

Speaker 1: we have a phone interview with one of those early engineers from Calex Sam wood, let's go do that.

Speaker 4: Okay.

Speaker 5: Sam Wood, thanks very much for coming on spectrum and talking to us about the early days of Calex.

Speaker 4: Well thank you for having me.

Speaker 5: And [00:02:00] what years were you at cal?

Speaker 4: I was actually there from the fall of 1963 through the spring of 1968.

Speaker 5: And how did you get interested in radio at cal?

Speaker 4: Well, actually I lived in the unit one residence hall, which was actually called Putnam Hall. Down the hall from me were two double e's who basically a hung out with for a while. And they took me over and introduced me to the founders of radio cow.

Speaker 5: [00:02:30] And what did you find there? You know, what was on the ground engineering wise?

Speaker 4: Well, at that point the station actually had a small studio and a little control room and a shop area. This was all in the basement of unit two residence hall. The actual original work that was done by Marshall and Jim started in 1961 everyone talks about 62 well that's about the time that they finally got some of the equipment working, [00:03:00] but they actually put this together in 1961

Speaker 5: and what were the engineering challenges for you back then?

Speaker 4: Well, the challenges were that we had no time and very little money, so we ended up having to build much of what we had. We got some surplus gear from some of the commercial stations and we'd modify some of that, but we ended up building most of the stuff on our own. In fact, the transmitters that we [00:03:30] had for the carrier current station were actually built out of food service trays for the chassis. And then surplus scrap wood for the frame. The transformers came out of the physics department and the tubes came out of, I think it was the chem department, so really this is literally built up from scraps. We spent a lot of time and very little money

Speaker 5: and that carrier system that you talked about, describe that a bit.

Speaker 4: That was basically an a m transmitter. [00:04:00] It operated in the am radio band and it coupled into the power lines of the residence halls and it started out in unit two and then they expanded it to unit one and eventually into unit three and students who wanted to listen to the station could tune it in on an am radio.

Speaker 5: And who were some of the key people that were in the engineering group back then? You've mentioned a few names. Do you want to sorta run down? Who was who?

Speaker 4: Sure. John grilly worked with me. [00:04:30] He became chief engineer a later on, another guy, Bob Tasjan, who was an engineer and he helped out also Lee fells and Stein who later became one of the homebrew computer network people. John Connors, Scott Loftus, us, mark Tendus, Charlie Bedard. These were all engineering people who helped out in various ways.

Speaker 5: How much time and impact did this have on your studies?

Speaker 4: Oh, it was, it was interesting shoehorning [00:05:00] everything together because it, I spent far more time than I probably should have down there. I did all right, but mainly because once I got into upper division, the double e part of it, I had a natural ability to be able to work through the problems. And I think some of my experience at radio cow actually helped me in some of my w classes.

Speaker 5: Do you want to tell some stories about uh, pulling cables?

Speaker 4: Oh, the cables? Yes. We were in a very interesting situation with the university. [00:05:30] We got friendly with some of the top people at the university and were able to therefore have a general attitude toward us of, we don't care how the cable gets into the conduit, but once it's there, you can use it. So we ended up having little wire pulling campaigns, typically about two or three in the morning where we'd pull cable and we called it midnight wire and cable. And we wired up. Much of the, one of our biggest accomplishments was [00:06:00] the studios in the basement of Dwinelle Hall that we built up. Didn't have any real connection with the telephone network or any of the other university cable networks that we needed to be connected to. So we, uh, ended up pulling approximately 200 feet of 75 pair cable all the way from the grounds and buildings part of Darnell all the way to the studios.

Speaker 4: And we figured out a really neat little trick using a vacuum cleaner [00:06:30] and a sponge and some fishing line so we could get a pole wire into a conduit that normally you couldn't. So we pulled this cable in that gave us our connectivity into the network at one l hall. One of the things also, I hadn't mentioned, we needed a lot of wire and cable to build the station. So the way we got that was, Marshall talked his way into getting access to the Republican convention at the Cow Palace. This is a 1964 [00:07:00] Republican convention, so we went over as the convention was winding up and we sqround miles and miles of cable off the ground that people didn't want. So we were able to get enough cable to wire much of our requirements for the station. So some of these outside activities were really quite exciting.

Speaker 5: What sort of impacted all your work at cal radio and then Cadillacs have on your personal and professional life?

Speaker 4: Well, [00:07:30] it gave me a different dimension because I had pretty much just focused on engineering and I like building things and that's why I went into engineering. The radio cow experience gave me a taste of what else you have to be able to do. You know, not that I have a good aptitude for it, but at least I have an appreciation for issues regarding organization and how to be able to put something together and get it through the system. [00:08:00] We really had to have an organization that we've built from the ground up to make this viable to do something like this in an environment where there's basically nothing available to you unless you know how to go and get it. It taught me how to go and get it, which was really useful. I consider that the experience that I got at radio cow far more important than the courses that I took. I mean I took a lot of interest in courses but the station gave me experience. You can't [00:08:30] get any other way. And that helped me and startups and it helped me in understanding how to make things work, not just from the technical end but from the other end too.

Speaker 5: Any reflections on uh, what the station meant to the university community?

Speaker 4: When we actually built the station, people really liked it and got involved and things were going unfortunately later, uh, into the 70s, there turned out to [00:09:00] be a number of problems. The station basically it shifted from being run by the engineering people to being run by others in the university who had different agendas. The stations really had its ups and downs and it's come back really well and with a lot more community efforts now than it had originally. So it is really important that you have a continuing set of goals and a continuing purpose and someone to build the structure into [00:09:30] running the station. Initially when it was starting from scratch, it was ad hoc, so clearly by definition there was no embedded structure that was suitable. Now that the station especially has got structuring, it's important to maintain the functionality and maintain that the way it operates and everything from one class to the next. Because by definition students come and students go and that doesn't lend itself for the kind of structure you need for an ongoing activity. The station [00:10:00] has had a long growth cycle here and I'm glad to see it's still around.

Speaker 1: Sam would, thanks very much for coming on spectrum and talking with us about the early days of Calex.

Speaker 4: Well, thank you for having me.

Speaker 1: You're listening to the spectrum on k a l x Berkeley. Our topic this week is the 50th anniversary of Kelex. We're talking to engineers about how Calex got started. It's also fundraiser week. Call us in the five and dime. That's six, four, two five, two five, nine. We're back now with [00:10:30] duck pell sal and doc. Next up is Ron Kwan. What are your insights into him?

Speaker 3: Uh, Ron Kwan came in later on and he, he really did a, an amazing job with nothing. I mean we were still in a s ASU c funded club, which was a budget of few blue chip stamps was how much they gave us each year. And uh, so the fact that we were even able to, to function at all was truly amazing. But yeah, to Ron, Ron knew his stuff. In fact, he's, um, he's even still doing that macgyver kind of thing [00:11:00] of building like a lie detector with a, with an old cigarette butt and a rubber band.

Speaker 1: Ron Quan, thanks very much for coming on spectrum. Thank you. How did you get interested in radio?

Speaker 6: Well, in radio I build crystal radios when I was like nine or 10 years old through my brother. Getting into broadcast was actually kind of a fluke. What had happened was one of my friends got his FCC license, he had his third class license [00:11:30] and he was trying to get a second class license. Back in those days you would have your third, your second and your first class. And nowadays I think it's only like third class in general. So what happens is he's kind of like almost daring me to do it as well. And he had taken the test, the second class [inaudible] about two or three and had failed. And how he would do is he would take these questions and answer booklets and just try to memorize [00:12:00] the answers. So I did it the hard way. I, I got this book called Electronic Communication by, by Robert Schrader, who, who taught at Laney College back here in the East Bay.

Speaker 6: And it's a thick book. It's almost like half of a telephone book. So I spent 150 hours and six weeks studying it. Between the time I enter cow and after I just graduated from high school and I passed the tests, but just barely I thing. But I got [00:12:30] it. And then when I entered cau back in 72 I heard that there was a radio station here. And so I said, where is this place in this as well? It's a, I think 500 Eshleman hall. So I went there I think during my second quarter. So that would be like the winter of, yeah, 73 and ran into a few people and one of them was Henry Chu who was the station manager and they said, yeah, we [00:13:00] have somebody outside getting the transmitter, a room ready to work, but we, we always can need help in the studio and elsewhere.

Speaker 6: So for about three or four months I worked with this outside engineer and then I think by the time I had finished my first year, then I became the chief engineer, which then I found out was a very strange job in itself because you get called a lot [00:13:30] sometimes I'd 11 o'clock in the evening like, Hey, a, the photo preempt went out. And I say, well, what did you do? Uh, well everything was working just fine. Instead, I picked you, kicked the switch underneath it based back in those days we were so poor, we didn't even mount the damn thing. We stuck this funnel pre-amp deer off to the corner, but it was on the floor. Instead of this jockey would be moving his or her feet around it and kicked the switch off. And so I would have to come back [00:14:00] and deal with that.

Speaker 6: So it was a very good job though. I lasted for about roughly a year. Uh, some of the crazy things that, that we did were that we did remote broadcasts and one of them was the famous UCLA cow game. Uh, when Bill Walton and John Wooden came to town, Dick was broadcast at the Oakland Coliseum or someplace like that. And so I had to whip up some kind of like a conso and a backup [00:14:30] in case of, you know, everything else failed in. Fortunately all that worked. And the backup amplifier was this heath kit Hi-fi amplifier that I found at a, I think in Norton Hall where the, all the equipment was, was being stashed at the time. And so, so it worked out fine. And I was, you know, actually sitting on top of instrument hall that night, uh, listening to the game, making sure everything was okay. So the radio part was sort of like, I just kind of fell into this thing. I didn't really [00:15:00] intend to work in radio, but it turned out to be a very good experience. So, so I took a nosedive in my grades and then I came back during my junior and senior year.

Speaker 3: Did you learn anything from [inaudible] that helped you with your career?

Speaker 6: The coolest thing about working at cow ax and also in broadcast, I got to see how people actually work the equipment and people don't always read the manual. People will use whatever [00:15:30] they have to get the job done and nobody really cares, you know? Well we have to use specific headphone or a specific something to this. You know, you have to design a thing to be idiot proof. And so that was the biggest lesson. I learned a work in broadcasting. And it was actually a great advantage because, uh, most people who work for an Ampex or a Sony when they get out of college, they have absolutely no practical knowledge of how [00:16:00] the users use their equipment and, and how they might configure it. So, so that, that, that part was good. Great. Ryan Quan, thanks very much for coming on. Spectrum. Thank you.

Speaker 3: It's fundraiser week call [phone] to pledge. We are back with doc pell cell and doc the 70s were a turbulent time. What was it like here at Cadillacs during that upheaval there was a lot of different factions at the stations that were sort of vying [00:16:30] for either control of it. And as a result, whoever won didn't really do anything except their own particular little fiefdom of area they wanted to work in and everything else sort of fell apart. So the station fell off the air a few times in the 73 74 period. Uh, there was a time in the early seventies when, um, the station studio equipment was stolen. There was no chief engineer. Our license was up for renewal. [00:17:00] The student government had had a war with the politics of the station, so we had no budget, so we had literally like nothing left. We were off the air for a period of time.

Speaker 3: It looked pretty bleak. Then it's about in the 73 and four period tell a person named Andy Reimer who was, had been a student at UC Irvine, transferred up here for his last few years and he showed the university that their lack of oversight might cause them to lose their license and he outlined a program for [00:17:30] how he would build a station in a management team and have some accountability, but how the university would have to pump some money and some oversight into it. He pretty much pull the station out of the ashes and sort of Phoenix like it was resurrected and came back and began what is probably on its current path to where it is. David Josephson

Speaker 7: was the chief engineer at that time and we just happened to have David Josephson in here. Excellent. Thanks for inviting me. It's always a pleasure to come back and visit Berkeley. [00:18:00] How did you get started in radio? Well, I had the good fortune of landing in Berkeley at age, about nine or 10 when, uh, all sorts of experiments were happening. My mother was involved with KPFA and I was an electronic tinkerer experiment or I had a pirate radio station and the under the stairs in our house and she was doing some promotion work for KPFA. And I said, well, Gee, maybe I can get involved with a real radio here. They were very, uh, open [00:18:30] to that idea. So I started immediately then learning about production recording program, uh, editing and so on. So I got my, uh, third class license when I was 10 and read board shifts at Kpmj, but we moved away from Berkeley, uh, right after some of the worst of the people's park riots up to more rural northern California.

Speaker 7: And, uh, finished high school there and decided that I really wanted [00:19:00] to stay involved in radio and electronics and audio broadcasting, uh, design and stuff like that. So came back to Berkeley and uh, was intent on being an engineering student when there was a, a note on the chalkboard of the Amateur Radio Club that the radio station was looking for an engineer as far as I knew the station was off the air and gone, which it was at that point, but I was part of the crew then that, uh, resurrected it. What was the time period? You were a chief engineer? [00:19:30] I was chief engineer from 75 through 79 I was here the four years. What were the main technical issues at the time? Just the resurrecting of cal. Yeah, building the station from scratch. The challenge was to build something that we could put on the air, making it work, making it illegal.

Speaker 7: I started in the spring quarter of 75 and I think we started working on it toward the end of spring. I think we [00:20:00] were working on it for most of the summer. I was here all summer and I think we went on the air before school started again in the fall. What's important is that there was a crew of people who came together at that time who most of whom had a background in radio. The general manager, Andy Reimer, uh, had been manager of the UC Irvine Station when he was there for a couple of years. The other cluster of people were mostly involved in a record business. [00:20:30] You know Tim divine who went on to be out of an art at a and m I guess doc Pelz l of course. It was kind of keeping the continuity of things from the older time and running the music department. So we had a couple of months to figure out what could be patched together. A of my friends from KPFA helped staff and technicians from the w department provided test equipment, parts access to bits and pieces. So we just kind of pulled it together from that. [00:21:00] The next step was to be some thing a little bit more accessible and reliable than this closet up on the the roof of Dwinelle and that's when Andy got to doing the political thing and got us space in Lawrence Hall of Science. We moved the studios up there first

Speaker 1: and you moved the transmitter up on the hill? That was next? That was stage two. So the first two, yeah. I think first phase was to get the studio to Lawrence Hall because we were being booted out of to know [00:21:30] and then the transmitter followed. How long after that? That was a year, more than a year after that because there was a lot of construction that was secondary to the studio operations. Back in the early days of Calex, a lot of the engineers were students at the time.

Speaker 7: All of the engineers were students or former students or part time students. That was actually fairly common in college radio around [00:22:00] the country. There were more radio engineers out there because of the small radio stations around everywhere needed more engineers. The equipment was less reliable, transmitters needed work all the time. There were a lot more people who, as teenagers were working in radio and so they were a lot more engineers and there were a lot more people who were familiar with the technical requirements of, of an audio chain and a transmitter and studio transmitter, [00:22:30] links and antennas and things like that. So, uh, yeah, I was a student part time during that time. I, I think I got it about two years during my four years here, I said I graduated from colleagues. Most of the other engineers were also students or community people. There weren't any staff engineers while I was there except me. I mean, if they finally got a kind of a stipend salary for the chief engineer.

Speaker 1: How did your time at Calyx influence your career?

Speaker 7: [00:23:00] Most of the people I know who had solid college radio experiences when they were in school refer to them throughout their lives as a defining experience in enabling experience. That was, I mean, I don't know how many of them consider that they learned more from the radio station than they did from classes like I do, but I'm sure it's a significant fraction. The real challenge that drove what I was able to [00:23:30] feel confident in doing in later years was dealing with something that had to work all the time with limited resources and patching together things to make a system work and that that whole discipline of able to see a system come together and allocating limited resources to fitting that all together. That's the engineering challenge of doing the engineering of a radio station. At least it was then when things were not reliable, not stable, [00:24:00] not dependable, and things were being fixed all the time. And that applies to any technology that's in kind of development, I think. [inaudible]

Speaker 1: David Josephson, thanks very much for coming on spectrum talking with us. Very welcome. Thanks for inviting me. K, a l ex Berkeley doc pell sal. Thanks very much for your help getting the context of the sixties and seventies squared away and it's fundraiser week here at Calyx fundraiser. So give us a call. [00:24:30] We need your donations. [phone] back to spectrum. We're going to talk with Susan Calico, who took over in the 80s as chief engineer. Susan Kaliko. Thanks very much for coming on spectrum and talking to us about Calex.

Speaker 8: Thank you. I'm glad to be here. It's nice to be back at the station and see how nice it looks.

Speaker 1: I wanted to find out from you how you got interested in radio in the first place.

Speaker 8: Well, I have to go back much further than my time at Calex. I [00:25:00] got out of school and I was very interested in writing and got involved at the daily cow. So I was a journalist for a little while and then I became a copy editor and somehow that wasn't enough. So I went down to KPFA, which is also in Berkeley and volunteered there. I got involved in first in women's news and then during that time, which was in the mid to late seventies, there were almost no women who knew anything technical at that station. So, [00:25:30] um, when I was at KPFA, I took advantage of the fact that you could do pretty much anything kind of like here I got my third class license, which was required to actually run the board on the air and learned how to do that. And again, was always teaching people. And I was there for probably about 10 years, everything overlapped with everything else and I had just studied for and gotten my first class radio license, which was in those days required to be the responsible [00:26:00] engineer at a station and the job of Calyx came up. So I applied for that and got in and well the work began.

Speaker 1: What were the years you were a chief engineer at Calex?

Speaker 8: Oh, I was engineer at Calex starting in 1981, I believe in the late, late in the year through uh, early 1995. So it was about 13 years altogether.

Speaker 1: While you were the engineer, there [00:26:30] was a move from Lawrence Hall of science down to bondage. What was that like?

Speaker 8: As I recall, we managed to get the honors studio down and settled and on the air and the newsroom was about to move from over in the student union and I got pneumonia, so I was at home in bed for two weeks with a fever. Well, the engineering volunteers basically put in the new studio. So it's, you know, as usual there's, there's never enough money to [00:27:00] do what you need to do, so you just have to do what you can with what you've got. And we were lucky enough to have some good volunteers who could really take care of business.

Speaker 1: The next big technical challenge you had was increasing the power from 10 watts to 500 watts. How did that go?

Speaker 8: We had to get a new transmitter, which was huge compared to our one that we had. And so we had to sort of rearrange things up at the transmitter shad and I'll patch all the leaks because I mean, when you get new [00:27:30] equipment, you want it to be good. Uh, we had to have a new cable running up the transmitter tower, which I think it's, it's not quite a hundred feet. I think it's something like 80 or 85 or something like that. I do remember, um, being up on the tower with the surveyors down below, because in such a crowded market, as Calex is in, in the bay area here, there are many FM stations. You have to be careful not to step on anybody else's frequency. So we had to have a very directional [00:28:00] and oddly shaped signal, the antennas crafted so that it directs the signal in the way that you want.

Speaker 8: But if your antenna isn't pointed exactly where you want it, you're going to not be, you know, I mean, the FCC is not gonna like you being out of line there. So I went up on the tower, loosen the bolts on the, uh, on the antenna and the surveyors down below, going all over this way, you know, and I'm like whackwhackwhack no, no, no, a little, little bit back. But those [00:28:30] were expenses we couldn't avoid because it had to be certified. But eventually it all got done and in our case it was 500 watts, which isn't a whole lot. That transmitter could have done a lot more, but that was what we were allowed to do, so we had to keep it pretty close.

Speaker 1: What was the culture like at Calex during your years?

Speaker 8: I learned that no matter how weird people looked, most of them or really good people, they were sweet people. They, you know, a lot of our djs [00:29:00] were just really nice people. They were pretty easy to work with. They were considerate and I wouldn't always be able to tell by looking at them

Speaker 1: Cadillacs. How did it affect you professionally?

Speaker 8: I spent 13 years here and I really, really learned a lot more electronics and a lot more transmitter information and so I really understood why everything worked.

Speaker 1: [00:29:30] Susan Calico, thanks very much for coming in and talking with us.

Speaker 8: Well, it's been a pleasure to see that the station is still here and that the equipment still works.

Speaker 1: The card during the show. It was by law, Stan and David for these help on folk and acoustic made available by a creative Commons license. 3.0 attribution. Please do donate to the calyx fundraiser and we'll see you in two weeks with another edition of spectrum at the same time.

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