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Robert Nelson had had a similar occurrence and had a pronounced loss in his right ear, but mostly above 4KHz, which left most of the speech
range intact. Robert also just had a new windshield installed in his car after being caught out in a hail storm. Duane Loyd is doing OK. Vern Wirka and his wife have been traveling to upper NY state to make
arrangements for her mother's care. They did run into some CoVid quarantine problems, but fortunately were able to ride that out in their Winnebago. They may have to go again in December.
Marty and his wife have not done much either. Marty says he has put fewer miles on his car than he can ever remember. Bryce LeGrand says they
are celebrating his daughter being off for college. Their son is a senior at KU, ajoring in Sports Management. Robert Nelson noted SBE Frequency Coordinators are being offered a stipend of $600/6 mo for
assisting in the spectrum repack. He and several others are doing this service as volunteers rather than taking pay for it. He says there isn't that many requests for coordination going on in Kansas anyway.
The program was assembled by Robert Nelson from an audio cassette tape, and a slide presentation which he married together, then added open
titling since there was a drop out or two on the audio. It was titled "A History of Radio in Kansas", much of which told the story of John R. Brinkley, better known as Doc Brinkley. Yes, the infamous doctor who in
the 1920's offered men a rejuvenization for $750 by transplanting goat glands into them. His medical enterprise grew in Milford from the abovementioned operation to prescribing medicines for the masses, even to the
point that he developed an alliance with regional pharmacists who carried his favored drugs. He benefited from that by a 20% kickback. He was a personable man, and grew in favor with the public as he made himself
known to them over radio station KFKB in Milford as he realized the potential of radio's ability to reach the masses. While his image with the public grew, he was also being noticed by the legitimate medical
profession and the State of Kansas for what they considered were fraudulent advertising and practices. Eventually he lost his right to practice medicine in Kansas, and his radio license at the federal level. In an
effort to change things that were affecting him adversely he ran by write in vote for Governor of Kansas against Harry Woodring.
There were several thousand of those votes challenged on the basis of incorrect spelling and for any of several reasons those tallying votes
could think of. He was considered an outsider and local politicians did not plan to suffer from his aspirations. Finding he was unable to gain power in Kansas, he moved his operation to Mexico, building a very high
powered (for the times) AM radio station there. It was assigned call letters XER, but XERA was more to Doc's liking and he began using those call letters around 1932-34. The station was primarily used to promote
Brinkley, but he understood the desires of his audience and provided good orchestral music and popular programming. He began with 50 KW, but increased power as soon as he was able. Brinkley hired the very best
people he could find to run his operations. His Chief Engineer, Jim Weldon was an expert in high power transmitters, and he designed and built eventually, a 500 KW AM on the clear channel! Weldon left the operation
and later began Continental Radio. In years to come he built several high powered radio stations for Voice of America. Brinkley figures into Kansas Radio History mainly because he realized and capitalized on the
potential of mass communication offered by radio most successfully, making him a pioneer in that respect. Eventually, KFBI bought Brinkley's Milford station. Other stations were attaining success in Kansas as well.
KFH installed the first vertical radiator, and Paul Arendt worked in Salina at KSAL, later to move to Chicago as Paul Harvey. KGGF was another early Kansas station in Southeast Kansas, and remains on the air in
Coffeyville with the same call letters. KFH has the distinction of exchanging frequencies with KNSS.
KNSS became very popular in modern times with their talk show format, and was looking for a way to expand coverage. There was no spectrum
available that was not limited in power and did not have directional requirements, and since both stations had come under the same ownership, it seemed the logical thing to do. Several items were discussed, such as
the original anacronyms for various station call letters. Rod Rogers, long time Salina resident, used to work with Sherwood Parks who had a large part in assembling the material that went into the program we saw
this evening. Although we do not know for sure who narrated the audio for this program, Rod says this definitely was not Sherry's (Sherwood) voice. He had a very distinctive voice. Robert Nelson says he will do some
research to see if the narrator can be determined so proper attribution can be made to the program for all parties involved in its production.
Our thanks to Robert Nelson for working on this program. He did a great job timing the audio and video together, then added captioning (both
open and closed versions) to the DVD. From the conversation that followed the show, it was enjoyed by all who saw it. Our program stood adjourned at 09:19 PM and the trip home was short for all who attended our
virtual, but very successful chapter meeting.
Nominees for Officers for SBE-3 2020-2021 are as follows:
Chair: John Langer, KSU.
Vice Chair: Robert Nelson, KSU.
Secretary Treasurer: Robert Locke, KPTS-Retired.
Provision will be made for write in votes, but they must be legible, and the nominee must be willing to serve in that office, if elected. The
election will be virtual this year. Chapter members will be sent an e-mail ballot, which must be returned as specified via USPS mail, postmarked and received by the SBE-3 election officer by at least one business
day prior to the election, 5:00 PM, Wednesday October 21.
The election results will be tallied and results will be read at the SBE-3 Virtual meeting held near the end of Engineering Day at the KAB
meeting this year on Thursday October 22, Robert Nelson will send a link for a zoom meeting for the SBE-3 chapter meeting and for results of the election.
We've been camping for the past week and the remote control for our RV TV died. It got to where it would work, but only after the ambient
temperature got warm, then continued to work less and less until it is only a piece of non-functioning gear. I think it had been dropped one too many times. I finally gave up and bought an RCA Universal remote
replacement at Walmart. It is a multifunction, multi-model unit and most of the instructions deal with selection the proper code from the sheets they supply with it, so it knows what set of instructions to
broadcast. Several codes were supplied for this model, so you must try each one to see which offers the most useful number of functions. The factory supplied remote would extract future programming data from the
PSIP information streamed out. The new one does not seem to be able to present that data, nor does the hyphen button act as a separator for the OVA stations from the multiple channels that channel may broadcast. You
are left with entering a channel number below what you want then hitting the channel up button before it decides it can't move up the 1.75 MHz required for the tuner to be centered on the digital bandwidth being
sent on that channel. It could be worse. At least it turns the set on reliably, if I haven't inadvertently hit the VCR or DVD button before I tried to turn it on. Then I have to hit the TV button first, prior to the
power button so it knows to whom it should be speaking! I shouldn't complain so much I guess. We have 22+ channels available since we have gone digital, rather than the two or three we used to get with NTSC. …
and its nice we are parked inside a triangle of towers between Hutchinson and Wichita, rather than 60 miles away. 30.
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