NorthEast Radio Watch 6/23-30/2025: Another Great Day in Alpine

In this week’s issue… Honoring radio’s greatest inventor – Maine morning vet retiring – Buffalo names new HOF inductees – PA’s Loftus retires

By SCOTT FYBUSH

[Programming note: We’re getting into summer holiday season. The news is getting slower, and we’ll be doing more traveling for the next few weeks. So this is the first of what may be several double issues this summer. We’ll always be here when there’s breaking news, and we encourage you to also follow RadioInsight.com for daily news updates! We’ll also be dropping some bonus Tower Site of the Week segments and Top of the Tower podcasts on weeks when there’s no fresh NERW.]

*Did we mention we’ve been traveling? This latest round on the road started early on the morning of June 19, when the celebration of the 90th anniversary of Major Edwin Howard Armstrong’s first public demonstration of FM radio was shifted a few hours earlier in hopes of beating some bad weather that was heading for the Armstrong tower site in Alpine, NEW JERSEY.

It’s hard to believe it’s been twenty years since the last Armstrong anniversary gathering (and do please pardon all the broken links in that vintage NERW column from 2005!), but it’s not hard at all to understand why the memory of one of radio’s greatest inventors still drew dozens of engineers and historians out to the Palisades on a steamy Thursday afternoon.

This year’s event was organized by the Society of Broadcast Engineers chapter 15 in New York City, working closely with K2 Towers, which now owns the historic three-armed tower and the site that surrounds it.

For the first time in a decade, Philadelphia’s Steve Hemphill fired up his replica Phasitron transmitter at the site to put WA2XMN on the air, his Armstrong tribute station operating with 250 watts on the Major’s old 42.8 megacycles. As in past years, WA2XMN broadcast a variety of Armstrong-related material, including a replay of the 2005 panel discussion with several Armstrong associates, as well as the “Empire of the Air” radio drama and more goodies from Hemphill’s collection.

This year’s event had some new twists, too: Kirk Harnack was on site for a live broadcast of his This Week in Radio Tech podcast, all set up inside Armstrong’s original 1937 transmitter building – which, as we learned from the K2 team, is in the process of being renovated into a full-fledged Armstrong museum that may have at least a little bit of public access.

Would the Major have recognized the big T-shaped pieces of metal that were scattered around the tent and on display inside the building during the TWIRT live show? Those were some of the 32 elements of the Alford FM master antenna from the Empire State Building, more than a dozen of which were auctioned off by SBE 15 to raise money for the SBE’s Ennes Educational Trust. The auction raised over $7,000 for the fund, which will go toward helping train the next generation of engineers, and the picnic was the pick-up point for several lucky winners who will be taking their pieces of history to new homes as far away as Maine.

Oh yes – the Top of the Tower Podcast was on the scene at Alpine as well, and this week we’ll start bringing you some of our interviews from the big day. (Your editor also had the chance to perform some stand-up comedy for the crowd, but you needed to be there for that!)

It was great to get inside the gates at Alpine again after all these years, and it’s impressive to see how much is still going on at this most historic site. It’s still the main transmitter location for WFDU (89.1 Teaneck) and the backup site for several New York City stations, including WPLJ, WPAT-FM and WSKQ. There’s lots of two-way radio and cellular on the old tower, and there’s some shortwave, of all things, as well, being used for high-speed stock trading, we think.

How many broadcast sites are still this vibrant after almost 90 years? Not many.

And stay tuned – in addition to our Top of the Tower segments and our friend Nick Langan’s excellent Radio World recap, there’s a good possibility this becomes an annual picnic for SBE 15, which means it won’t be another 20 years before we pull off Route 9W again to visit this amazing site.