Art Blair wrote:
NUMEROUS STATIONS OFF CHANNELS 50-cycle Deviation By Half Checked in March Art, You WOULD have to send that out! I could get on a talk-e-talk about frequency measurements go into an infinite loop, and never be seen again. Anyone remember Ron Schatz's idea of PFMs. Not new, or, old; but RFS got the BCB DX community into trying it. I used to do it in a big sort of way during my assignments (civilian and military) in the Far East.As Mike Hardester will attest (maybe if I slip him a little something under the door), the Far East at night was a mass of hets. Prime offenders were the Filipinos, whose station frequencies varied either way from dead center in a sort of random way. Note that each station's frequency would remain constant, stable, with 10 Hz over long periods of time. But seemed to have no predictable offset. As I found out, the Philippine stations generally used crystals left over from WWII. That station would be assigned a frequency, and then search out a crystal for it. The station could locate a surplus crystal which was the assigned -/+ 2.5 kz, 5 kHz, 3, 4, 7 kHz, and plug it in. The prime factor here was that the Radio Control Office didn't check frequencies. It was left to the station to determine whether it was within tolerance. So the offset made the station illegal in effect, but no one did anything about it. This is no exaggeration here! Granted, various broadcasting organizations did take an effort, but it had to be a self-guided thing because RCO didn't really care either way. In a case where two stations were QRMing unacceptably, it was likely because there was too much offset between the two, never mind that they both may be off by 2.5 kHz! New frequency alignments (going from 10 to 9-kHz assignments) forced nearly every station to acquire a new crystal. And during the period 1960 - 1972, I sent my PFMs to Philippine Broadcasting Service (government) weekly. Two of my in-laws were employees there, and real professionals, too. By this time most everyone knew the status quo was no good, so the new Bureau of Telecommuications took control with the acquisition of frequency measurement equipment from Japan under War Reparation payments. The Philippine situation in 1973 was more or less the same as that of the period outlined by Art Blair. More like +/- 50 Hz and amenable to correction by communications between the BuTel and the stations. What a vast change. Situations in Japan, Korea, China (+Taiwan), Indonesia and Malaysia, were variable as to frequency offsets, depending on the country. But that's the subject line for a bunch of words OT. I have something like 10,000 PFMs recorded of my years in the Far East. Generally, I'd have to say Africa and South America would be good subjects for PFMing. 73 de Charlie was send This article appeared in Broadcasting on May, 1 1932. Although the 50-cycle deviation order became effective June 22, almost half of the stations checked by the Radio Division of the Department of Commerce in March deviated more than 50 cycles from their assigned frequencies. While the number that came within the order was greater than for the previous month, the percentage in proportion to the total measured was less. Of the 519 stations checked, 274 deviated less than 50 cycles, 80 less than 100 cycles, 79 under 200 cycles, whereas 86 went beyond the 200-cycle mark. Art Folsom, CA --
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Charles A & Leonor L Taylor
Greenville, North Carolina
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