Thank you to the Wavescan staff for this week's nostalgic look at NBC.
Jeff: Back in November last year, we told you about a CBS shortwave station in Philadelphia in the 1930’s. The main competitor to CBS at that time was the National Broadcasting Company, NBC, and this week we can bring you a story about NBC’s involvement with shortwave radio, in that same pre-war era. From Los Angeles, here’s Ray Robinson.
Ray: Thanks, Jeff. Well strangely, the story begins with a large yacht on the U.S. West Coast. One of the actors in an NBC radio drama, Phillips Lord, bought the 200’ yacht, and renamed it the Seth Parker after the character he played. He extensively refurbished it, sailed it through the Panama Canal to New York City, and prepared it for a sponsored round-the-world voyage.
NBC provided a 1 kW shortwave transmitter valued at $12,000 and an engineer to operate it, so that progress reports from the voyage could be fed back to the NBC medium wave radio network in the United States. The Seth Parker then set sail from New York Harbor on November 20, 1933, with twenty-seven people on board – Phillips Lord plus the crew, staff, and radio personnel. The shortwave transmitter had been licensed with the callsign KNRA, and an additional low power experimental transmitter onboard was also licensed as W10XG.
The first port of call was at Portland, Maine, followed by several other ports down the eastern seaboard. Radio transmissions from the yacht started nearly three months later beginning on February 13, 1934, from Wilmington, Delaware. After that, special shortwave broadcasts were made each Tuesday evening from progressive locations down the east coast, then out in the Bahamas, and also from Haiti in the Caribbean.
However, NBC then ended their contract with Phillips Lord, and although the reasons were never officially stated, rumors persisted that many blatantly scandalous events were taking place on board. NBC in New York even took steps to send staff down to Jamaica to remove their radio transmitter from the ship, but the ship eluded them.
It moved on, back through the Panama Canal, and out into the Pacific. A shortwave broadcast was made from the Galapagos Islands; and the last known shortwave broadcast from the Seth Parker was made in February 1935 when it was some three hundred miles from Tahiti.
Then the story becomes even more controversial. The Seth Parker supposedly encountered two storms in the Pacific, off the coast of Tahiti, badly damaging the vessel. The onboard transmitter KNRA was heard sending an urgent SOS message in April 1935 that was picked up by the maritime station WCC at Chatham, Massachusetts. The British Royal Navy had a vessel, the HMAS Australia, in the vicinity, and they were asked to assist, which they did.
The Australia reported that they had picked up all nine people who were then onboard the Seth Parker, but they also stated that they had not encountered any storms in the area. The Seth Parker was then towed by a tug boat into Pago Pago harbor in American Samoa, where it was eventually sold.
During its more than a year of spasmodic transmissions, KNRA on board the Seth Parker was logged by multitudes of international radio monitors in North America and Australasia, even though it was only intended for relay on the NBC medium wave network in the USA. The transmissions were heard directly on shortwave from many exotic island locations. Several different shortwave channels were used, and the corresponding land-based stations heard in two-way contact with KNRA were the RCA communication stations:
• at Rocky Point on Long Island, NY,
• at Bolinas, CA, and
• at Kahuku, HI.
Additionally, KNRA was also heard on occasions in contact with station LSX in Argentina.
So, what happened to the 1 kW shortwave transmitter KNRA? Well, that wasn’t the end of the story. Before the Seth Parker was sold, the transmitter was rescued by NBC personnel and taken to Honolulu where it was installed on a small naval ship called the Avocet, which was used as a tender for servicing larger vessels. The purpose this time was to relay reports from the Pacific back to the United States during a major eclipse of the sun in 1937. The transmitter was assigned a new call – WMEF – and the Avocet took up a position near Canton Island in what is now the nation of Kiribati, about 1,000 miles southwest of Hawaii. From there, the ship’s transmissions were relayed first by the RCA station in Hawaii, and then onward to the RCA station at Bolinas in California. Once again, the main purpose of the little transmitter was to feed news reports and commentaries back to NBC, New York for relay on medium wave across the United States. However, as was quite common in those days, a secondary purpose was for direct reception on shortwave by any listener who might be interested.
But even that’s not the end of the story. After the solar eclipse in the Pacific, the transmitter was taken back to the continental United States, and placed in storage. Then five years later in 1942 after America had joined World War II, NBC took the transmitter out of storage, renovated it, and shipped it over to North Africa.
Immediately following the Allied invasion of Sicily in July and August 1943, the transmitter was transported to the island and set up and placed on the air in the city of Syracuse. Shortly afterwards, following the troops, it was re-loaded onto a ship and taken to Bari on the west coast of Italy, where it was then taken overland by road north to the city of Naples and again placed on the air for reports back to NBC.
Finally, the transmitter was taken to the city of Rome, where it was placed on the air as a temporary shortwave relay station for the Voice of America. By this time, the much-battered transmitter had been nicknamed the Relic, due to its age and size.
So, what was the end for this historic transmitter? Well, we don’t know for sure, but we presume it was simply abandoned after the war, there in the city of Rome.
Back to you, Jeff.
(Ray Robinson/NWS Wavescan)
