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Comment by simmons | Hacker News Reader

The station’s once groundbreaking transmitter is long retired but preserved, on-site, beside its modern counterpart.

I wonder if they ever offer tours. It would be neat to see some of this history the next time I'm passing through the Cincinnati area. On a related note, it looks like there's a "National Voice of America Museum of Broadcasting" just down the street from the WLW site.

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It's not quite the same scale, but another of the nation's 'mega AM stations', KMOX in St. Louis, has a few interesting articles covering the history of their transmitter / tower and associated gear:

https://www.stlmediahistory.org/index.php/Radio/RadioArticle...

I used to work as an engineering assistant there, and went to the tower site a few times. The amount of RF energy in that 50,000 watt tower was enough to cook snakes, rats, etc. which got close enough to the gear.

The tower itself is energized to the extent you wouldn't want to be within at least a few feet; see https://thenextweb.com/shareables/2016/02/11/what-happens-if...

I don't know if they offer tours at the WLW site itself, but I do know that in the VOA museum there is a lot of detailed info/history and items pertaining to WLW.

Here is a tour on YouTube https://youtu.be/CbHjcwIoTiY

100 KW tubes, those are monsters. Watercooling?

Yes. There's a pond on the site that was used for cooling the tubes.

The VoA museum near the WLW Antenna does give tours on the weekend of the VoA transmitter (Voices of America) that was located near the WLW Transmitter -- sadly, it's only open on the weekends, but, it's still a really fun tour that talks about the shortwave transmission history of VoA.

During Hamfest (usually held in Xenia now that Hara Arena is gone), you can usually get a tour of the WLW transmitter site.

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