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This topic comprises 2 pages: 1 2
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Topic: Roof Top Drive-In 1955
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Jack Ondracek
Film God
Posts: 2348
From: Port Orchard, WA, USA
Registered: Oct 2002
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posted 09-26-2017 07:19 PM
Mitchell, I suspect that the adoption of FM did gain traction in the '80s, as you noticed, but I think the reason has more to do with the availability of technology, rather than any shift in governmental position.
Prior to the mid '80s, most available FM equipment came from the radio stations themselves, as they replaced older exciters and processors. Some owners and/or their engineers made this cast-off equipment available to drive-ins, if only on an experimental basis. The stuff was big, clunky and, in some cases, full of tubes. I know of two early cases where drive-ins got FM because their owners were also FM broadcasters.
If you go back many years before that, you run into the lack of installed FM in the cars themselves. In the mid-'70s, a lot of car radios were still AM only. To receive FM, they had to use those converter gadgets that plugged into their cassette or 8-track players.
I built our first switcher/compressor/stereo generator/transmitter on our rewind bench. We made FM available to our patrons in 1987, during our run of the first "Predator" movie. I built 3 more systems in 1988 and fully converted away from our window speakers over the next year or so. We also had some old Cine-Fi equipment here, but it never worked very well, and we pulled it out along with the speakers.
I'm sure we weren't the first to use FM at a drive-in, but I think we were among them... certainly in terms of building a system that was designed for the purpose. I was even approached by the star character of this forum's "dirtbag" thread, who wanted me to send him two systems for potential sale as a "manufacturer's rep". Thankfully, I discovered his intent to reverse-engineer the thing before I did that.
The availability of relatively-inexpensive transmitters, manufactured mainly for the low power and translator markets made adoption of FM much easier for drive-ins in subsequent years. Today, we're on our 3rd generation of transmitter and switching equipment, all of which is commercially available to anyone. I install and maintain the same transmitters for some of my broadcast clients. BW Broadcast and Decade are typical brands. A numbers of drive-ins are still running Ramsey transmitters, which appear good enough for some, but which I tend to consider "professional-lite".
Nearly forgot... Smart had a processor/switcher with a drive-in variant. We used those out here as well, for a time.
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