[BC] question for you engineers

[rj carpenter]

Donna Halper <dlh at donnahalper.com> asked about questions "from the 
field" for America's Town Meeting.

I hope I'm not completely off base, but didn't NBC feed its eastern 
stations in a "round robin" manner as far back as the late-30s? It was 
that way in the 40s. This was a loop that went from NYC, perhaps to 
Boston, then through Cleveland, Chicago, ST Louis, etc., the south, 
Washington and back to NYC.  Major points could break the loop and 
insert audio. NYC, Chicago and Washington were certainly origination 
points which could break the round-robin loop.

It was "interesting" when the originating station didn't break the loop 
for enough time for audio to die out before closing it.  Here in DC in 
the late 40s, one could listen to the tailend of the loop on WINC (esp 
on FM), Winchester, VA, when ABC was originating network news from DC. 
WMAL carried the outgoing feed on FM to get the better quality.  There 
was a LONG delay around the loop.  As a general policy, the originating 
point was supposed to listen to the audio coming back around the loop to 
verify that it had control and that things weren't broken.