BEARS History At A Glance

It was 1973 when an ad-hoc group of ABC engineers in New York decided to form an employee ham radio club they called the Broadcast Engineers Amateur Radio Society.

The BEARS’ first repeater, a rack-mounted 40-watt Motorola MOTRAC mobile transceiver, was built by the Club’s first trustee, Jack Powers/W2JIA. Assisted by Larry Mussman, Bill Blumel/W2QKY, Harold Robbins/K2VKG and Phil Levens/W2EIO, Powers installed the machine in the studio-transmitter link facility of WABC-AM Radio. A military-surplus RF amplifier, known affectionately as The Boat Anchor, boosted the rig’s rated power to several hundred watts. Station management enthusiastically supported the project – donating space, utilities…even an old tape cartridge machine which played repeater IDs voiced by ABC celebrities.

From high atop ABC Headquarters at 1330 Avenue of the Americas, repeater WR2AHX served hams throughout the Company and the tri-state area on 146.01/.61 MHz. That is, until the BEARS found out a Paterson, NJ ham club was also operating on the same frequency pair.

In desperate need of a new channel, the Club once more turned to Powers. An active RTTY operator, he connected the BEARS with an inactive RTTY repeater in Hempstead, LI, and using a commercial-grade selective calling unit known as a “selcal,” Powers devised a way for both RTTY and voice operations to share the same repeater pair.

As RTTY was a precursor to packet, the selcal was the precursor to the tone-activated PL logic systems used in our repeater today. A series of RTTY signals from the Hempstead machine would tell our voice repeater to shut down when teletype traffic had to be passed.

Before long, the trustee of the RTTY machine left the country – leaving the 147.27/.87 frequencies all to the BEARS. We’ve made our radio home on this pair ever since.

Our first controller? A three- or four-function contraption, activated by three-digit codes processed through a touch-tone decoder. The relay was designed and built by Larry Mussman – and for all its complex circuitry, it fit inside a seven-inch cardboard audio tape box.

A donated Phelps-Dodge six-cavity duplexer allowed the BEARS to replace separate transmit and receive antennas with a single array.

The times they were a-changin’ – and the BEARS were changing right along with them. By 1975, hams from all over the Company had joined the Club, and the BEARS changed their name to reflect their more diverse membership. The Club formally incorporated as the Broadcast Employees Amateur Radio Society, a not-for-profit organization. The FCC did away with “WR” club calls; Jack Powers handed the trustee reigns over to Bill Nicosia. And Bill lent the BEARS repeater his callsign, WB2ZKX, the call it used until the FCC instituted vanity club callsigns just a few years ago.

Riding high, the BEARS soon found it could be lonely – er, noisy – at the top. Plagued by interference from the New York Telephone Ham Club repeater (on 147.07/.67 MHz), and from a high-power contest coordination machine run by the Frankford Radio Club in Abingdon, PA, the BEARS once again were looking for a quiet place to hibernate.

It was Harold Robbins to the rescue. With a twist of a well-placed arm (attached to a dean at Bronx Community College), the BEARS acquired a satellite VHF receive site linked by a line-of-sight UHF relay to the main site at 1330.

New sophistication eventually required a new controller, and the BEARS procured a nifty Spectrum in the late ‘70s. As for the machine, well, it, too, was moving up in the world – literally. We lost the Bronx receive site, but friendly ABC managers let WB2ZKX/RPT room with her big sisters at the WABC-TV (later the WPLJ-FM) transmitter facility atop the Empire State Building.

Talk about connections. Motorola’s ABC rep just happened to be a member of the BEARS, and arranged for the Club to obtain – at cost – a previously-owned 90-watt MICOR remote base transceiver, complete with parts. Under the direction of the BEARS’ technical wizard, Jerry Cudmore/K2JRC, the commercial rig was converted to ham radio operation. An ACC RC-85 controller was installed to run the whole shebang, and with the help of WQHT-FM’s chief engineer, BEARS installed an low-power antenna outside a south-facing window of the Empire transmitter plant to enhance our repeater coverage south of the Empire State Building, while still protecting the signal contours of our fellow hams operating on a co-channeled down in Abingdon, PA.

The return of many commercial broadcasters to Empire after the World Trade Center was destroyed created technical challenges for BEARS that forced us to seek a new transmission point. Today, BEARS operates a new, state-of-the-art repeater (now bearing the callsign W2ABC) atop Millennium Tower across from the ABC campus on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. And we’re working to engineer a backup repeater atop Four Times Square, in the heart of Midtown Manhattan. This machine will have full emergency power, and will assure W2ABC stays on the air “when all else fails.”

Beyond providing reliable, wide-area 2-meter repeater service to our members, BEARS, from its inception, has been committed to serving the public interest, convenience and necessity, in keeping with the federal mandate issued to all amateur radio licensees.

The Club is reconstituting its ham radio training and licensing programs, in cooperation with the American Radio Relay League. The W2ABC repeater was for many years the primary tactical repeater for the New York City Amateur Radio Service (ARES), and the New York City Radio Amateur Civil Emergency Service (RACES), which is under the aegis of the Mayor’s Office of Emergency Management.

BEARS facilities have been used to help coordinate communications for the New York City Marathon, and are placed at the disposal of the National Weather Service’s SKYWARN program in New York City.

On September 11^th, 2001 – and for many days thereafter – the BEARS repeater served as the primary tactical communications channel for SATERN, the Salvation Army Tactical Emergency Radio Network, which helped coordinate relief activities in New York following the attack on the World Trade Center. Our Club was subsequently honored by the Salvation Army for its dedication to public service.

BEARS maintains a cooperative relationship with the Disney Emergency Amateur Radio Service (DEARS) at Walt Disney Co. facilities in California and Florida, and with the Channel 6 Amateur Radio Club, the employee ham club at ABC-owned WPVI-TV in Philadelphia.

BEARS is a constitution-driven, dues-free, 501c3 non-profit corporation administered by an executive board elected annually, and comprising the Club president, vice-president, treasurer and secretary. The executive board is advised, and Club operations are overseen, by a board of directors which includes the Club’s repeater trustee, its immediate past-president and three members elected at large each year by the Club’s rank-and-file membership.