OUT OF THIN AIR

when the large and powerful 50,000 watts came pounding into Prince Edward. Island.

Up to this time, CFCY had been a basic station of the CBC and on the trans-Canada network, and the first blow was that we were placed on the Dominion network, the secondary one for the Corporation. Where we had been the most powerful outlet for Canadian network pro— grams heard throughout the central Maritime provinces, with a pop- ulation of approximately half a million people, now we would no longer receive the important network programs and the province would suffer as a result. Dad began at once writing long letters and telephoning impor- tant people. It was a fight for provincial rights and this time he had the backing of the press and much public support. Even those who had ignored radio for so many years were behind him. It was a hard fight. but provincial prerogatives were being threatened and the press quickly realized that the fight was theirs also.

The result was that we remained on the Dominion network as a basic provincial station but were added to the Trans— Canada network for all major event programming. We found ourselves in an enviable position indeed. Later years proved that CBA as a Maritime outlet was not as harmful to us as it had appeared it would be, and the Dominion network was a successful operation with many popular programs.

CFCY had been established in the new building for about a year. hardly long enough to get used to it, when it became known that private broadcasting stations across Canada would be given permission to increase power from 1,000 watts to 5,000 watts. It was wartime and the Department of Transport had issued a regulation stating that after a certain date, all power allocations would be frozen for the duration of the war. My father felt that we would have to retain if possible the number of listeners we already had, and to do this we would need additional power, but could it be done in time?

Max Corkum had' left to join the Navy and Lorne Finley was Assistant to Bob Large, Chief Engineer. Bob did a lot of research and they decided that they might be able to beat the deadline if they could buy some units and assemble them together to make a composite trans— mitter. The race was on and Lorne began changing the power supply so that higher power tubes could be installed. This took months of work and there were special problems in procuring equipment as manufac- turers rightly were alloting it all to the services. When they finally got the parts and turned on the power, some of the capacitors severly over—

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