After 71 years, WLO operators go off the air

Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Zach, who notes that WLO have announced that as of 04:59 UTC on July 1, 2018, “there there will no longer be 24/7 operators on duty at the Mobile, AL stations.”

Here’s a screenshot from their announcement on Facebook:
The end of an era indeed. Thanks for the tip, Zach.

Spread the radio love

14 thoughts on “After 71 years, WLO operators go off the air

  1. Mike Malloy

    Well, I think I was there in the early 1990s. Not the middle 1990’s, so I think I mis-spoke there. I was conducting GMDSS classes for Skipper Simms, who was kind of an emotional, not very stable person at the time. However, I give him credit. To my knowledge he was the only single person in the USA to have a complete suite of STCW classes. I had my own STCW certificate for the 70 hour courses and a complete GMDSS system also and I sold it to him and told him I would teach some of the classes for him, especially when he said they would be held at WLO (who wouldn’t). Actually I and another person were the first to conduct GMDSS classes in the USA. I had my first (FCC) class in Aug of 1994. Then as time marched on the training migrated over to STCW.

    I was involved in maritime communications long before that and also military communictions and was a government contractor. But I could see the handwriting on the wall and decided to sell out the GMDSS stuff. Glad I did.

    I had my own classes in Corpus Christi, where I live but also was a contract teacher for: Calif Maritime Academy, Texas A&M, Galveston, and other propriety schools. The book I wrote was used by these schools, but my biggest customer for the book was the USMMA. I considered that quite an honor.

    Now at age 75, I am totally retired and still get on my ham radio.

    Mike Malloy

    Reply
  2. Mike Malloy

    Well, I was not an employee of WLO. However, I was at WLO in the middle 1990’s conducting GMDSS training classes. I was there for about 6 weeks. I loved my time there. I was like being in heaven, especially for a ham (WD5GYG). However, it was going down, there was not question about it. CW was already gone when I was there, but I have worked WLO on CW before (I was also a RO back in the 1980’s). True. Satellites and GMDSS killed CW.

    They told me that at one time the SSB room generated a million dollars a year, just by itself in it’s hay day. They had two professional workers there. One was at the Rinla location and maintained the equipment at the receive site. The other guy was down about 20 miles away at the TX site. He had all those wonderful Mr. Henry 4k amps. He designed a system where the verticals (below 12 MHz) all would be phased in certain directions. I can tell you for a fact that when I was off the coast of Venezuela one time I sent a SITOR message, and their 12 MHz signal was so strong it was about to blow the speaker out of the radio. They had a really good system. A 100 times better than Sailmail that uses 150watt transmitters spaced around the US. We have one of Sailmails TX sites here in Corpus Chrsiti, at Boaters World (or something like that). It works, but it ain’t like working a shore station with 4k, into an antenna with at least 3db + gain.

    I also knew Mr. “D” the founder. He was a true RF man, and he taught me some tricks of the trade while I was there. It is all gone now.

    Mike Malloy
    WD5GYG

    Reply
    1. Jimmy D

      WD5GYG, I was there in the mid-1990’s. When did you teach GMDSS? There is a license certification test for GMDSS that the FCC requires to be certified in it. I don’t see you being certified in GMDSS. Plus I don’t remember anyone visiting to “teach” GMDSS. Only the CW guys had advanced commercial licenses, like me. The rest only had the basic Marine licenses to operate the VHF rigs.

      Reply
  3. Billy Farnell

    1957 – 1961 at WLO
    At the recommendation of my HS ‘Radio & Electronics’ shop teacher, who worked summers at WLO, I applied for work in the summer of 1957. Assigned to continue building an in-progress HF CW transmitter during the day and helping early in the morning in the voice section, transmitting on 2582-kHz, receiving on 2430-kHz. The shop teacher had required each student to pass the FCC third-class radiotelephone test.

    At WLO after attaining the second-class license I was assigned to open the station in the morning. The early routine included powering up, calling a special WX phone number and writing out the marine forecast, and manually correcting, if necessary, the second-hand on the wall clock listening to WWV. The first broadcast was at 5 AM, repeated on the odd hours, of weather and phone contacts or messages for specific vessels.

    30.377668, -88.2114680 on Gmaps shows this as WLO road now, the location near the Coden, AL site in 1961 where I stacked towers, dug ground-plain and assisted with refurbishing a microwave system to communicate with the state docks main site where the phone and code operators worked. Not far from the end of the highway 188 at Mobile Bay, and just south, was a remote receiver on 2430-kHz with telephone connection back the docks main site.
    Current status of WLO: shutdown in 2018, but some reports indicate possible merging with others maybe using it as a remote site. ???

    Reply
  4. Mamerto Taniegra

    I was a ship R/0 for 20 yrs from the Philippines.
    After my last ship assignment, I landed a job at WLO as a morse code operator from 1989 to 1993. I had so much fun , I became so popular among Filipino R/O’s from commercial ships.
    After work I used to go the docks where a couple of commercial ships manned by Filipino crews. I couldn’t count the number of R/O’s I brought to the radio station. I left and moved to Charleston, Little Rock and presently in California.
    I have my best memories in Mobile, Al ??????

    Reply
  5. George Owens

    I was at WLO for 2 years in the mid 70’s .
    I worked at the VHF station located at the Alabama State Docks, and filled in at the High Seas SSB voice and RTTY station in Theodore.

    The VHF shop had 7 VHF transmitter sites running from Codem all the way up to Tuscaloosa on the Rivers. We also stood watch on Ch16 and 2182khz and assisted the Coast Guard with emergency comms.

    In the High Seas voice we could just about talk to anybody in the Gulf, Caribbean Sea, and up the east coast as far north as Virginia. Isn’t the RTTY side we were a world wide operation and routinely made contact with ships off India, China, the Mediterranean, and all over.

    It was an interesting job for an Undergraduate student and the knowledge I gained there served me well over my career.

    Reply
  6. K F

    I worked at WLO about 30 years ago right after undergrad school when I needed a job. It was nothing at all like I imagined growing up listening to WLO’s channel markers on my shortwave radio. I imagined nicely-dressed and highly skilled people manning the equipment and state of the art buildings etc. Nope.

    It was a run-down, small three-bedroom house modified and packed with surplus equipment racks and equipment. It also had very dated, warping wood paneling in the SITOR room. All this was patched together somehow so it worked. The house was on maybe five acres or so, I think, maybe ten. It had an old shack barn behind it. The antenna field had several towers holding Yagi’s. There was also a cross of loops on the ground for LW operations (sometimes ships would call us on Morse using 500Khz) and there was a microwave dish we used to relay our signals to the main transmitters on the Mobile Bay. It was an amazing assembly of old, surplus equipment interconnected into a hodgepodge of computers. PC towers, the kind you have at home, did a lot of the work too. They were on the floor or shoved between a desk here and there. There was a room where all the computer routers and switches were placed. Imagine an eccentric ham operator turning his whole house into a ham shack with no regard on how it looked. That’s what it was/is.

    I’ll be honest here. The Morse operators were the only ones really qualified in radio via commercial licenses and most were former military, like me. I was a Morse operator. Most of the people manning the equipment were unskilled/uneducated people from the Mobile AL area trained on site. They were mostly former fast food workers who got the job by knowing someone else who worked there. This type of worker reduced cost by not having to pay skilled radio folks or offer any benefits at all. They didn’t offer any form of health insurance or even a retirement plan — nothing. Morse operators made more pay because we had commercial licenses and were skilled in a way, but it wasn’t a lot by any means. Alabama was a right-to-work state and this reared its ugly head even at the coast station.

    The owner foresaw the end coming and kept sending out notices that lay offs would occur due to decreasing traffic at the station. He bought and merged two other coast stations in the hopes that would increase revenue, but it didn’t. The unskilled people working at WLO refused to find other work despite his warnings. They hung on like vultures. I was already looking for another job the first day I saw the “house shack” and the type of people who worked there — I kid you not.

    It was satellite phones that ultimately killed the company and all US coast stations. The cost of using them kept going down and pretty soon, you didn’t have to go thru a coast station in order to call a loved one while at sea or contact your company to report your cargo amounts, speed, ETA etc. US vessels switched over to GMDSS and didn’t have to send in their AMVER Morse reports to the station anymore. Then, the nail in the coffin for us Morse operators was when the Coast Guard ceased using Morse Code.

    When I was there, the only activity was the early morning rush of local fishing boats who couldn’t afford satellite phones. For about an hour, they were the early morning rush in the voice room. After that, almost nothing. The same was true for Morse. All the ships would call in starting at 6am M-F. All the traffic would be received and whatever was on the traffic tree sent out and by 10 am. It would gradually fade to sporadic contacts the rest of the day/night. I’d have maybe five to ten ships call in via Morse on the swing shift and almost nothing on the mid shift. This only got worse as time went on.

    So, that’s the truth of working at WLO. At one time the traffic trees were like Xmas trees they were so full of paper. They were spinning metal “trees” with paper messages clipped on them. When a station called in, you would un-clip the paper traffic and send it to the ship calling in. That’s why they were called “traffic trees.” It was a good time for coast stations. Again, technology killed the need for a third party station to relay traffic. Still it’s sad for me to see WLO off the air 24/7. It was comforting to know it and all coast stations were out there 24/7. Take care and 73, if anyone is still out there…listening.

    Reply
  7. Mario

    I know that WLO had computer voice weather reports that I used to listen to, along with CW markers, that is about all I know of recent activity. And WLO Shipcomm, run by radio amateurs that sent RTTY and Sitor messages to ships at sea, I have that frequency in my SDR# frequency manager as it was nice to hear those reports. Not sure if that station is also going off the air too?

    Correct me if wrong, thanks.

    Reply
  8. Bob Dyer

    Who are they ? And what did they do ?sounds like something that was connected to wirld war 2, if so i tip my hat to them

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.