As I mentioned in a previous post, a lot of my Franklin Institute… obsession?…is related to what used to be called the “Futures Center”; a massive addition to the Franklin Institute in the early 1990s that not only added on a large portion of the building, but filled it with all things modern, like computers, virtual reality, automation, space, and so on.
By the way, I’m STILL looking for any ephemera from the Futures Center; I literally have one thing (a poster). Sadly, they couldn’t keep up with technology, and the Futures Center was cleared out in the late 90s, but that entire section of building remains and often houses the temporary exhibits the FI hosts. When you go into the atrium where the ticket counters and Omniverse IMAX theater is, that whole part of the building was originally the Futures Center.
Anywhoo…as part of the addition they reorganized and updated a few things in the FI outside of the Futures Center as well, and after being told the station had to go, the Phil-Mont mobile radio club sprang into action and instead proposed an updated station provided by the club, which ended up getting approved. It was moved up to a higher floor (same floor as the Telescope I believe), and updated with all modern equipment, and continued to be a partnership with the Phil-Mont Mobile Radio Club.
This is the station as I remember it, and sadly while I always had a passing interest in radio, I never really got into it until literally just a few years ago, so I never got a chance to do more than gawk at all the bells and whistles in the old station. My only memory of this, other than what you see, was a bearded gentleman briefly talking about the station and pointing out what each “section” did – I probably had no clue back then and just gawked at the “big” radio in the middle.
The new station was even recognized by a full-cover photo and article in the July 1992 issue of QST magazine:
Sadly, a majority of that floor (5th floor?) has now been turned into office space, and as it would have been too difficult to move antennas and wiring around, the station was shut down in 2002. I do really wish the FI had more technology/electronics, as I feel some of the modern exhibits are very “simplified” compared to what used to be shown.
Radio is still very much a large part of modern science and technology, especially today with WIFI, Cell phones, radio astronomy, and many other aspects. Ham radio is still a great demonstration of that technology and gives anyone the chance to experiment and play with it. All the techs running those phone towers have to come from somewhere!
For a full history of the W3TKQ station, you can find it on Phil-Mont’s web site here: http://www.phil-mont.org/tfi-hist.html. If you have any memories of the station from this period – please leave a comment below!
I volunteered at the Institute in the mid-70’s (we were called FIRST volunteers – I never did find out what FIRST was supposed to stand for). I rotated through the building, hanging around the various exhibits, answering questions and doing demos. I dropped by W3TKQ from time to time, but often unfortunately there was no operator on duty. Back then there was an exhibit called “Futures” too. There was an electric car, household goods and other ‘futuristic’ items, but what fascinated me most was the Votrax speech synthesizer. I spent quite a few hours playing with that. (By the way, a while back I saw that the call W3TKQ was available, so I took it as my vanity callsign.)