AM Transmitter Schematic on Welcome Back Kotter - "Sweatwork"

Videos for Engineers

It is no secret that I have been a long-time fan of the TV show Welcome Back Kotter, which centers around Buchannan High School, a fictitious Brooklyn, NY, institution of learning, and a gang of affable, low-achiever Sweathogs. Gabe Kotter, a reformed former Sweathog himself, is now a teacher of Social Studies at Buchannan. He is the only person able to coax any semblance of respect or conformance from them. It was a simple, clean show, typical of 1970s Prime Time television.

In the episode embedded below, titled, "Sweatwork^†," (a takeoff on the 1976 movie "Network"), produced from my purchased copy of the Welcome Back, Kotter DVD set, is about the Sweathogs running a radio station in the school. On the blackboard outside of the broadcast studio is a schematic for a vacuum-tube-based AM transmitter. It looks legit, and includes all the components to form a basic transmitter, including the audio input. I could not make out the manufacturer of the transmitter cabinet in the studio.

Freddie "Boom-Boom" Washington talking to Buchannan HS VP Mr. Woodman

AM Transmitter schematic on blackboard in background

Season 3, Episode 16,  Aired December 22, 1977

† " is a variation of the 1976 movie "Network." The famous scene in Network is where the broadcast anchor prompts all his viewers to go to the window and yell ,"'I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!" Arnold Horshack does his own interpretation of the scene on his radio broadcast. Strangely, 33 years later the same sentiment exists; it appears we kept on taking it after all.

For more Sweathog electronics, see Sweathog Clinic for the Cure of Smoking.

Posted February 4, 2015