Edwin Armstrong’s Tower: FM Radio’s Windswept Legacy on Mount Washington
May 1, 2025•320 words
For our homeschool technology unit, we’re studying Edwin Howard Armstrong — the inventor of frequency modulation (FM) radio. To connect history to real places, we’re visiting two peaks that shaped FM broadcasting: Mount Washington in New Hampshire and West Peak in Meriden, Connecticut.
The Summit Broadcast Breakthrough
In 1937, Armstrong worked with the Yankee Network to move their experimental FM station, W1XER, to the summit of Mount Washington. The location’s 6,288-foot elevation made it ideal for testing VHF propagation over long distances. Construction of the transmitter building and antenna was grueling — a crew of eight needed three weeks to work five days due to high winds and ice (National Archives article).
By December 1940, the station (renamed W39B) began regular FM broadcasting, later becoming WMTW and then WMNE, before closing in 1948 due to FCC reallocation of FM frequencies (Wikipedia).
The Tower Still Stands
The original FM tower on Mount Washington still stands near the Sherman Adams building — repurposed but visibly distinct from modern telecom structures. On our upcoming visit, we plan to locate and photograph it, using resources from the Mount Washington Observatory and archived broadcasts shared by Fybush.com.
We’ve also referenced Ron Schott’s Flickr photo of the tower.
Next Stop: West Peak, Meriden CT
The next day, we’ll head to West Peak in Meriden, Connecticut — the site of W2XAG, another Armstrong test station built in 1939. This site is accessible via Hubbard Park and still hosts broadcast infrastructure today. Several blog posts document its history:
Armstrong’s Impact
From those wind-blasted towers, Armstrong's vision gave the world static-free radio — and the foundation for modern wireless communications. His legacy lives on in steel towers and digital signals alike.
Further reading: