October 2011 – Page 2 – Engineering Radio

The melted ground wire

I found this on one of the guy wire anchor points for a 400-foot tower:

#2 solid copper wire burned open by lightning strike — #2 solid copper wire burned open by a lightning strike

Had to be a pretty big hit to burn open a #2 wire. This is on one of six guy anchor points for the tower. The ground wire is U-bolted to each guy wire before the turnbuckle and then goes to ground. This was noted between the last guy wire and the ground rod.

It is important to find and fix these things, as the next lightning strike on this tower would have a less-than-ideal path to ground at the guy anchor points, forcing the current to flow through other parts of the transmitter site, possibly through the transmitter itself, to ground.

I generally try to do a brief inspection of towers, guy anchors, lighting, painting, and a general walk around the property twice a year. That helps prevent surprises like “Oh my goodness, the guy wires are rusting through,” or “Hey, did you know there is an illegal “hemp” farm on your property?” Well, no officer, I don’t know anything about that…

Micro Radio goes to Occupy Wall Street

I read a very interesting article from John Anderson regarding the Occupy Wall Street movement’s use of media, specifically low-powered radio. Being a native New Yorker, the demonstrations are of some interest to me. To date, the demonstrators have placed a wide variety of grievances at the feet of “Wall Street,” some justly and some not. What I found interesting about it is this:

Last week, the Occupy Wall Street encampment established a microradio station at 107.1 FM. The station simulcasts the 24/7 live stream which provides coverage of life inside Zuccotti Park, as well as street-level reportage of daily protest actions in New York City’s financial district.

One of the reasons for this is the City’s ban on the use of amplified speakers and or public address systems. By using a micro radio station, persons in a crowd too far away to hear the orator can use a small FM radio or even their smartphones to listen to the speech. Another reason is the idea that large corporate media has been controlling the narrative for far too long, to the detriment of the average citizen.

Zuccotti Park is in lower Manhattan, about two blocks away from Wall Street itself. It is described as 33,000 square feet, which makes it about 3/4 of an acre. A part 15 FM radio station (47CFR 15.239) can easily cover this area and more. Even with the station limited to 250 µV field at 3 meters from the radiating element, generally thought to be 100 mW TPO, the reliable coverage area would be a radius of approximately 200 feet, depending on local interference. That makes the coverage area approximately 125,600 square feet or more. There are several other stations licensed to 107.1 in the greater NYC area; WXPK, WWZY are the closest and most likely to cause problems.

I am not sure how they are generating their live stream, but when listening to it for several hours over the weekend, I found it interesting and technically well done. They seem to be running circles around others, who are only grudgingly admitting that there might be something going on in some forty-odd cities across the US.

Micro Radio is a creative way to use the available technology and keep the public and protesters informed.

More HD radio news

Link to: HD RADIO™ GOES THE WAY OF THE LASERDISC PLAYER.

An interesting take from a non-broadcaster that gets it mostly right. The premise for HD radio™, as the author states, was to serve two purposes; improve sound quality and add extra programming channels. I have a few issues with this statement:

Regarding the improved signal, that still holds true, and can be especially beneficial for AM radio, which has struggled for some time with signal degradation.

I would argue the opposite. HD Radio™ has done nothing to improve the signal quality of the AM band. It has, in fact, degraded the band further by adding digital hash to adjacent channels, limiting the on-channel analog bandwidth to less than 5 KHz and creating on-channel background hiss.

Thus, HD Radio™ has done neither of those two stated goals. In addition to that, from the radio station owner/operator’s perspective, it is expensive to install, expensive to license, expensive to operate, and has no audience.

Hat from here.

Wiring Error

See if you can spot it:

Somehow I missed this one when it first circulated last July. I think I was out on the lake fishing or something. I suppose a bunch of lawyers would not know the difference between a correctly wired antenna and an incorrectly wired one.

Another one:

Department of Jammed Gears

If only these were some sort of clever fake, a spoof, or something like that. But no, this is the real deal. The Department of Innovation’s best work is a logo of jammed gears. I wonder how much that cost.