Good only in Europe

And some parts of Asia:

Equipment rack outlet with 220 Volts to ground.
Equipment rack outlet with 220 Volts to ground.

It seems the power company has some work to do. The other leg measures 28 volts to ground, which to me means the Neutral has been lost somewhere. Fortunately, the transmitter was running on 240, which looks normal on the voltmeter. Everything in the rack; the remote control, exciter, STL, etc have been damaged or destroyed.

Then, of course, there is this:

Utility line
Utility line

That is the power and phone line in those trees, as it leaves the road and travels approximately 1,700 feet through the woods.  It is a private line and the utility will not do any work until the trees are cleared away.  In all fairness to the current owners, who have owned the station for not quite a year, this situation has been like this for a long time.

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8 thoughts on “Good only in Europe”

  1. Yeah, the station was put on the air in 1990, then pretty much forgotten, one of those 80/90 drop ins. No site maintenance has been done in many years, something we are working on correcting.

  2. Ouch. I had something similar when a clueless electrician moved a 120v breaker to the wild leg of a 3 phase service. Thankfully a large APC ups was the only causality but it could have been disastrous.

  3. I worked on a site where the tower had only 3 10/2 UF cables strung up on guy wires through about 2,000 feet of woods to the panel. I know it smoked at least one UPS I had put in there. Prior to the very low powered FM, the only equipment were three police/fire Motorola repeaters. That site was a disaster from the get go, the owner wouldn’t pay the money to do any upgrades.

  4. Kevin, you remind me of the time a licensed electrician wired up an outlet in the break room to the 277 volt lighting circuit. The conversation went something like this:

    “Well, all set”

    (plugs in the soda machine)

    “Wow, that display light is very bright. Hey, do you smell something burning?”

    (breaker trips, lights go out)

    “Shit.”

    Mike, it is amazing to me some of the things one can still find out in the field. A few years ago, I found telephone wire, (AKA JK, 24 Gauge, Red, Black, Green, Yellow) with 120 VAC on it, powering the door light relay, unfused. It have been like that for 30 years.

  5. “A few years ago, I found telephone wire, (AKA JK, 24 Gauge, Red, Black, Green, Yellow) with 120 VAC on it”

    I have lost track of the number of times I have snipped a run of Belden 8451 while cleaning up a new facility, only to be greeted by sparks and a tripped breaker somewhere.

    I believe the best find to date however was a transmitter failsafe consisting of a 48V relay across the door interlocks, connected a Telco DC loop, which was plugged into a wall socket at the GM’s house several miles away.

  6. Chuck, that is awesome. I can imagine some guy who didn’t want to go to the transmitter site to sign off the transmitter at night. “I’ll just rig it so I can unplug it… at my house.”

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