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
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.
It does not look like much, however, that is about $5,500.00 worth of damage. What you don’t see is the mashed oil cooler and radiator. This happened on my way from one place to another during the early morning hours. I was traveling at about 55 MPH when a deer bolted from the woods and entered the roadway from the right. I did not have time to a break.
In a ditch
A momentary lapse of attention causes a loss of $80.00. I think I was adjusting the defroster as I was driving down the road when suddenly, I felt the car tilt over to an alarming degree. You can see the tow truck getting ready to pull it out. Fortunately, there was no damage to the vehicle.
Troubles with the neighbor
This is on the access road to one of our transmitter sites. The station has a legal right of way through this property, however, the neighbor seems to object. I spoke with him and showed him a copy of our deed, he has since changed plans.
One side of a balanced audio connection disconnected
This is the downside of using category cable to make audio connections. The wires are not as rugged as say Belden 8451. This was causing problems because it is at an AM studio/transmitter site.
Burned 30 amp three-phase contactor
Three-phase, 30 amp, 240-volt contactor installed in a 480-volt system. Lasted a few years, anyway.
White face hornet’s nest
New tenants on one of our towers. This is a white-faced (or bald-faced) hornet’s nest. They are really paper wasps, but that difference aside, these beasts are nasty, aggressive, and have a painful sting. Normally, I am a live-and-let-live kind of person, but in this case, they gotta go.
Dummy load attached to plywood
This is at one of our AM client’s site. Somebody, quite some time ago it seems, made this test load for a 1 KW AM transmitter. It is very nice, with carbon ceramic resistors, 50 ohms, and surprisingly little reactance. Then they attached it to this piece of plywood. As one can surmise, the load gets quite hot under full power and full modulation conditions. We remounted this in a cage-type enclosure and bolted it to the cinder block wall.
Scala PR-950U cross-polarized
The client at this station is complaining of intermittent STL dropouts and low signal strength at the receiving end. Found this Scala PR-950U antenna mounted for vertical polarization, but the antenna element is horizontally mounted. We’ll call it “vorizontal.”
Ribbon cable from a Cummins 135 KW generator
This was discovered during routine maintenance and thankfully not during a power outage. Mice got into the control box of a newish Cummins 135 KW generator and chewed through what looked like a data buss cable. The generator would not run and the cable and control board needed to be replaced.
Bulging capacitors
There are more bulging capacitors removed from flat panel monitors.
Sometimes it is obvious and relatively easy, other times not so much. This summer we have had wave after wave of afternoon thunderstorms. It is almost like living in Florida; almost, but not quite. Anyway, with the storms occasionally comes some lightning damage. At most of the transmitter sites we service, every step has been taken to ensure good grounding and adequate surge suppression. This is especially true of sites that have been under our care for a few years. Even so, occasionally, something gets through. After all, those five-hundred-foot steel towers do attract lightning.
Broadcast Electronics AM5E output tuning section
This is the output section of the BE AM5E transmitter at WROW. The transmitter got pretty trashed; a bad PA module and power supply and this capacitor in the output section. This particular transmitter is 14 years old and this is the first major repair work we’ve had to do it.
The capacitor was fairly easy to change out. As a general precaution, both capacitors were changed. There was a spare PA module and power supply on the shelf, thus the transmitter was returned to full power relatively quickly.
Broadcast Electronics AM5E output forward and reflected power meters
The rest of the antenna system and phasor were inspected for damage, a set of common point impedance measurements taken, which showed that no other damage was sustained.
Next, the 30 year old Harris SX2.5 A transmitter at WSBS. This failure was slightly more exotic; the transmitter started randomly turning itself off. The culprit, in that case, was this:
Harris SX2.5 remote control interface bypass capacitor
Literally, a two cent part. The transmitter remote control uses optoisolators. The inputs to these opto-isolators are RF bypassed to ground on the back of the “customer interface board.” After determining that the remote control was not malfunctioning, it was down to either a bad opto-isolator or something really silly like a bypass capacitor. This capacitor was on the ground side of the remote off terminal. It shows short on the capacitance meter and 4.1 K on the ohm meter, just enough to randomly turn the opto-isolator on and shut down the transmitter. Being a Harris transmitter, removing and replacing the “customer interface board” was no easy matter. Overall, it took about three hours to find and repair this problem.
As promised in an earlier post, here is an update on the progress at the North Adams tower site for the restoration work on WUPE-FM and WNNI. For those unfamiliar, refer to this post: North Adams Tower Collapse.
A contractor installed a 70-foot wooden utility pole last week. We ordered new Shively Versa2une FM antennas as replacements for the antennas destroyed when the tower fell last March. These new antennas are field tunable, which is a nice feature. The idea is that this pole will be used until the replacement tower is constructed, which is many months away. After the new tower is up, I would like to keep the pole in place as a backup facility for both stations.
North Adams restoration work
The bucket truck arrived but the driver had a bit of bad news; there is room for only one person in the bucket. The boss pipes up and says “Oh, that’s okay, Paul can go up and run the bucket”
WAT!
Are you sure this is a good idea?
So anyway, it turns out running a bucket truck is not a huge deal; there is a joy stick of sorts that moves the booms around, up down, sideways, etc. Once you get the feel for it, it is pretty easy and three dimensional movement becomes second nature. That being said, at 70 feet in the air, everything gets a little wobbly, so it is best not to jerk the controls around.
The antennas were mounted on a 2 inch pipe which was attached to the pole with 1/2 inch threaded rod. We left a little bit of pipe sticking up above the top of the pole to get the FM antennas as high as possible.
Mounting pole to towerMounting pole to the towerSome dude in a hang glider checking out the work
Getting photobombed by some guy in a hang glider is a new experience. No day is exactly like another in this line of work.
WUPE-FM and WNNI temporary antennas
The antennas were tuned up once they were up on the pole. We did this with the network analyzer, which made the job very easy. WUPE-FM (top antenna) started using this antenna on Wednesday afternoon (5/7) with greatly increased power output. This gets the station almost the same coverage area as they had before the tower collapse. We tested WNNI (bottom antenna) and it all looked good. WNNI is still waiting for a temporary wireless internet feed for program delivery. Once that is established, we will have to do the intermod measurements one more time before they can go on the air.
Here are some pictures of the cleaned-up site:
North Adams, fallen tower removedNorth Adams, fallen tower removed
The temporary monopole being used by the cell providers:
North Adams temporary cell tower
Basically the pole is ballasted in place by those huge concrete blocks.
