Tales of disaster – Page 4 – Engineering Radio

North Adams Tower Collapse

High winds seem to be the culprit in the collapse of two towers in North Adams. According to the Motorola system technicians, it happened at about 12:30 am Sunday morning, which is when all their link loss alarms started going off. The larger, self-supporting tower broke from its mounting plate and tipped over into the smaller guyed tower next to it. Effected are WUPE-FM and W226AW (WFCR New England Public Radio) as well as NEPR’s new station WNNI which has not officially signed on.

Cellular service for ATT, Verizon, and Sprint/NEXTEL were all knocked offline as well as internet services and E911 dispatch. Those services are coming back online, with temporary modular cell units en route. N

Here are some pictures:

WUPE-FM WNNI and W266AW transmitter building — WUPE-FM, WNNI, and W266AW transmitter building

Tower base mounting plate, apparent failure point

For pictures of the towers during happier times, refer to this post: Filtering for co-located FM transmitters.

Restoration work is underway with WUPE-FM expected to return to the air at low power by Monday afternoon.

Update:

WUPE-FM was returned to air at low power by about 1pm on Monday 3/31. We took an unused Shively 6812 antenna that was tuned to 94.1 MHz and retuned it to 100.1 by cutting 1/4 inch pieces from the end of the elements until it was on frequency. It took a bit of doing, but with a network analyzer, we were able to get it to 1.2:1 SWR with symmetrical sidebands. Running 600 watts, it covers the city of license and then some.

The STL antenna is a survey antenna mounted on the side of the building. In this configuration, with the leaves off of the trees, we are getting about 250 uV signal, which is pretty good.

The site is now crawling with insurance investigators, cell site technicians, North Adams fire department, Berkshire County Sheriff’s officers, tower workers, etc. After we finished this work, we cleared out to make more room for everybody else. Estimated restore time for W266AW is Wednesday 4/2.

Planning for the replacement tower is already in progress, I’d expect it to happen fairly quickly. The next step for the broadcasters is to put up a 70-foot utility pole and get a full-powered antenna for WUPE. This should happen in the next two weeks or so. That will serve as the temporary facility until the new tower is constructed.

The roof is on FIRE!

We don’t need no water, let the… oh, wait… The actual roof is actually on fire you say?

YES: Ahh! Time to run around like crazy people!

This happened over the weekend at one of our clients in NY. The back story is this; over the last two weeks, the area has received almost three feet of snow. This roof is pitched slightly toward the back of the building. The roofing material is some type of PVC, which is very slippery when wet. Thus, at some point the snow/ice pack shifted towards the back of the building, and it broke the natural gas pipe off where it entered the unit:

The next time the HVAC unit cycled on, there was a giant torch on the roof with flames reportedly eight feet high. A local firefighter just happened to be driving down the road and spotted the fire, thus likely saving the building from major damage. The fire department came and cut off the gas and electricity. The building was evacuated for about 20 minutes while they overhauled and checked for internal fires.

A second unit suffered the same fate, only with less damage:

The fire in this unit was contained in the controller area. Same situation with the gas pipe, only it looks like the pipe was not broken all the way off:

The other two units are shut off while the gas pipes are dug out of the snowpack and checked for damage. At some point, they will be turned back on so that the heat can be restored to the second-floor sales bullpen. Meanwhile, the salespeople; are complaining.

We threw a tarp over the unit with the cover ripped off because more snow is on the way:

Man electrocuted putting up a pirate radio antenna

A south Florida man was electrocuted when the antenna he was putting up struck a power line. Police say 42-year-old Jean Adelphonse was working in the dark Monday night when part of an antenna to be used for an unlicensed radio station collapsed and struck a power line. The Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel reported that he was working on the roof of an office building where his other businesses were located.

That is rather unfortunate and completely preventable. The first red flag here is working in the dark. The second would be working alone. Safety is always paramount; whether it is working on a transmitter, putting up an antenna, working on a ladder, or environmental conditions such as heat, weather, etc. In my younger days, I had gotten away with a few careless moments mainly due to blind luck. I cringe thinking about it today. Nothing on the radio is worth killing yourself or anyone else over.

This type of thing used to happen more often when almost every house had an outside TV antenna.

Let’s be careful out there.

It lives! The PRE BMX III

I have just finished putting back together this PRE BMX III console.

PRE BMXIII analog audio console, reassembled — PRE BMXIII analog audio console reassembled

We basically ripped the guts out of this unit and in doing so, I was reminded of how well these things are built. The PRE BMX series consoles were truly wonders of audio engineering. It is a testament to their ruggedness and serviceability that so many of these units are still in use twenty to thirty years after they were manufactured.

This console suffered some pretty bad water damage to the backplane:

Which was replace, along with many switches and buttons. The Mic2, Mic3 and CD1 modules seemed to have taken most of the damage, there were several logic ICs and IC sockets that needed to be replaced on those modules. Of course, this was not inexpensive; the parts were somewhere north of $3K plus about 40 man hours of labor… that adds up fast.

The good news, I think that the studio was back in service last night.