Paul Thurst – Page 69 – Engineering Radio

Exploding Parts

We or rather, I have been working on installing this CCA transmitter as a backup unit at one of our sites. It was installed as a backup at another site but was mothballed about ten years ago. Now, we need to get it running again and re-tune it. Seems like a fairly uncomplicated job.

Except, every time I start it, another one of these 1000 pf bypass/feed-through capacitors fails. They are located at various points around the PA enclosure and route AC voltages into and out of that enclosure. The bypass function is needed to keep stray RF off of the control circuits. Normally, they have been failing with a medium resistance fault (40-70 ohms) to the case. That causes the control circuit breaker to trip.

This time, however, it was on the primary for the filament transformer on the IPA tube. Just a wee little pop, followed by some ozone smell and sans power output. I have, thus far replaced four of these and there are seven originals still in the transmitter.

It is time to replace them all, otherwise, this rig will fail when we need it the most. The replacement part is a Mouser 800-24437X5S0102MLF, 1000 pf 500 v made by Tusonix Electronics.

Horby and Solvesborgs transmitter site

This is a video of Radio Sweden’s shortwave and medium-wave transmitter sites:

Håkan Widenstedt at Hörby and Sölvesborgs Transmitter sites from HamSphere on Vimeo.

This was filmed in 2006. In 2010, Radio Sweden ceased broadcasting on medium and shortwave, thus I believe ~~these sites have~~ Horby (HF) have been dismantled. Medium wave installation Solvesborg is visible starting at 15:30. Two tower directional array 180-degree towers with 600 KW carrier power. Quite impressive.

There is an effort to at save the Solvesborg site, perhaps as a museum.

Transmitters were in Skane, Sweden:

View Larger Map

h/t Shortwave Central

Bucket Trucks and Landing Craft

Hopefully, that title is descriptive enough:

ATT bucket trucks, , mobilized via landing craft to Pleasure Beach

We loaded a couple of ATT bucket trucks on a landing craft and waged an assault on Pleasure Beach. This is to finalize the repair work from Hurricane Sandy last year. The other factor is the construction taking place on the Island. The City of Bridgeport is constructing a park, which involves extensive repairs and renovations to the buildings. Construction vehicles driving under the old lines have ripped them down several times, thus repairing the lines on the new utility poles was necessary.

ATT is the LEC for the Bridgeport area, something they don’t do in most other parts of the country, from what I am told.

It took approximately four hours to complete this work and reload the trucks back on the landing craft. The boat itself looks like a slightly modified LCM (Landing Craft, Mechanized), which was produced from 1943 onward. This is an LCM-8.

WICC towers almost in line, I was about one second too late with this shot. This would be “down the bore” of the daytime pattern into downtown Bridgeport.

Another shot of the WICC towers. These were designed to hold up a horizontal T top wire antenna strung between the two of them. At some point in the early thirties, somebody realized that the tower itself could be excited as a vertical radiator and the antenna configuration was changed. Up until the mid-1970s there was a horizontal wire which supported a third wire element hanging between the two towers, making it a three-tower directional array. This was removed and it was then that the current phasor and two-tower DA-2 system was installed.

All in a day’s work.

Wikipedia Articles

Type the call letters for almost any radio or television station in the country into a search engine, and the second or third result will be a Wikipedia article.

Try it.

This is both an opportunity and a burden. Since Wikipedia articles place so well in most search engine results, it would be a benefit to radio stations to keep an eye on them; keep them up to date, make sure that no one vandalizes them, and fix them when they do. Most importantly, keep the station website link and streaming link information up to date. That is the burden but it is relatively small.

The opportunity comes from the ability to document the history of individual radio stations. On the grand scale, the history of any individual radio station is like a grain of sand on the beach. It is only pertinent to those who care. But then there are those who do care and for some of us, reading a well-written, well-sourced article about some station we are familiar with is interesting. To be sure, there are many crappy radio station articles on Wikipedia. Some of them read like advertisements, clearly written by non-neutral party. Others do not have sections, have poor grammar, improper or no source citations, etc. Those poor articles should be fixed.

In my time as a broadcast engineer, I have found radio stations to be like ships; they all have a certain personality. It is difficult to explain how an inanimate collection of equipment and buildings can have personality, but they do. Of course, with time, format, and ownership changes those personalities change. Documenting operating histories, formats, unique occurrences, famous past personalities, incidents, accidents, and technical discoveries in one place takes a little bit of time. Having that information available for fellow radio people to read about is a valuable service. The one thing that I notice about most radio station Wikipedia articles; there are no pictures. There should be more pictures.