General – Page 19 – Engineering Radio

I wonder

Update: Apparently the pictures in this post have upset some people. Even though there is no identifying information; no call letters, no company name, and no location given certain folks have been putting a lot of pressure on the guy I work for. I do not want to make any problems for him, so I removed the pictures. After all, the last thing we would want to do is acknowledge there is a problem. The commentary stays.

Well, we have returned from our semi-vacation. Sumat to do with the other side of the family; a road trip to Canton, Oklahoma, a brief study on mineral rights, then a family reunion. On the return home, several side trips to interesting things like the Abraham Lincoln museum in Springfield, Illinois, and the Gateway Arch in Saint Louis. We also stopped in Springfield to see Santa Anna’s leg, which seems to be generating some controversy of late. I do not like to announce such things ahead of time because it seems like an invitation for a house break-in.

But, all good things come to an end, so back to work it is.

And then there is this:

A transmitter site for a group of stations not too far from here.

Class B FM station (50,000 watt equivalent) running 100 watts.

And filth, lots of filth.

As more full time broadcast engineers drop off line, we seem to be picking up more and more work. That is good for business, but some of these sites are downright depressing.

It is very sad to see such disrepair and makes me think that we are in the last days of terrestrial radio. Truth be told, the end may be many years off, but the decline gets steadily steeper every year. In the end; Television, Video, Satellite, the internet and took small bites of radio, but radio owners are the true culprits when it comes to who killed radio.

It is hard to make predictions; so many have failed in the past, but ten years maybe. Perhaps a few more. It will depend on whether or not business still find value in radio advertising. Right now that looks pretty far fetched, but who knows…

Happy Independence day, Extremist

Today is July 4th. We here in the United States like to remember this as the day when a bunch of upstart yokels from the colonies had the unmitigated gall to decide we wanted to rule ourselves. Terrible thing, that. It sets a bad precedent for the other subjects, some of whom may decide that they want self-rule as well. Allow that to happen and pretty soon, the whole empire will be in shambles.

So, there was a war.

It became pretty brutal in this area; loyalists and Indians banded together to pillage the countryside. Families massacred, women shot down, children scalped, old men hung from trees, etc. Part of the local history, although not really the stuff they teach in school these days. It happened, nonetheless.

Therefore, we celebrate our independence and revel in our freedoms that were so hard won. Freedoms to do things like speak our minds, own firearms, and enjoy limited government intrusion in our lives. As human beings, we have rights to legal safeguards that ensure the legal system will not be abused. We enjoy the freedom to travel within our own borders unmolested. We can worship or not worship in any way we choose.

We are free, for example, to exchange ideas and develop technology that benefits us and others. Free to learn about things like open source software and even help write the code. Imagine my surprise then, to find out by visiting a website called “Linux Journal,” I am now an extremist? I have frequented many such Linux websites, forums, subreddits, and so on over the years, all in an effort to better understand and apply the open-source operating system. I am now, apparently, on a watch list.

This is an article from ars Technica that outlines the NSA program: The NSA thinks Linux Journal is an Extremist Forum.

This is an article from the Linux Journal website: Are you an Extremist? WARNING: If you click that link, then clearly you are.

My only conclusion to this is open source software is bad because of TEH TERRORISM!!11!!! Well, that and appears to be eating into Microsoft’s and Apple’s market share.

So, put me on a watch list, and make sure you spell my name right. You can track everywhere I go. Hell, I’ll even make entertaining for you.

Happy Fourth of July, Extremist!

The efficacy of the computer generated voice

I was just listening to the latest broadcast of severe thunderstorm and tornado warnings rolling in across WXL-37 for upstate NY:

It looks a little bit hairy to the north. There is a lot of rumbling around to the west of us and we are prepared to head for the basement in event of a tornado in this area.

At some point in time, somebody decided that computer-generated voices were exactly right for emergency communications. Never mind some of the quirks that can be encountered. These are mostly pronunciation errors for places like Saugerties, normally spoken as Saw-ger-tees but the NOAA computer voice says S-ouw-jer-tees. That is understood well enough, but frankly, there are other place names that go by so fast that I cannot make sense of what the computer is saying.

Another good example of this is the Coast Guard’s computer voice confusion around the word “November.” In the military (NATO) phonetic alphabet, November is the word used to express the letter N. For some reason, the word itself seems to be a bit of a mystery to the computer, which sometimes renders the word November as “NOVEMBER OSCAR VICTOR ECHO MIKE BRAVO ECHO ROMEO.” For those of us who have been in the military, this makes perfect sense. Why just say “November” when you can say much more, waste time, and confuse the un-aware? This particular computer voice is nick-named “Iron Mike.”

Computer-generated voices can be hit or miss.

Then there is the computer voice from Shannon VOLMET:

Even on HF Single Side Band, that voice is clearly more understandable than the NOAA voices in use today. The issue is, many broadcast stations now use the NOAA computer voice to broadcast weather alerts to their listeners. If I were driving in my car with lots of background noise, I likely would not get most of the information being relayed by the broadcast station via EAS. I suppose gone are the days of a professional broadcaster’s voice clearly imparting information and comforting the listeners during times of calamity. Sigh.

WEBE pictures

WEBE is fairly unique in that its antenna is mounted on the side of a 500-foot smoke stack. I took a few pictures last winter:

This is a close-up of the Antenna:

WEBE main antenna, Shively 6 bay half wave spaced, ERP 50 KW

Here is an even closer view from a different angle:

From this angle, one can see the mounting brackets and the wire mesh reflector installed on the smoke stack. From the first picture, one can see that the 400 MW PSEG coal fired power plant puts out a lot of combustion products when on line. Combustion is an exothermic chemical reaction that looks like this:

Hydrocarbon Fuel + Oxidizer + Nitrogen → Heat + CO₂ + H₂O + NO_x

Included in this are any trace elements that are found naturally in the coal that is being burned. These include things like Mercury, Nickel, Uranium, et cetera. These trace elements can concentrate around the smoke stack because they fall out of the particulate quickly and these plants burn a lot of coal. The above picture was taken on a very cold day, most of what is coming out of the smoke stack is steam.

The issue for the radio station is when the particulate matter accumulates on the antenna, effectively shorting it out. The solution was to place the RADOMES around the elements and then constantly purge the RADOMES with nitrogen. Thus, this liquid N2 tank is vital for the operation of the radio station:

Each element of the antenna has a small hole in the feed line. N2 is fed continuously into the transmission line at a pressure of about 1.5 inches water column which then purges the RADOMES keeping any combustion products out of the RADOMES. The N2 tank needs to be changed out every 18-21 days and weights over 650 pounds when full.