General – Page 46 – Engineering Radio

Things that make you go hmmm, part III

Continuing the series, this is a picture of an ice bridge installation I recently saw:

On an otherwise neat installation, it appears there is something wrong with the way these ground wires are connected to the support poles of an ice bridge. I am not sure how effective that connection will be if lightning hits anything nearby. Generally speaking, those wires are CAD welded (exothermic welding) to the support poles or whatever else is supposed to be grounded. I’d bet that whoever packed the truck for the job simply forgot to throw the CAD weld shots on the truck.

Now they have to come back.

It will be interesting to see how long it takes whatever tower company to return to the site and finish the job.

So, you call this work?

A trip to the WSPK transmitter site on a pleasant day, or, one could say, another day at the “office.” Tower painting season is here, I’ll post some more about that later. This is a nice set of pictures from the top of Mt. Beacon, in Beacon, NY.

Hudson Valley looking north from Mt. Beacon

South Mount Beacon with the old fire tower:

Mount Beacon looking south at the old fire tower

Tower farm; two TV stations, Media Flow, one radio station, three translators, several cell carriers, one paging company, some government two-way gear, and a few microwave relays. The 320-foot guyed tower in the center holds the main (top) and backup (bottom) antennas for WSPK:

Tower climbers ascending a 320-foot tower. This picture (and all the others as well) was taken with my HTC smartphone camera, proving the old adage, sometimes it is better to be lucky than good:

View from the ATC site at the very top of North Mount Beacon of the tower workers painting the top of the tower:

Tower workers painting torque arms on 320 foot guyed tower

Another view from the ground:

All in all, not a bad day.

Engineering Radio is Two Years Old

Happy birthday to us! I was looking through the past posts of this blog and found much of it still relevant today. There were some older video posts where the videos are no longer available on youtube, those were deleted.

I continue to look for subjects to blog about while keeping the subject matter pertinent to broadcast engineering or some aspect of radio in general. With so many things going on, this can be hard to do.

Here are a few stats:

Average daily page views: 400
Average unique visitors, daily: 240
Average returning visitors, daily: 37
RSS subscribers: 73
Total posts: 323
Total comments: 911
Total $pam comments: 52,403
The average number of comments per post: 2.8
The average number of $pam comments per post: 162

This brings me to this; I use an aggressive $pam filter. There is no way that I would be able to keep up with the number of junk comments received otherwise. If you have posted a legitimate comment and it doesn’t show up after a period of time, e-mail me and I’ll look into it. Chances are very good that some legitimate comments have been deleted by the $pam filter, for which I apologize.

Many of my unique visitors come from Google searches which is strange considering its page rank is 0/10.

I continue to enjoy blogging about the everyday life of a broadcast engineer and thank all of my readers and subscribers for their interest. It is entertaining and enlightening to read all of your comments and e-mails. For as long as there is interest, the writing project will proceed.

Longwave Radio, Atlantic 252, Ireland

We don’t have any long-wave stations in this country, other than the government’s failed attempt at using long-wave (WGU-20) for emergency communications in the 1970s and 80s. In Europe, Longwave continues to be used, mainly because of its excellent ground wave propagation can cover large distances without fading or interference. Several have closed in recent years due to the expense of maintaining tall radio towers and higher-quality programming sources.

This is a video of the transmitter site for Atlantic 252 in Ireland. Atlantic 252 went defunct in 2001, however, the frequency is still in use by RTE radio 1.

500KW is quite a bit of power. The antenna mast is 248 meters, or 813 feet tall. Interestingly, RTE discontinued service on MW (AKA AM broadcast or standard broadcast) but left this signal on the air. Reportedly, this station has less power but better coverage.