Tales of disaster – Page 10 – Engineering Radio

Creek floods AM tower array

We have received somewhere between 5-6 inches of rain in the last four days. That, coupled with the deep snowpack and the still-frozen ground has led to some flooding. The WLNA antenna array is located along the Peekskill Hollow Creek in northern Westchester County, NY. Back in 1980, it might have seemed like a good idea to locate an AM station in a tidal swamp along the Hudson River. I am sure the land was not that expensive and from an engineering standpoint, having a continually wet, partially brackish ground system may have seemed like a slam dunk.

Unfortunately, the idea never really panned out in the application. First of all, the neighbors had other ideas, fighting the radio station owners all the way to the NY State Supreme Court. Secondly, technically, it never lived up to expectations. The original non-directional antenna on 1430 was a 1/2 wave tower which by all accounts, worked very well. It did not, however, allow for nighttime service, which is why the new sight and array were sought. By the time the system was built, AM was already in steep decline and I doubt the owners ever recouped their investment.

Fast forward to today. All five base insulators are under water and the transmitter is off the air. These are pictures from last Wednesday after the first flood waters receded from the Monday/Tuesday storm. I imagine it looks worse this morning, although I don’t own a boat and won’t be wading out there to look.

Base insulator, tower 2 WLNA array, Peekskill, NY

This is tower two of the daytime antenna array. Clearly, it spent some time underwater. We cleaned off all the debris from all the tower bases. A far worse prospect is the ATU’s:

This is the Antenna Tuning Unit for tower 1, which is the reference tower for both the day and night arrays. The E.F. Johnson contactor in the bottom of the cabinet was fully submerged for an undetermined amount of time. The bottom of the unit is covered in fine silt. The high water mark is visible on the right side of the aluminum cabinet.

The contactor is going to need to be replaced, or at least rebuilt. The ATU cabinet will need to be washed out. There are two other ATUs that suffered the same fate.

WLNA antenna array, towers 4 and 5 — WLNA antenna array, towers 3 and 5

This is the end of the catwalk next to the Peekskill Hollow Creek looking west towards the Hudson River. The water level reached the bottom of the catwalks and had receded about 4 feet when this picture was taken.

WLNA antenna array, tower 5, peekskill, ny — WLNA antenna array, tower 5, Peekskill, NY

Lookup east, upstream at tower 5.

WLNA antenna array looking north, Peekskill, NY

This is the antenna array looking north, with my back facing the creek. Tower one is the center tower, tower two is on the right and tower four is on the left. The daytime array consists of towers 1, 2, and 3 bearing 300 degrees. The night time array consists of towers 1, 4, and 5 bearing 335 degrees, so the array makes a big X in the swamp. More from the FCC database.

It is going to take a lot of work to clean out all these ATUs and repair the damage. Clean water is at least 1000 feet away. My question is; why bother? Once upon a time, this station was viable, well thought of in the community, etc. Now, I doubt anyone knows it is off the air. The current ownership over the last thirteen years did, what I’d like to call, a controlled flight into the ground. Axing staff, cutting maintenance, and generally neglecting the station. Why not take it dark for a while and figure out what to do with it? Likely somebody would buy it, even if for the land it sits on. Anyway, the grind continues…

When things go wrong

Not necessarily applicable to radio, but a good collection of videos

Other than that, we are watching another 12 inches of snow accumulate.

This is what you’ll get…

Back many, many years ago, in a city far away, I was driving down the road and I flipped one of “my” stations on the air. The end of this song was playing:

The ending sounds an awful lot like a Moseley MRC-16 transmitter remote control’s return telemetry. When I heard that on the air, my first response was “HOLY SH*T! The telemetry is on the main channel!” A little voice in the back of my head said “That is not possible. How is that possible?” I grabbed the gigantic, then state-of-the-art Motorola bag phone and dialed the studio hotline, just before I hit the “send” button, the song faded out and the announcer came on back selling “Karma Police by Radiohead“

Wow. Radiohead? Karma Police? WTF?

I almost had a coronary. When I got home, I tried explaining this all to my then-girlfriend, who didn’t get it. Few do. At the time, making such an error would be very bad form indeed and likely open the unfortunate party to all sorts of snickering and finger-pointing at the next SBE meeting.

Better Times at WICC transmitter site

The WICC transmitter site, Pleasure Beach in Bridgeport, has been cut off from normal access since the bridge to the island burned in 1996. Since that time, access has been by boat with a 0.93-mile walk from the dock to the transmitter building.

Last summer, LVI Construction, under contract from the Town of Stratford, put in a temporary road and began removing the burned out cottages. While that road is in place, the radio station has been able to access the site and get many important things accomplished. These include:

Replacing the vandal damaged top beacon on the South tower
Removing several decades worth of stored crap, garbage, obsolete and unused equipment
Repair the electrical service to the building
Replace the generator transfer switch
Repair the Sonitrol building alarm
Replace the old Onan Generator
Have the power company replace the 3-phase circuit from the point where the underwater cables come ashore to the transmitter building.

All of these projects should greatly improve the reliability of the station. This should make Bill, happy, who appears to have a WICC chip implanted in his brain because every time the carrier is interrupted he posts about it on the radio-info.com website.

The biggest issue with the site was the utility feed from the shore to the transmitter building. The original circuit was installed in 1936 when the station moved to the island. It was old and the poles were all rotting and had horizontal cross arms. Ospreys especially liked the horizontal cross arms as they made good nesting spots. That is, until the nest shorts out one of the phases catches on fire and burns the top of the pole off. This has happened several times over the years causing many hours of off-air time.

United Illuminating, the local utility company, was very cooperative and installed new utility poles, wires, breakers, and transformers, this time with a vertical phase arrangement, which should keep the Ospreys off of them. Additionally, the cottage removal project included installing Osprey nesting poles.

With almost all of the cottages now removed, the area looks much better than before. Actually, it should be a nice nature preserve, and hopefully, the absence of the buildings might reduce the number of vandals in the area. The work is almost done, so the road is about to be taken up. This means we need to wrap up the work out there, so the final push is on.

In the last three weeks, 10 truckloads of junk have been hauled out of the transmitter building and generator shack. Over 1,500 pounds of scrap steel, 640 pounds of insulated wire, 2,000 pounds of particle board furniture, old t-shirts, and hats (something called “Taste of Bridgeport” which, if anyone knows what that was let me know), old propane tanks, batteries, etc. We also managed to fix the fence and gate in front of the building and cut down the overgrown yew bushes and bittersweet vines.

The old Kolher transfer switch was also an issue. There was no place to mount a new switch inside and mounting one outside is out of the question, so the guts from the Kohler switch were removed and replaced with an ASCO unit. This was done in the summer of 2009. The breaker on the right side is the main service disconnect for the building, which was installed in September.

Onan 12JC 4R air cooled generator — Onan 12 KW 12JC 4R air cooled generator, removed from service

Today, it was time to replace the Onan propane generator. The old generator is an Onan 12JC-4R air-cooled propane unit which was installed on April 4, 1969, at a cost of $1,545.00. For many years, this unit gave reliable service, but it has many, many hours on it and it lacks the fault/self-control circuits needed for remote (read desolate) operation. Several times over the last few years, the generator would run out of gas or the propane tank would freeze up and the starter would crank until it burned out.

It was cold out on the island, with temperatures in the twenties and a bitter west wind blowing right into the generator shack. All of this conspired to make working conditions difficult. Wind chill readings were in the single digits all day long, and in spite of long johns and extra layers, by 3 pm I was shivering and even several hours after coming inside, I still felt cold.

The new generator is a Cummins/Onan 20GGMA which is rated for 20 KW. We used a John Deere bucket tractor to move the generator from the flatbed truck to the generator building, and then push it inside. The old generator wiring to the transfer switch was reused, but a piece of flex was used to connect to the generator instead of the solid conduit. The building fan was also wired up so that it would run whenever the generator was running.

The generator load with all possible things switched on and the transmitter running at full power is about 12,000 watts, but this would mean the air conditioner and tower lights were on during the daytime. More likely, the transmitter will be at low power when the tower lights are on and the AC will be intermittent on/off at night. At full load, this generator uses slightly less than 2 gallons of propane per hour. At half load, I’d estimate that to be 1.4 or so gallons.

HOCON gas came out and connected six 100-pound propane tanks in series, which should prevent tank icing. Propane weighs about 4.11 pounds per gallon, therefore the fuel supply should last about 100 hours, or 4.5 days, give or take. Why 100-pound tanks? Because we will have to shuffle them back and forth between the dock and the generator shed, a journey of about one mile, in a cart. Anything larger would be impossible to deal with. Even so, refilling the propane will be a 2 person job and will likely take all day.