Tales of disaster – Page 14 – Engineering Radio

How stupid do you have to be?

I read through the news coverage of the vandalism at the KRKO transmitter site. Apparently, there is some group of idiots people running around insisting that radio towers are bad for the environment and people’s health. These are the same ones who have torched SUVs and burned high-end housing developments down. Naturally, no pollution is released into the environment during these acts, or else they would be hypocrites.

They make these claims with no merit or scientific basis, instead relying on base fears to make people go crazy, either temporarily or permanently like. It is actually a pretty good motivator as both political parties and all sorts of fringe truthier, birthier, and others have discovered. If enough people insist that it is true, then it must be so.

Unfortunately, there is always some idiot around who thinks it is his or her duty to take action, to protect the rest of us from some terrible fate.

In the meantime, some security cameras at the transmitter site might be a good investment. Chances are, these Earth Liberators that sneak around with bolt cutters and hack saws will likely think twice if there is any chance of themselves going to jail.

By the way, those KRKO towers looked like self-supporters which would have been very difficult to get down. Did they rent that excavator, or was some construction equipment left unattended?

When batteries explode

This is a picture of an exploded battery on a 45 KW backup generator:

850 CCA battery exploded during generator startup

This happened during a thunderstorm. The smoking crew was out on the back porch, during a thunderstorm (you have to have your priorities I suppose) and witnessed the entire incident. What was told to me was lightning stuck the generator. I find that improbable since there are many metal objects scattered around the area that are much taller. What likely happened was lightning stuck something close by, causing the power to drop out momentarily. This caused the generator to turn over. The battery was likely low in electrolyte, so there was an internal arc and the thing exploded in short order.

These events happened in rapid succession, giving the illusion that lightning struck the generator.

I removed the old battery and hosed the inside of the generator with copious amounts of water. There is nothing that can be done about the spilled electrolyte, since it was likely washed into the storm sewer during the storm. After the replacement of the battery, I tested the generator and all is well.

T-1 outage

One of our stations relies on a T-1 (DS-1) to relay audio from the studio to the transmitter site (STL). This station started as a piece of paper, with no format, no staff, no real estate, and no studio equipment. There was a transmitter and an antenna installed on a leased tower site.

That being said, corners were forcibly cut. Instead of installing a microwave STL system, a T-1 was ordered because we had a T-1 multiplexor. Fast forward several years… The station is now successful, making a decent amount of money and having a popular format.

The station has two T-1 circuits on different cables with an automatic switcher. Yesterday afternoon, the inevitable happened, both T-1s went out, along with most of the other TELCO circuits in the surrounding area. A construction crew cut two 3600-pair cables a mile down the road. The TELCO is racing to restore the service to all of the tenants on that tower by rigging a temporary aerial cable.

Now the mad scramble ensues with conflicting requirements from the wacky program director. Screw it, I grabbed one of the AudioVault express machines and took it to the transmitter site. They are back on the air with a radio station in a box playing music until the T-1 gets fixed.

This site has had numerous problems since we have owned it. In the 5 years since we launched the format, there have been six T-1 outages longer than 24 hours. For backup, we have tried an ISDN line, a 3G wireless card in a computer, and a second T-1 circuit. None of these have proved reliable as most circuit outages involved a cable cut, and multiple circuits were affected.

The real solution is a microwave STL, either a conventional 950 mHz system or a 2.4 or 5.8 gHz last mile system. Either would work better than what we have now. Station ownership, they don’t want to hear it.

Update: This took until Friday, September 4th to repair, for a total outage of 9 days, 2 hours, and 26 minutes. During that time, the station remained on the air with the AudioVault server at the transmitter site and the program director updating it twice per day with voice tracks and commercials.

Lightning strikes

For about 4 years, I lived in a house next to a four hundred-foot radio tower. Although I never actually saw lightning strike the tower, I heard it several times. Like everything else, after a while, you get used to it.

This is a video of lightning hitting the WSIX STL tower in Nashville, TN. The camera work is a little unsteady, the strike occurs around the 1:36 mark:

Yep, that is what it is like.