After one of our clients had an FM station go off the air over the weekend, I investigated and found this:
Transformer meltdown
Looks like something one might find in the reactor room at Chernobyl or Fukushima.
Transformer melted down
This is at one of those sites with three phase open delta power. Needless to say, the transformer is toast, perhaps the entire transmitter too. This will be another fun transmitter-scrapping project. I was thinking about this; over the last five years, I have scrapped at least ten to fifteen old tube transmitters. The old tube types are going away fast, as are those that can still work on them.
This is a tower behind one of our FM transmitter sites. In the past, it has housed paging and two-way services. It has always been sort of a slum, in my opinion. Several times, malfunctioning or improperly installed 900 MHz paging radios from this site have caused interference with our 950 MHz STL receivers. In recent years, all those things have gone away, however, to be replaced by a Wireless Internet Service Provider (WISP). Even with this change, the site is mostly overgrown and uncared for.
Yesterday, I noticed the tower was not as tall as it used to be, so I walked down the hill and saw this:
Self-supporting tower after losing top section
It appears this happened a few weeks ago. View from the other side:
Self-supporting tower section resting on the roof of the building
Close-up of the tower section that failed:
Failure point
Looks like the bolts that held one of the flanges together failed, the tower was pushed over by a strong NE wind causing the other two legs to fail. Truth be told, the tower had been in rough shape since the mid-’90s. I am surprised that it stayed up this long.
Carnage
WISP sector antennas. I don’t know if they owned the tower or were tenants. Either way, this is going to cost a few rubles to repair.
More carnage
Looks like the shelter took a little bit of damage too. To be honest with you, I hope that this is it for this site. It would be nice if they take down the stump, scrap the lot of it and move it somewhere else.
It seems the power company has some work to do. The other leg measures 28 volts to ground, which to me means the Neutral has been lost somewhere. Fortunately, the transmitter was running on 240, which looks normal on the voltmeter. Everything in the rack; the remote control, exciter, STL, etc have been damaged or destroyed.
Then, of course, there is this:
Utility line
That is the power and phone line in those trees, as it leaves the road and travels approximately 1,700 feet through the woods. It is a private line and the utility will not do any work until the trees are cleared away. In all fairness to the current owners, who have owned the station for not quite a year, this situation has been like this for a long time.
It does not look like much, however, that is about $5,500.00 worth of damage. What you don’t see is the mashed oil cooler and radiator. This happened on my way from one place to another during the early morning hours. I was traveling at about 55 MPH when a deer bolted from the woods and entered the roadway from the right. I did not have time to a break.
In a ditch
A momentary lapse of attention causes a loss of $80.00. I think I was adjusting the defroster as I was driving down the road when suddenly, I felt the car tilt over to an alarming degree. You can see the tow truck getting ready to pull it out. Fortunately, there was no damage to the vehicle.
Troubles with the neighbor
This is on the access road to one of our transmitter sites. The station has a legal right of way through this property, however, the neighbor seems to object. I spoke with him and showed him a copy of our deed, he has since changed plans.
One side of a balanced audio connection disconnected
This is the downside of using category cable to make audio connections. The wires are not as rugged as say Belden 8451. This was causing problems because it is at an AM studio/transmitter site.
Burned 30 amp three-phase contactor
Three-phase, 30 amp, 240-volt contactor installed in a 480-volt system. Lasted a few years, anyway.
White face hornet’s nest
New tenants on one of our towers. This is a white-faced (or bald-faced) hornet’s nest. They are really paper wasps, but that difference aside, these beasts are nasty, aggressive, and have a painful sting. Normally, I am a live-and-let-live kind of person, but in this case, they gotta go.
Dummy load attached to plywood
This is at one of our AM client’s site. Somebody, quite some time ago it seems, made this test load for a 1 KW AM transmitter. It is very nice, with carbon ceramic resistors, 50 ohms, and surprisingly little reactance. Then they attached it to this piece of plywood. As one can surmise, the load gets quite hot under full power and full modulation conditions. We remounted this in a cage-type enclosure and bolted it to the cinder block wall.
Scala PR-950U cross-polarized
The client at this station is complaining of intermittent STL dropouts and low signal strength at the receiving end. Found this Scala PR-950U antenna mounted for vertical polarization, but the antenna element is horizontally mounted. We’ll call it “vorizontal.”
Ribbon cable from a Cummins 135 KW generator
This was discovered during routine maintenance and thankfully not during a power outage. Mice got into the control box of a newish Cummins 135 KW generator and chewed through what looked like a data buss cable. The generator would not run and the cable and control board needed to be replaced.
Bulging capacitors
There are more bulging capacitors removed from flat panel monitors.
