Tales of disaster – Page 5 – Engineering Radio

Man electrocuted putting up a pirate radio antenna

A south Florida man was electrocuted when the antenna he was putting up struck a power line. Police say 42-year-old Jean Adelphonse was working in the dark Monday night when part of an antenna to be used for an unlicensed radio station collapsed and struck a power line. The Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel reported that he was working on the roof of an office building where his other businesses were located.

That is rather unfortunate and completely preventable. The first red flag here is working in the dark. The second would be working alone. Safety is always paramount; whether it is working on a transmitter, putting up an antenna, working on a ladder, or environmental conditions such as heat, weather, etc. In my younger days, I had gotten away with a few careless moments mainly due to blind luck. I cringe thinking about it today. Nothing on the radio is worth killing yourself or anyone else over.

This type of thing used to happen more often when almost every house had an outside TV antenna.

Let’s be careful out there.

It lives! The PRE BMX III

I have just finished putting back together this PRE BMX III console.

PRE BMXIII analog audio console, reassembled — PRE BMXIII analog audio console reassembled

We basically ripped the guts out of this unit and in doing so, I was reminded of how well these things are built. The PRE BMX series consoles were truly wonders of audio engineering. It is a testament to their ruggedness and serviceability that so many of these units are still in use twenty to thirty years after they were manufactured.

This console suffered some pretty bad water damage to the backplane:

Which was replace, along with many switches and buttons. The Mic2, Mic3 and CD1 modules seemed to have taken most of the damage, there were several logic ICs and IC sockets that needed to be replaced on those modules. Of course, this was not inexpensive; the parts were somewhere north of $3K plus about 40 man hours of labor… that adds up fast.

The good news, I think that the studio was back in service last night.

Message from the General Manager

Or whatever those guys are called these days:

Especially when that sink is located on the second floor, above the studio on the first floor. ‘Tis but a small thing really, one of those little details, but in light of the sink also being clogged, it becomes very significant. That, coupled with the fact that the building is uninhabited at night and disaster is afoot.

The water was running slowly all night…

It filled up the sink. It ran across the floor. It soaked the carpet. It seeped into the sub floor and out of the ceiling on the first floor and then into this nice Pacific Recorders BMX III console.

Pacific Recorders BMX III console, draining

Pacific Recorders BMX III console, draining/drying

Do you know that burning electronic/plastic smell? Yeah, that’s it, mixed with stale funky water, wet wood and a nondescript mildewy odor; that is what the room smells like. Very pleasing. The furniture below the console was soaked too:

Some of the input module edge connectors; didn’t fair so well:

The backplane for the power supply buss has to be replaced and these switches with the water bubbles in them, have to go too:

Pacific Recorders BMXIII buss select switch full of water

We dried out the furniture with an industrial strength hair dryer. By three PM we had unsoldered all of the bad parts and cleaned off the modules and the console back plane.

Parts for repairs are on order from Mooretronix. I doubt this will be repaired before next Tuesday.

Somebody came in and was all “awww, this sucks bla bla bla.” Well, maybe, but I get paid by the hour and frankly, there are much worse things that I could be doing…

Blown up surge suppressor module

This is a picture of a surge module taken from an LEA series type surge suppressor:

LEA MOV module destruction — LEA 600 volt MOV module

Looks like it took a pretty significant power hit, enough to explode several MOVs. This site is at the end of a long transmission line that stretches across an entire county. Over the years, the station has made many complaints to the utility company about the quality of their power and the frequency of interruptions encountered at this transmitter site. Occasionally, something will happen. Often times it is the figurative shoulder shrug.

That is why we installed the surge suppressor.