[BC] Staffing levels

[RichardBJohnson at comcast.net]

Lack of maintenance is not new. Once, Paul Gregg sent me to Washington, D.C., actually across the river in Virginia, to turn on a new Cetec/Sparta Transmitter, which had just been installed. It had been connected through a transfer switch so that the original transmitter, a RCA could be used as a standby rig. Once the new transmitter was on the air, the engineer asked me to check his RCA and see if I could find out why it had not been able to make power for the past year or so. I looked in the PA box and saw something that looked like a black pineapple. It was the PA tube with all its fins burned off because it had been running without a blower for several years! The engineer told me that it was very quiet and he did not know it was supposed to have a blower.

--
Cheers,
Richard B. Johnson
Read about my book
http://www.LymanSchool.org


 -------------- Original message ----------------------
From: "Dana  Puopolo" <dpuopolo at usa.net>
> Yeah, and cars are that way too many believe-until the engine blows at 50 K
> miles because the oil was never changed.
> Look at that picture of the burned up SX-5 at WLIS in Old Saybrook, CT. That
> TX should/would have never burned up had it been cleaned once in a while and
> been kept cool. What's sick is that the insurance likely replaced it-when it
> was extreme negligence that caused this! I saw the same thing with a 50 kW rig
> years back. It was so dirty that you couldn't see the tubes-but after it
> burned, insurance bought them a brand new DX50! I once worked at a daytimer
> where the owner was so cheap that he got rid of me because he found a high
> school FM 'engineer' that worked for five dollars an hour less then me.
> BUT...when it came to maintaining his candy apple red Caddy, he thought
> nothing about dropping a grand twice a year on routine maintanance. He spent
> more on that Caddy then on his radio station.
>