[BC] Staffing levels

[Chuck Lakaytis]

Several years ago, I was called to a 5 KW FM station.  "No power" was 
the complaint. When I went into the transmitter room I was heat by a 
blast of  hot air.  The buildings did have ventilation fans and 
filters.  The fans were running, but the filters must have had two 
inches of dirt covering them!

The exciter was pulled out of the rails from the BE transmitter, the 
top cover removed, and a small household fan duct taped over the top 
of it on its side.  The transmiitter blower squirrel cage was so 
filthy and the filters clogged so much that the air was barely 
moving.  (The air pressure switch was held in the on position with 
some tape)  Naturally the PA tube was black.

Some of the people on this list fondly remember the days of radio "as 
it used to be".

The fact of the matter was that there were hundreds if not thousands 
of very marginal operators.  I do not miss those days a bit!  Nor do 
I miss their bounced checks, etc!

RichardBJohnson at comcast.net wrote:
>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.