[BC] Transmitter (lack of) maintenance...

[Burt I. Weiner]

About 5 years ago I got a call from an ex-client.  Their LMA client 
was complaining that the station was going off and on at a rate of 
about two minutes on and 5 minutes off.  It turned out the station's 
CE lived and worked in New York.  By the way, did I mention this was 
a Los Angeles station?  I went to the transmitter and found that all 
of the fans in the back of the station's Omni-1000 had died, which 
explained the funny cycling of the transmitter.  A quick trip to a 
very local W.W. Grainger to get replacement fans and about another 15 
minutes to install them and the station was back on the air.  I 
really wanted to put the transmitter in the back of a truck, remove 
all of the covers and drive it through a car wash.

Burt

At 03:01 AM 1/26/2008, broadcast-request at radiolists.net wrote
>From: Chuck Lakaytis <chuck at akpb.org>
>Subject: Re: [BC] Staffing levels
>To: "Broadcasters' Mailing List" <broadcast at radiolists.net>
>Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20080125205359.03fd3a40 at oldradio.com>
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed
>
>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.

Burt I. Weiner Associates
Broadcast Technical Services
Glendale, California  U.S.A.
biwa at earthlink.net
K6OQK