[BC] Wind and STL Mutes

[Mark Croom]

I'm sure we will have a bunch more of these, but here's mine--

One-watt factory Starlink, 27 mile path, clear FZ, 6' Mark dishes at both
ends. No bandpass filter on this one yet. This is an ICR bringing one of our
O&O stations' programming back to HQ. We relay the mid-morning guy to all
our O&O stations, so it's only in use a couple hours a day, but
unfortunately the BER/mute problem is no respecter of time that way.

First time we had this problem, during very strong east winds, like 30+ mph
gusts (no matter the accompanying weather), we'd have some breakup in the
audio. After a while of this I sent my tower guy up and he looked at
everything that might be loose on the tower. He tightened a few loose items
and re-strapped some SO cords running to a neon sign on the tower, and we
didn't have any more problems for about two years.

Suddenly in the last two to three weeks it's back, only this time it's SOUTH
winds, and not nearly as strong before it starts to break up. I tried just
killing power to the sign, but that didn't make any difference. Binocular
inspection doesn't show anything flapping in the breeze up there, but I will
have to send my climber back up when we get some better weather.

Here's a question for you guys that have more than one of these: I'm about
to put another Starlink on this tower, a transmit end this time rather than
receive, and the antennas will be a good 150' apart, facing about 150
degrees from each other. Should I expect the receive link to keep running
without filtering, or should I be budgeting for a bandpass filter?

Thanks for any insight. Meanwhile, I'll be watching this thread with great
interest.

Mark
MN

On Wed, Feb 4, 2009 at 6:22 PM, gary <garyz347 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Carl:
>
> I have had the same issue with a Starlink and a Harris CD Link. Mine were
> factory one watt units. In both instances the receivers had the a bandpass
> brick inline. My experience with these dropouts spans a couple years and a
> couple of installations far removed from one another. One happened in
> Nashville, the other is happening here in Cleveland. Other people in my
> company have complained about the same problem. None of us has solved it
> yet. It always happens during higher than normal winds, but not necessarily
> winds in a damaging class, so you would think that points to a physical
> problem. In Nashville I had a tower guy climb, inspect, tighten, align, and
> even fabricate a brace for the 6' Mark grid dish. None of it helped and the
> dropouts persisted. Here in Cleveland it also happens during stronger than
> normal winds....but not always. It is infrequent and unpredictable,
> nevertheless it is annoying and problematic. Error counts happen even under
> no dropouts, so that avenue does not point to any particular alignment of
> the planets.
>