TWiRT 10 - War Stories

Kirk Harnack - Executive Director, Int'l Business Development, Telos-Omnia-Axia
Tom Ray - VP, Engineering, Buckley Broadcasting, WOR, New York
Chris Tobin - CBS Radio, New York
Chris Tarr - Entercom, Milwaukee, GeekJedi, and Broadcast Engineering Info

Stories.  Horror stories.  Teachable moments.   I'll never to that again.  And some humorous stories, too.

This is one fun episode!

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TWiRT 10 - War Stories

Comments

[Peter Smerdon]

Ah war stories...
I have my own shorted-to-deck transformer story.
I was a young buck on my first CE gig back in the seventies.
We were moving tx sites and frequencies. The old site was simulcasting on the old frequency using the 30+ year old standby (the main had been re-rocked and moved to the new site as its standby).
The site had no remote control (that had moved too).
We had just endured a major cyclone (hurricane in your terms) and the tx site was flooded.
The day after the storm the tx went down - so I waded thru about half a mile of waist-high water to get to the site.
I was a little nervous working on the tx dripping wet, but found (from memory) a filament transformer shorted to deck. It was for one or two of the eight (!) 833As that formed the power stages of this old 2 kilowatter. Unfortunately it was side mounted on a cabinet wall. So I hung it in mid-air in the middle of the cabinet with hookup wire... and all was sweet.
The transmitter would be scrap within a fortnight, and I'd be the only person to see it so I figured "fair enough".
I never saw that transmitter again. A thunderstorm knocked it off the air on the day before it was due to go silent but I thought - close enough - and left it dark.
The site was resumed for the new Brisbane (Australia) airport, and their teams moved in and demolished the site the day after.
That site is now in the middle of the main runway of the Brisbane International Airport.

Listening to your shorted transformer/choke stories brought a vivid flashback of that transformer hanging in the middle of the cabinet. Hadn't thought of it for years.

Cheers,
Peter S.