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necturusThis was a tiring week, with too much driving around. WTSN in Dover, NH is an AM radio station -- not one of ours -- with four towers that together make the signal stronger in some directions than in others in order to protect the signals of more distant stations on the same channel. The pattern is different at night than in the daytime, and the switch is made by firing seven relays: one at the base of each tower, plus three more in a box called a "phasor" in the transmitter building.
This station was built in 1957, and some of these relays are decades old. One of them refused to switch at dusk on Tuesday, and the station went off the air. So, I jumped in my car and drove an hour and a half to get there, and spent the next few hours groping around in the dark to identify the one that wasn't firing. It turned out to be at the tower farthest from the building, across a small creek I had to wade through. I had to make several trips back and forth for various tools and a ladder before I got it fixed. At one point coyotes started howling. Then when I got the thing back on the air, the transmitter wasn't putting out full power, so I spent the better part of another hour looking for what turned out to be a blown fuse. I got out of there well after midnight, getting home at 2 AM, at which point I decided to record the WSCS and WSRO morning news and WSRO weather before going to bed rather than wake up at the usual 5 AM to record them.
Then on Thursday I had to drive to Newport, NH, where another station was off the air. My brother had it back on at a measly 35 watts by the time I got there, but this problem couldn't easily be solved; this transmitter has seen better days and as soon as we fix one part, another part dies. The cell phone companies on the tower keep changing the load impedance, which doesn't help. We need to buy a new transmitter.
Yesterday WZBC at Boston College went off the air, so I went over there and waited for their faculty adviser to let me in to the transmitter room, which is on the second floor of a women's dorm. That problem turned out to be a battery backup that had died, so I bypassed it with an extension cord until we can install a new battery backup.
I spent most of today doing paperwork for our New Hampshire stations: political ad disclosures, which have to be posted to the FCC's Web site; orders for ads; and entering a large bank deposit into our database so our sales people will get paid next week. That bank deposit consisted of dozens of checks, most of them for $99 or some such, and a lot of them were pre-pays, which means I had to guess which stations they were for. The bank balance looks good right now, but it will drop dramatically next week when I have to pay rent on a bunch of sites on top of two big insurance bills and payroll.
The coyotes were probably the high point of the week.
This station was built in 1957, and some of these relays are decades old. One of them refused to switch at dusk on Tuesday, and the station went off the air. So, I jumped in my car and drove an hour and a half to get there, and spent the next few hours groping around in the dark to identify the one that wasn't firing. It turned out to be at the tower farthest from the building, across a small creek I had to wade through. I had to make several trips back and forth for various tools and a ladder before I got it fixed. At one point coyotes started howling. Then when I got the thing back on the air, the transmitter wasn't putting out full power, so I spent the better part of another hour looking for what turned out to be a blown fuse. I got out of there well after midnight, getting home at 2 AM, at which point I decided to record the WSCS and WSRO morning news and WSRO weather before going to bed rather than wake up at the usual 5 AM to record them.
Then on Thursday I had to drive to Newport, NH, where another station was off the air. My brother had it back on at a measly 35 watts by the time I got there, but this problem couldn't easily be solved; this transmitter has seen better days and as soon as we fix one part, another part dies. The cell phone companies on the tower keep changing the load impedance, which doesn't help. We need to buy a new transmitter.
Yesterday WZBC at Boston College went off the air, so I went over there and waited for their faculty adviser to let me in to the transmitter room, which is on the second floor of a women's dorm. That problem turned out to be a battery backup that had died, so I bypassed it with an extension cord until we can install a new battery backup.
I spent most of today doing paperwork for our New Hampshire stations: political ad disclosures, which have to be posted to the FCC's Web site; orders for ads; and entering a large bank deposit into our database so our sales people will get paid next week. That bank deposit consisted of dozens of checks, most of them for $99 or some such, and a lot of them were pre-pays, which means I had to guess which stations they were for. The bank balance looks good right now, but it will drop dramatically next week when I have to pay rent on a bunch of sites on top of two big insurance bills and payroll.
The coyotes were probably the high point of the week.
