Hum

The Reverend Professor's funeral will be broadcast live by my old college radio station on Wednesday. They called me last night and asked me to try to get the hum out of the program lines from the church. I brought two Western Electric 111C transformers on the off chance the problem might be something unbalancing the lines at one or another end. There was a nasty high-pitched warbling in one channel that I got rid of by sending the lines into the studio via a different interstudio cable, but the transformers did not get rid of the hum. I went to the church and tried disconnecting the equipment there from the lines, only to see the hum get dramatically worse on one channel. That doesn't bode well; the problem is almost certainly water getting into the cable somewhere in the steam tunnels. They can arrange to get me into the tunnels, but not before Wednesday. I told them I'd try a second set of transformers at the church end, but I'm not optimistic.

If they'd called me a week ago, I could have got into the tunnels on Thursday or Friday. Sigh.

Hum, continued

The left and right channels of this morning's broadcast from Memorial Church were out of phase. Yesterday I took care to make sure all my connections were right, but it didn't occur to me that the cable from the church to the station might contain a phase reverse, which it does. I arrived midway through the broadcast and reversed the polarity of the right channel, and that cured the problem.

After the broadcast, we tried inserting a second set of transformers at the church end to get rid of the hum, but it had no effect.

However, it turned out that one of the two channels coming from the church has another line connected in parallel that goes to Widener Library, where it was plugged into yet another line running from there to the station. When we unplugged that line, the hum went away. So, the Reverend Professor's memorial service Wednesday morning will air with no hum after all.

Meanwhile, Rhode Island called to say their FM never came on this morning, and New Hampshire left a message reporting a problem with the Yankees, but didn't answer the phone when I called back.

Frogs!

L. and I took the Hyperdoggie to Cutler Park this afternoon, where we walked as far as Powell's Island and back. The spring peepers are out, and I heard a new frog that sounds vaguely like ducks quacking. It turned out to be the wood frog, which apparently is no longer Rana sylvatica but Lithobates sylvatica. Evidently the Politburo that rules such things has decided that Oceania is now at war with Eurasia, or some such.

But hey, frogs! Spring is well and truly here.