A quick testimonial for Nautel (as if they need one). One of my clients is running a P-400 as its primary, which I think was one of Nautel's first transmitters sold in the US... a repurposed nautical beacon rig, I'm told. In the last 12 years I've watched over it, I've re-capped it once and, after a...

I know this probably doesn't help the immediate issue, but... I have 4 Gates "X"s among my client base. 2 have never failed me. One, after I got to know the series, was cranky until I recapped it. It's now joined the other two. The 4th is a "Five", which represented my all-time personal worst nightm...

Tuning is important, but if you haven't been twisting the load/tune controls and nothing in the ATU has changed, that part of the transmitter is pretty stable, and mistuning shouldn't show up as a bandpass fault. As noted though, if those controls were someone's "go-to-first", you'll need to get tha...

Your question is a bit vague. Any number of things could cause this. More information, please. To start with, is it shutting all the way off, muting but not going all the way down or drastically lowering power, then slowly coming back up. The transmitter can do all of those things. In most cases, th...

Deep has covered most of this. A couple of other possibilities? Most of those 5s are 3 phase. Is your "Supply volts" up around 260? If not, I'd check incoming power (don't know if it will light up with a phase down, but maybe...). If not, then a PDM amp or two could do it (should have alarm lights o...

I'm having a problem with one of my DX-10s. Ralph is still there and has been very helpful.
I didn't have any trouble getting ahold of him, though they did put my call in queue. I think it was, maybe, a couple of hours before he got back to me.

Most of my clients are pretty good about AM maintenance. That's not to say they're OCD about every little detail, but they all, in general, keep a fairly good house.

With the workload around here keeping everyone busy, most contractors I know would tend to avoid taking on a problem broadcaster.

So how common is it to build a "skirt" with only one wire. I haven't seen something like that in my travels.

Added to the above: One "lab" likes to put some kind of locktite on their standoffs in addition to tightening the screws (imo) way too much. None of the replacements I've installed has broken, having done nothing more than just snugging them down. At one station, I replace over 40 standoffs of diffe...

Very poor audio on 1240 AM in Melbourne, FL. Drop outs, overmodulation, horrible distortion, etc. Embarrassing that this is what we get for millions spent by industry and government. I'm not sure this is a industry/government problem as much as it might be that we've become spoiled by the higher qu...

To me, it was notable how fast the audio quality fell apart, as it daisy-chained from the PEP. The stations I had that picked up the alert from the PEP sounded pretty good, though the noise level was higher on AM. On FM, it was nearly comparable to the former internet-based feeds. After that, it see...

TPT wrote: ↑

Wed Jul 17, 2019 5:23 pm

... Avoid BW broadcast.

Just out of curiosity, why do you feel this way?

Think I'd call BE and talk with them about that exciter fault light. If the board has gone and your shooting miscellaneous odd stuff through the transmitter, VSWR seems like a reasonable indication. Beyond that, given this is a strange one, I'd put a dummy load on the transmitter and bypass everythi...

That's no surprise, Larry. KGEZ is operated by someone I knew many years ago, here in the Seattle area. Back in the late '70s, John Hendricks was a local announcer in these parts. He was a pro to begin with, but worked with many of the area's best managers, owners salespeople and programmers. He eve...

That picture exemplifies one of the things I appreciate about having entered this business in the '70s as a teen, when everything was made from discrete components, the rigs were full of tubes, the fans were big, the exhaust was hot and the voltages were respectably high. Back then, a lot of trouble...