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...

but my attitude about the company and their commitment to support has drastically soured, to put it mildly. And when Ralph Wegman retires, there will be basically zero knowledge of these transmitters left at GatesAir. Agreed. His support made me much more comfortable, taking on the re-freq of a DX-...

If you have no technical experience, this is not the place to start. If you do, then you need a list of parts that would be required, plus the frequency change procedure for the Gates series of transmitters. Gates Air likely has this material available, though the transmitter's documents no longer s...

They've done that to me, too. It stopped when I sent logs from two of my client stations, 175 miles apart, running the same format... with exactly the same problems at the same times.

Deep Thought wrote: ↑

Fri Mar 08, 2019 5:55 pm

I have a client with a small-town 500 watt AM DA on 790 in conductivity 8 land and the 2 mV/m extends 55 kilometers (34 miles). If it were running 5 KW it would be 94 kilometers (58 miles).

How high up would you have to put 250 watts in order to get that kind of coverage.... if you even can?

Now look at Section 74.1263: (b) An FM booster or FM translator station rebroadcasting the signal of an AM or FM primary station shall not be permitted to radiate during extended periods when signals of the primary station are not being retransmitted. Notwithstanding the foregoing, FM translators r...

I second the BW equipment. They've gone to a new display, so that issue has been dealt with. For the money, I'm not sure you can beat the feature set in the V3 versions. As noted, they are fully web-enabled, are able to email out RF and modulation-related alarms (assuming power is available), and in...