This page is devoted to the unpleasant surprises that greet us when we show up at the transmitter or studio after we get the call that "we are off the air" or "we have no audio in the studio".  It ranges from the truly major stuff to the little annoyance items.  Enjoy....  And please feel free to send me your own "Uh-Oh."

It's a Friday, and the part-time remote techs (mostly students) are in class, so I'm doing remote-tech duty about 20 miles from the studio at a grocery store.   We are 1 hour in to a 2 hour remote when I hear the main TX go down.  About 90 seconds later the Aux comes on as it should, and the phone starts ringing.  Three main TX's are down, and only two of the Aux's come up.  A couple more calls confirm the entire mountain top has lost a phase.  But, if the two Aux's are on, the generator should be running, and the missing station is the primary one on the generator feed.  Things are not making sense, so, we hurriedly pack up the remote early, and I head for the mountain.    About an hour later I arrive on site and discover the generator is NOT running.  The two Aux's that are running managed to come up with a phase missing (One of them was a single phase 3kw, and it just happened to be on the surviving phases.  The other, a 3 phase 3kw, was running about 1/3 power with a missing phase).

I try to start the generator, and it is dead.  Nothing.  About then another engineer comes in with a flashlight, and we notice the battery .........

With some effort we managed to get a truck close enough that a 12-foot set of jumper cables reached, and we did get the generator on line.....There is enough loss in a 12 foot set of jumpers that the big diesel really did not want to run, but it finally did.

That was the beginning of a long afternoon.  One of the main TX's had lost an IPA, one of the Aux TX's exciter died, and the generator started having an attitude with a flaky oil-pressure sensor.  I managed to keep the failed Aux going with some re-wiring to put one of the main exciters on the Aux, and we got the generator re-started after we bypassed the faulty sensor.  It could have been worse.  It was a 5+ hour long outage.  Several stations were down the entire time.   We lost about 2 hours on one station, and about 20 minutes on another.  The third one miraculously stayed on the entire time (on the low power Aux, of course).

I don't think radomes should look like this ......

Especially when you find this on the inside!

                                      

Lightning was the cause of this one.  Oddly no damage to the trasmitter itself, but the entire line and the fittings at the top of the TX were destroyed.

    

An "interior" view of coax damaged when it arced after getting water in it.  A couple pics down you'll see where the water got in.

  

     

This one didn't take us off the air, but it sure made a big mess in the HV suppy.  A power spike took out this MOV on the HV side.                                        

        

Don't let loose hardware rub against your line.  This is after we peeled the jacket off.  We had not been able to hold pressure on this line for some time, and were getting moisture in the line.

     

                                                                              

Here we are draining the water that got in the hole in the previous photo.  We drained about 2 gallons of water, and then went back on with about 50% power.

  

                                                                         

We call this one an LNBee.    Yeah....  No audio on two stations and loss of news on a few others.   It was an easy fix if you call dodging wasps while standing in a dish easy.

          

Another lightning problem.  Blew up the whole panel.  The panel cover was still closed, but was as round as half a barrel.    Poor grounding at the tower seemed to be the cause.  The tower took the hit and the current exited the building through the power panel.  If you look closely at the bottom you will see what's left of the breakers.

  

               

This one is not my original.  I got it from the web a few years ago.  Anyone that knows its origin is welcome to let me know so I can credit the proper person or station.  Anyway, it speaks for itself.

  

          

The following shots were sent to me by Al Wolfe.  Thanks!

Attached are a few shots I took in March after a tornado  blew down one of the WTAX towers in Springfield, IL.   It WAS a 300+ self supporter.

    There are two views of the tower,  and one of the former generator shed, (It  ran for a couple of days till the cops let us in to shut it down).