Off The Air -- and I did it. Knocked out four transmitters without noticing, late this afternoon. A couple of us were relocating the wireless mic receivers from the studio rack where the IFB transmitters live, and fishing our wiring from the hooks were the teeny-tiny coax runs to the old IFB antennas -- but we were careful, right? Picked up some hum on one of the mic lines, found where the shield had popped off a mispunched 66 block when we temporarily rerouted the wiring, fixed it and my peer left for the day while I nuked a much-delayed lunch. As the microwave dinged, ten minutes before the news, the paging system came alive: We need an engineer in control room A immediately! Three of us (counting my boss) respond, to learn, Almost all of the IFB is dead! They cant hear anything but the Traffic one! I suggested the on-air employees share that one IFB channel (the big babies ;) ) and went to look at the hardware. Traffic is the only IFB transmitter I had moved, so that meant the four little Venture-6 transmitters (as seen in churches and museums!) next to where we had been working were the dead ones. Audio on the meters, audio on their monitor jacks. Nothing on three of the channels, one was working. Power-cycled them, nothing. Hey, worth a try. So my boss and I, standing on ladders (cos they are 12 feet up a tall rack), flipped one of the dead ones around so the antenna jack could see the studios and and moved the antenna from the end of the cable to the back of the transmitter. Success! Moved the others, and it was (mostly) all working. Fixed the bad RCA plug on one and its all good by 5:15. True, the transmitters are all in a sloppy stack, but hey, it works and they were slated to be moved tomorrow anyway. The moral of the story? Always check. Even if you were only near it. :( PS: All we found were some tiny nicks in the jacket of the bad coax runs, only deep enough to reveal the shield. Ohmmeter says they are okay, and a TDR is problematic, since they use non-standard connectors, TNCs with a different thread pitch. Hoping to get one to function on way or another, as I am one short on replacements on hand. Gah. Photos to follow.
Posted on: Fri, 26 Sep 2014 01:45:34 +0000
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