rec.radio.broadcasting (moderated) #15203 From: jeffrey@math.hawaii.edu (NH6IL) Broadcast Blowups Date: Fri Jun 16 23:51:16 PDT 1995 Over on the Boatanchors email list (dedicated to older ham, military, and commercial tube equipment, and radio history), there is a thread titled Broadcast Blowups. I think you folks might get a kick out of reading these. Jeff NH6IL --------BEGIN ARTICLE-------- >From: tech@cs.athabascau.ca (Richard Loken) Well if we are going to talk about frying bacon. I once worked in a station with a LOT of mice. I used to come in at 6:00AM to turn on the rig and after I had hit the filaments I would wander around and tip over the garbage cans to let the mice out. One day I was working in the hall beside the transmitter and as I glanced down the hall I heard the bang of the overload relay and a flash shot out across the hall from the glass window of our RCA TT2BH (a 2KW channel 7 rig that drove a 10KW amplifier) followed by two other flashes and bangs as the overload retried for three times and out. Most impressive!!... Once I got the door open I found half a mouse on output of the HV transformer. I cleaned the mouse out and got the rig back up and half an hour it happened again and I had to clean another mouse out of the secondary insulators. I figure that when hubby didn't get home for his lunch that the wife went looking for him. I will take this opportunity to complain about how RCA wired the pilot lights in their TT5EH. The lamps ran 12 or 20V or something through a series resistor off the 220V line. I once decided to change a burnt out pilot lamp during the 6:00 news, the lamp was a 328 type in a Microswitch push button assembly where you stick a metal puller in to grab the bulb. I stuck the tool in and shorted the two bulb leads together which provided a bang and a flash which pitted the front surface of my (glass) glasses and dumped the main breaker in the breaker panel. I ran over to turn the breaker back on and grabbed the breaker for the studio lights instead and now I had CJOC and CFCN both off the air in 15 seconds flat. Some days... From: KUZZ1@aol.com [1] Re: Even more broadcast blowups Date: Tue Jun 20 19:51:19 PDT 1995 Here's one that goes back to about 1968. I was working at the late, unlamented WGLM (FM) in Richmond, Indiana. There may be a few people around who know of that station, which was legendary in its time for being run on a shoestring and a prayer, and held together with bubble gum and baling wire. Remember, this was before FM was big...and this station was always on the brink of financial ruin. I'm not an engineer, so give me a break on the technical terms. Anyway, I came in one Sunday morning to sign on (we operated only 18 hours a The transmitter remote control wouldn't work. It was one of those old mechanical relay devices that used a telephone dial to bring up meter readings over a dedicated telco circuit. It wasn't unusual for the morning guy to have to drive out to the transmitter shack about five miles out of town, fire the thing up manually, and then go back to the studios to broadcast. (totally illegal, but you did what you had to do). I was badly hung over and in a really foul mood, and as I started to walk out the door to go to the transmitter, the phone rang. It was the station owner, telling me there was trouble at the transmitter, and I should come down and help. When I arrived at the transmitter site, the owner and our French-Canadian engineer were in the shack, with the transmitter almost totally dismantled. I was still in my hung-over fog when Jacques the engineer looked up and said, "Zee transmeeter ees fool of baird sheet!" My reaction was to double over in laughter, which did not please either Jacques or the boss. What had happened? It seems some birds had decided that the roof of the transmitter shack was a nice place to roost, and enjoy the heat radiating from below. The opening for the antenna coax was none too tight, so the droppings had been accumulating in the high voltage cage of the old 5kw Gates, to the point where there was a gigantic arc, and just about everything in the rig went kablooie. This had happened late the night before, while I was out getting plastered. I seem to remember we managed to kludge the exciter back together to get the thing on the air with about 50 watts ERP (out of 32kw licensed) by the middle of the afternoon. The owner had to persuade Gates to front him a whole bunch of parts even though he owed them money, and somehow he did it, and we got the station back up to full power in three or four days. My memories of WGLM are very fond. Working there paid most of my way through college from sophomore year on, even though we usually had to cross the state line into Ohio to cash our paychecks to give the boss a few extra days of float to find the money. I rose from part-time jock to PD and learned all the basics of broadcasting. But we did have our trials and tribulations. I believe the station is now WQLK, and co-owned with WHON(AM), where I got my first radio job...but that's another story. BTW, on the odd chance that someone reading this group may know about these stations, my air name at the time was Jay Howell. Mark Howell News Director, KUZZ-FM/KCWR Bakersfield, CA From: "Roberta J. Barmore" Subject: Re:Bang! Hi, gang! "Bang" might not be the proper title for this--maybe "crackle-crackle." Anyway, I'm going to be *real* scarce for awhile. Last night around 7:45-8:00 EST, the A-side 8kV/10A power supply at work caught fire. I got called in at 8 with one side off-air and the other side at low power and kicking off, and by the time I was in the car and on the celphone, status was "a working fire at the transmitter." Think I've mentioned in the past, the big rig at work is a parallel unit, two 25kW transmitters into a combiner. Anyway, my boss showed up about five minutes before I did, and by the time I was up the lane, he'd killed the generator breakers, then gone in the smoke and yanked the 800A main disconnect. Fire Department could *not* find the source of the smoke (building was full!) 'til finally they got close to the PSU cabinet, which was glowing red-orange!!! With *exactly* enough water (oh, *bless* them, it could have been such a mess!), they doused the thing, but the inside is a total loss. It looks like the plate transformer (10kV/30A max, 440V primary, three-phase) suffered catastrophic failure of one phase's secondary winding, arcing to the cabinet, *melting* the plate contactor *shut,* ditto all the OL relays in that box, and cooked until the breaker on the PSU kicked out. We had to take apart the PA cavity of the other side of the transmitter and do a total rebuild with all new socket & tuning contacts. Though we managed that eight-hour job in two hours (teamwork and a lot of hands--GOOD hands), it was 4:30am before we had one side up, limping along at 40% of what we usually run. Most of the delay was getting enough smoke out of the building to get the Fire Dept. happy about allowing us in, followed by negotiating with the Fire/etc. officials to get permission to turn the power back on. We've found a good/used PSU (thing is 8' tall by 4'x4', and HEAVY) over in PA, and it'll be here about midnight tonight. ...Paid ten grand with a smile; don't talk to me about Collins prices 'til you've had to fix an RCA pro boatanchor. About $30K of PA cavity parts are on order and should be on-site when I go back in tonight, too. (The lost ad revenue, 'tis said, adds up to considerably more than what we've spent on parts, too--that's the problem with doing RF for money! ) Since the side with the smoked PSU seems to have the *least* damage to the RF (the blowers in it shut down aboput the time the smoke really began to roll), getting that replacement PSU in and running will be highest priority and it's going to take some serious amounts of time. I fully expect to be working at least 18 out of every 24 hours for the next week, maybe two. Soooo, I'll try to keep up with list and mail, but bear with--my replies are liable to be real short if any! ...This just in; I was on the other phone line with the Corp. Dir of Eng, and they've got the plate transformer out of the fried unit. The windings check OKAY with a low-voltage ohmmeter--but the fiberglass bar that held the terminals is -gone- in the middle section. Starting to look like one of those Unfortunate Mouse-caused failures.... Eeeesh! Having *some* fun now...! 73, --Bobbi >From: TOM.A.ADAMS@mail.admin.wisc.edu >Subject: Broadcast blow-ups to: boatanchors@theporch.com A few folks here have asked for the horror stories of broadcast gear break- downs. Gads, what sadists you are! Broadcast folks would rather forget 'em! Exploding mice in transmitter B+ supplies have already been mentioned. This one seems to be pretty common. I can tell you from experience that the Gates 20H3 FM broadcast transmitter (20 KW out, B+ of about 9500 VDC) isn't a very mouseproof design; I had to go out several times to fix that one (I was chief, and my transmitter was 70 miles out of town!). Somewhat more dramatic was the time a Great Horned Owl decided to land on the power pole outside, with each foot on a different phase of the 3 phase line feeding the site. Unfortunately, he did it on the section of line AFTER the power company fuses, and it seemed like it took forever for the power company to get there to change 'em. The bird itself was interesting. He got zapped just as he touched down, and died with his wings still outstretched (I wonder if the corpse glided?). One of the best blow-ups (or at least the noisiest) was my own doing when I was a very new chief. MY site was gonna be the best in the network, I decided, so I started ordering parts like crazy to bring gear back up to original spec. It seemed that the electronic weatherstripping on the PA cavity door of the 20H3 was bad, and the inside of the aluminum door showed severe carbon tracking near it. PA efficiency was way down, and I decided this was the cause. I had Gates/Harris make a new cavity door, and ordered new weatherstripping. The only problem was that they had included no way to attach the stripping to the door. On the original, it appeared to be attached by some sort of conduct- ive glue. Being too impatient to call Gates and wait for mail delivery, I talked to the Director of engineering about the problem. What I didn't realize was that he hadn't worked on a transmitter in 25 years; I found later he hadn't been too good at it when he did, so they made him a paper pusher. He couldn't do very much damage that way. "Get yourself some stainless steel sheet metal screws" he advised, "and just bolt the stripping in place on the PA cavity edge". Being new and stupid, I did as I was told. The stripping SHOULD have been a smooth, continuous strip. Instead, it was kinda lumpy with all those screws in it. Because of those gaps, some parts of the cavity door were at a different potential than others; VERY different. When the rig was fired up, everything was OK... for about 10 seconds. BLAM!!! First impression; somebody's behind the transmitter with a 12 gauge pump gun. That notion was dispelled when the overload and fuse annunciator lamp panel lit up like a pinball machine. A quick check showed that I hadn't, as I suspected, left a pair of pliers inside of the cavity. Nothing appeared amiss, so hit the B+ again. Everything was normal. Well, let's dip the plate current a bit better... BLAM!!! Totally confused (and scared sh.tless by now), I dug up the Gates/Harris 24 hour tech service line's 800 number. As the tech listened to my tale of woe, he began to chuckle. As I went on, it grew to a laugh. As I ended, he was roaring. When he finally caught his breath, he advised me to get rid of those damned screws, and tie the stripping in place with skinned hookup wire thru the screw holes. No further problem. As far as I know, this temporary fix is still in place. The way I figure it, you're not REALLY a transmitter fixer until you've gone through a line burndown and lived to tell the tale. High power transmission lines are pressurized to greater than barometric pressure, using dried air or dry, inert gas. The idea is to keep enough press- ure inside to keep out moisture laden outside air in case of a leak in the outer conductor's joints, but not enough to CREATE a leak by blowing out the joint's rubber O-ring. If this system fails, outside air leaks in and eventually moisture condenses on one of the Teflon insulators that seperate the inner and outer conductors. When that happens there's current flow across the insulator. The current will heat the Teflon, and it carbon tracks. When it tracks, the Teflon eventually gets hot enough to burn. When that happens, hot gasses carry soot up the line, and gravity pulls it down thru holes in the insulators below. The soot is con- ductive as hell, and the first indication of trouble that you get is when the transmitter VSWR monitor trips the rig off the air. When you get to the site, the SWR bridge tells the story. You reduce power to the minimum, and watch reflected power. If the reading sorta walks around, it's time to call the tower crew. The only thing to do is remove the transmission line, section by 20 foot section, and take it apart. Gallons of wood alcohol on rags are pulled thru the outer conductor to get rid of the soot, and the inner conductor sections that weren't melted are similarly cleaned, and burned insulators replaced. You're talking 18 hour days during the summer, of filthy, back breaking work, hustling around line sections that can weigh up to a couple of hundred pounds for the the larger diameters. In winter, it's absolute hell. I've been through two of these little parties, but I've been lucky. Both times it happened in good weather, and the transmission line was 3.125", which is relatively light weight. Is it any wonder that there's a shortage of RF people in broadcasting these days? EVERYONE wants to stay in the studios and play with thier computers, and NOBODY even wants to know where the transmitter is! 73's, Tom, K9TA ----------------------------------------------------------------- Blow ups! Not due to electrical failure...but a blow up just the same! Old KLME...now new calls and a brand-new building...KOJO...Laramie, Wyoming in 1972.. Alan Boeker, DJ, on the air while natural gas was filling the studios, apparently due to an incorrectly installed furnace... Al told me he had just opened the mike to back-tag a song..when literally the lights went out...the music quit in his earphones...and the next thing he knew he was sitting...he though...outside! NOT! After he shook off the blast and looked around... the ENTIRE ground floor building had collapsed around him. Every wall had blown out..every inner wall had crumbled...the roof above Al had blown up...then had fallen totally around him. This good-sized, square building had come down around him as in a Buster Keaton movie. He was still at the console with his fingers on the mic switch (open-air relays activated, sparked, and BOOM!) with an entire building sitting flatly around him! Shaken but totally unhurt... Alan...where are you today? Rick / Terry Lee From: stellastar@aol.com (StellaStar) Date: Sun Jun 18 23:54:44 PDT 1995 Would like to hear more such tales; could we start a string of Spectacular Disasters Survived tales here in AIRWAVES/rec.radio.broadcasting? Stella (don't worry, it's just lightning) Starr StellaStar@aol.com From: lous@crl.com (Lou Schneider) [1] Broadcast Blowups Date: Tue Jun 20 02:00:10 PDT 1995 When I worked at KFAC in Los Angeles, we decided to replace our RCA BTF-3B auxiliary FM transmitter with something a little newer. We made a deal for a used 5 Kw RCA rig, and had it delivered to the AM transmitter site. I spent about a week cleaning it out, re-surfacing the contacts in the final cavity, replacing the high voltage wiring, etc. Finally it was time for the smoke test. I jury-rigged it to the three phase power panel and turned on the filaments. Once it was warmed up I hit the Plate On switch. The high voltage contactor pulled in and the building went dark. I listened as the blower on the AM transmitter wound down to a halt. I stumbled over to the power panel and tried resetting the breakers. Nothing. I stuck my head out the back door and heard people in the surrounding apartment buildings calling out that their power had just gone out. Then the phone rang - the studio operator wanted me to know that FM transmitter on Mt. Wilson was off the air, and the studio power had also glitched. About this time it began to dawn on me that the outage -wasn't- my fault! BTW - that old BTF-3B was one bulletproof transmitter. At one point the de-icers failed on the Jampro antenna, and all 6 elements became solid globes of ice. The main transmitter refused to operate into that load. The 3B stayed on the air until the ice melted a week later, delivering 2.5 Kw forward power while seeing 2 Kw reflected back. It didn't care. Lou Schneider KCBS/KRQR San Francisco From: jerryt@touchmap.com (Jerry Trowbridge) [1] Re: Broadcast Blowups Date: Wed Jun 21 19:30:35 PDT 1995 It was the first day of the spring book, and the engineering department at Cap Cities' KPOL-AM 1540 had been working overtime with the consulting engineers to install the new 50K transmitter and phaser. We'd been at 10K for several weeks, causing us to lose much of our coverage area, including some of the Hollywood Freeway, thanks to KDAY at 1580. At 5:00 AM, we were all waiting to hear that new powerful 50K signal that would give us a shot at some big numbers in the book. By 5:30, we were still waiting. Finally at 6:00, we came up, and I started the newscast. A few words later, we were off the air. A call to the transmitter. A panicked engineer who yelled, we'll call you back. At the transmitter, on the edge of a reservoir in El Sereno, the phaser poured forth smoke and flames. Engineers ran for fire extinguishers, and they started the rating period without us. 6:30 came and went, then 7:00. Every half hour, I'd trot down the hall to the news booth and stand there for 5 minutes, hoping we'd come alive. We spent the whole morning off the air, came back that afternoon, and spent the whole book back at 10K while the consulting engineers reverse-engineered their faux pas. Neil Ross, now oft heard doing narration on the Discovery Channel was doing morning drive and quipped about that morning and our exercise in futility. "Welcome to the KPOL Wax Museum, featuring announcers in life-like poses." ------------- Jerry Trowbridge jerryt@touchmap.com From: stellastar@aol.com (StellaStar) [1] Broadcast Blowups Date: Tue Jun 20 02:00:11 PDT 1995 It was a hot summer day 20 years ago, and that training on the emergency generator came in handy. The generator, Korean War surplus, was about the size of a locomotive engine; had been lowered into a basement and the engineering shack built over it. You had to wear deadening headphones to work on it for long, as the CE learned to his infinite pain. So when the summer storm blew the electricity away, it was rather an act of bravery to light a match, head for that basement, and haul away on the levers that started the big old motor howling. Nobody knew till later that a small plug in the generator's radiator (it WAS a dinosaur!) popped out right after it started, the coolant drained out onto the floor, and the engine seized up. But upstairs in the studio, this time the lights dimmed slowly instead of blinking out, and the record on the turntable SLOWLY spun slower and slower... It was past bravery to venture into that basement again. Stella (don't be scared; it's only electricity) Starr StellaStar@aol.com From: RobABass@aol.com [1] Even more broadcast blowups Date: Sun Jun 18 23:54:45 PDT 1995 This is an interesting topic, actually.... I always get interested whenever something goes down in radio... There's one other thing that happaned to me a long time ago. I used to do a show on weekends. Most of my music came from my own collection. I had just bought a copy of the New Kids On The Block song "The Right Stuff". It was a 45 r.p.m. single. (remember those..?) We had two turntables in b-cast. It didn't make one bit of difference which one I played that record on, it "always" skipped, and it was never at the same spot on the record. I'm thinking the only thing that could have caused this, was the turntable not having any taste for the New Kids... This was the only record that I saw this happen with, and no it wasn't warped OK and this is the last story, because I know you're getting bored... Ever had an occasion when you had rewound an open reel tape, and when you hit stop, the brakes on the machine were so tight that it chewed up the tape between the flangs of the reel? Yeap... I've been there and done that... Didn't notice it either until the reel was playing a song. When I did finally see it, "Oh please... not during this song... please please please...! not during this song... I'll do anything if it doesn't jam up on this......errrpppp" Shoot...... Thank goodness for CD's.... although they start skipping when we rewind open reel tapes where the machines are in the same rack mounts as the CD players... When will we ever learn? Rob Bass From: pcwbillb@aol.com (PCW BillB) [1] Re: More Broadcast Blowups Date: Sun Jun 18 23:54:44 PDT 1995 Yet another one of those nifty tales of woe that come from having ancient equipment... I got hired on at WMNF FM in Tampa as the second CE. The first guy had never seen a broadcast facility before, and had wired the place like an experimenter's kit from radio shack... To start with: they put the station on the air for $20K total. That included buying an army surplus transportation trailer for the transmitter.. Used Heliax, a used antenna.. and a very very very used Gates transmitter. WMNF rented space from WTVT on their standby tower. They got 6 months for free, then started paying heavy tower rent... Well, installation was described for me by the station manager, Lia Lent. Lia was an interesting woman. She climbed towers. Their CE didn't. (I think he was the bright one..) -- Lia and Rob Lori and a few others got all the stuff together to put the station on the air.. They called WTVT to see about what they had to do to mount the antenna, and got told to call the "official" tower crew. They called the crew, and got told "oh, that's about $5K per day plus transportation.. Figure 5 days to get everything up and tuned up right." Well... they had $150 in the bank. The tower crew was out. They could afford some rope and pulleys, however. Somehow, they got the heliax spools up on a stand where they could pull the cable off the wood... and got the antenna stuff laid out around the tower where they could grab it... Lia climbed to the 700 foot area, and hung one of the pulleys, and fed a rope thru it. Rob tied one end of the rope to his car bumper.. the other end to the antenna. (This had a many hundred pound power splitter with the 4 bays)... and drove off... The folk were brilliant.. Rather than ruin that cable, they carefully unplugged the antennas from the combiner, and lofted that separately. However, they didn't mount the antenna bays at any specific spacing, nor did they use the stand offs that came with the antenna.. apparently the hardware either didn't fit the tower, or they didn't know what it was for... They then lofted the power splitter, and lia mounted it to the tower. At the 600 ' level. They then did the same thing with the heliax... routing it *into* the tower.. so it came off the spool, and did a SHARP upward turn to go up to the power combiner. Rob did his driving bit again, with Lia at the 600 foot level. The engineers from 13 stood in their doorway waiting for the tower to fall over. They got the line up there, and tied down to the tower.. They also had enough spare to allow for a nice loop outside the building, and a big loop to the rear of the trailer inside it. Neat. Lightning reduction! About 4 months later, the splice did a 10' melt down. Somuch for the big outside loop, and part of the inside.. So much for the lightning reduction. It did it again 1 year later. Lia fixed it again. This time they rolled the trailer a little (stretched the hell out of the phone lines and power drop).. but kept everything together. A year later, they bought new heliax when it melted again.... (I don't climb towers.) Oh.. and the first CE had no idea was SWR was.. and there was no real SWR monitor on the ancient gates.. at least nothing that worked... The gates is the real story, however. That, and their studio held together by termites holding hands.... The gates was about 6th hand. It started life off near the bottom of the band, and from the paper work that came with it, it had visited stations all up and down the Mississippi, and finally ended up retired from a place it had melted down at... That model of gates had a quick pop-off assembly for the cavity plate. Really neat. If you wanted to remove the cavity cover to get to the tube, you could do it in under a minute. Unless there was corrosion on the steel wool they used. Then the back plate resonated at about 2 gig.. maybe 5 gig.. Naturally, not much of that went out the heliax, so a lot of warmth got generated. The symptom? Full plate current.. full plate voltage.. no output. Apparently that transmitter had pulled the stunt on EVERY owner before WMNF got it. And it did it to me. Almost. I walked into the station as the "Italian Show" went on the air, and checked out the remote as I am prone to.. looked at the readings... and almost fainted.. *500* watts out.. about 14K in! I told the DJ.. You are shutting down NOW. Give a station ID, and shut the transmitter off. He started another record, then started reading PSA's about meetings. I reached over an said.. "WMNF must leave the air due to technical difficulties.. WMNF FM TAMPA." and killed the plate. The Italians were VERY pissed. However, I figure I saved the station about $2K at that point. Turned out later that the Italian show folk were selling advertising (and pocketting the money)... which most of us couldn't tell because we didn't speak Italian.. I went out there (after pulling the remote's phone wires so they couldn't turn it back on..) and found the tuning assembly blue... and still cooling. The entire output assembly was silver plated copper.. It was now blackish in places, having been very warm.. It also had some real melty looking spots.. I disassembled the thing and carried the corpse into the theater where they were having a fund raiser... Lia was there with the bluegrass folk.. She and I ended up showing the audience the tuning assembly.. and raised another $800 that night.. which was almost exactly what the local silversmith charged to replate the thing. I ground the back plate to remove the old steel wool junk, and ended up using sheet metal screws to put the thing back together temporarily. It worked for at least 4 more years that way, and seemed to be a LOT more reliable after that incident... We were in the middle of tapping the holes and mounting proper hardware when my office moved 70 miles away, and I had to leave the task for the next CE.. Great fun while it lasted... From: DANUETZEL@delphi.com [1] More Broadcast Blowups Date: Tue Jun 20 02:00:11 PDT 1995 I guess all this makes what happened last week sound dull and ordinary. Enterprising hornets making a nest in the L.N.A. of the sattelite dish. Dull except when it is YOU who gets the task of getting them and their nest out. 73's Dennis Mitchell WDUX Waupaca, Wis. From: Public Service Telecommunications Consortium [1] Worse than a blowup Date: Tue Jun 20 19:51:20 PDT 1995 WBAI-M, late 1950s. Ancient transmitter, _circa_ 40s. I was PD; the GM was a superb recording engineer, it so happened, but not a transmitter engineer. The transmitter had somehow gotten off-center (not quite the right term but I'm sure you know what I mean). Our Chief engineer was somewhere on a boat, unreachable. So, the GM decided that, since he knew the theory, he'd retune. Seemed simple until the phone rang. I took the call. Said a deadly calm voice: "Is this WBAI-FM?" "Yes." "WBAI_M, 99.5 on the FM dial?" "Yes." "This is LaGuardia control tower, godamnit it, you're overiding our communications." I jumped for the master switch (about the only thing I knew how to do with the xmitter) and took us off air. When things calmed down, and I think I remember this correctly in technical terms, it turned out that in his retuning, we were putting out a strong second order harmonic (50Kw ERP) on the control tower's frequency. From boatanchors@theporch.com Wed Jul 12 17:53:41 1995 Date: Wed, 12 Jul 1995 12:50:36 -0500 From: "Roberta J. Barmore" Subject: Re: Why we love tubes Hi! Jeff Herman and Jim Durham have shared tales of big broadcast tube rigs working into horrid loads; here's mine: One fine day I was heading into work at a local 5kW AM, listening to the radio (of course) and enjoying a thunderstorm, when the signal just vanished! I was a few blocks away; sped up, zoomed through the parking lot and up the loading ramp to the back door and was in the AM control room in seconds. "It won't come back on!" wailed the op. A dash back to the transmitter room showed the rig ready, no OL flags, but it cycled right back out of Plate On; so I fired up the RCA BTA-5U2 all-tube standby, waited 30 seconds for everything to very nearly warm up :), hit the Antenna Transfer and Plate On switches, bang, bang, and we were back. Antenna current was *way* off; so was PA plate current in the final. The Null meter on the OIB was *pegged!* Back down the hall, top speed, out the door, and squish-squish-squish through the swampy field towards the 440' self-supporting tower. About halfway there, I noticed a thin thread of smoke wending upward from one leg at the base. Does everyone know what an Austin Ring transformer is? It's one way to light up the aircraft-warning lights on a base-fed AM tower, two *big* toroids interlaced like links of a chain, each a yard across and massively heavy. Very low capacity between the windings, which should each pass through the center of the circle formed by the other. Well, ours had shifted and got very close at one point, a lightning hit had arced across and the windings had sort of blown out and been welded--the RCA was running into a dead short at the end of about 500 feet of coax and the antenna-tuning unit! I turned around and ran back, yelling "Shut it off! OFF!" to the AM op, who was standing in the door watching the loopy engineer girl running around in the field. On the run back, I remembered we had some scrap plexiglas in the shop. Ran right by the op, through the building, and back behind the transmtters (killed the RCA on the way, the op being slow at the switch), dug out the plex, and snapped it into 6" lengths on the edge of the bench. Grabbed as much as I could carry, ran *back* out to the tower. No keys--my purse was still in my car! Oh, well, I had on old jeans anyway, so I stuck the plex through the gate, climbed the 7" fence, hoisted myself up the 6' concrete pier (not too hard a trick, there were bolts sticking out), and commenced hammering in as many pieces of 1/4" plex as would fit. (About six). Ran back in, turned on the RCA from the control room--and everything was *perfect!* No smoke, no sizzle, base current dead-on. Elapsed time from arrival, fifteen minutes. On my way back to Engineering, still half out of breath and plenty wet and muddy, I met the General Manager. "Hey, we're off the air," he says, then does a double take and asks, "What happened to *you?* Flat tire?" "No, it was...well, we're not off the air now, okay?" He didn't ask anything else. (We ran the old transmitter all that day, not being too sure about the RF properties of wet Plexiglas with the paper left on, without problems and took off the old Austin that night. Seem to recall one of my shoes Vanished Forever in that eternal fifteen minutes, and I clomped around in army boots, kept in my office for slogging out for base-current readings, the rest of that day. 1982 or 3, maybe I started a fashion trend?) ...There's another story, more recent, about cleaning up and rebuilding an output "Tee" on the TV rig, and not getting the center conductor stuck back on in the long vertical run of 3.125" rigid coax at the output; transmitter came up into it just fine, and wasn't I mystified for a half-hour about why it wouldn't tune up properly! Sheeesh, was my face red.... 73, --Bobbi