[SBE] Staying on the Air (Was: "Unattended operation")

[Dan Rapak]

Olay guys. I'll keep it as short as possible.

A thunderstorm whacked the high tension power grid and the whole city (and 
then some) went dark. Our transmitter site was in the next county and 
although that area got hit too, our transmitter still had power.

A fellow engineer, E. Frank Longenecker, owned a Sony battery powered TV. 
This was 1979 so this was no Watchman! It was one of those battery powered, 
black & white sets with a real picture tube that ran on about two hundred 
"D" cells! That was how we found out that our transmitter was still alive 
and kicking. We also found out that everyone else in the market was stone, 
cold dead! There was no such thing as a direct feed to the cable company at 
the time so off the air was off the air!

We were an ABC affiliate and at that time network programming was still 
delivered by AT&T and Bell Telephone, locally by way of 124 ohm balanced 
land-line. We had a G.E. A2A equalizer/ receiver in Master Control and a 
Farinon subcarrier shelf for the audio. Our STL was a microwave link that 
ran on magnetrons. There was a main and a backup.

Now, the telco gear and the STL microwave could run on 48VDC and 24VDC 
respectively. As I mentioned, we sent a guy to the transmitter to take over 
local control and override the fail-safe. While he was enroute, we stripped 
batteries from several of our cars and powered up the Bell Telephone 
terminal gear and one of the microwave transmitters. We hard-patched the ABC 
telco feed copper-to-copper into the STL and viola! ABC network programming 
was on the air!

We had an old Telemation, dot-matrix character generator at the transmitter 
for rather long station I.D.s that lasted the entire time of our local 
breaks. That dot-matrix was something like 6 dots by 8 dots and it made an 
Epson MX-80 printer look darned good!

Then came NewsBrief. ABC did a network NewsBrief during prime time and there 
was also a slot for a local NewsBrief. We set up an ENG pack in the studio 
with an RCA TK-76, a Shure M-67 and one Colortran light powered by a belt 
pack. When the time came for the local NewsBrief, we hard-patched the ENG 
setup directly into the STL, reported on the on-going power outages, then 
hard patched back to ABC. All of this was done strictly by looking at my 
wristwatch as there were no preview monitors. Fortunately I kept my watch 
well synchronized to WWV back in the day.

Once power was restored, we put the batteries back in the cars and used the 
station's battery charger to jump start the cars and get everyone going 
again. For two hours or so we were the only station on the air in the market 
and we had a blast getting it done! Gawd, broadcasting was fun back then!

Dan Rapak



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Tom Bosscher" <tom at bosscher.org>
To: "sbe member discussion mail list" <sbe at sbe.org>
Sent: Thursday, June 16, 2011 8:58 PM
Subject: Re: [SBE] Unattended operation



> Gotta hear it... :)

>

> On 6/16/2011 8:52 PM, Dan Rapak wrote:

>> Nope. There's a whole story about getting programming on the air without 

>> electrical power. If the group is interested, I'll pass it along. 

>> Otherwise I won't tie up the bandwidth.

>>

>>

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