Tech Notes from the Field

Why title it a “weekly update” when it has been more than a week?  Shoot, it’s been a couple.  Since my last post when Wide Orbit visited, all my updates have been tweeted.  I had some family time, along with our travel group, at Disneyland!  My kid loves the place, as does the wife.  So what happened since?  If you follow them tweets, then you know about AT&T.  Well, we also worked on some HD2 preparations for one station, caught up on some EAS news, a UPS failure, and pretty much had busy work to do.

AT&T does not make me happy.  That control circuit for our Burk went down in an interesting way this week which meant a little late night work to stay legal.  It was not a complete circuit failure.  There was two way continuity, sort of.  The interesting and most tell-tale sign that the issue was at the CO (central office) was the echo sound I heard with my trusty TS-22A test set.  The studio unit actually should a circuit was there and some of the channels reported readings, but no all.  Some channels just showed dashes (—-) for the reading.  When studio and transmitter units were placed back-to-back, they worked great.  When AT&T finally reported back the issue was resolved the message was quite vague with an admission to a card replacement at the CO.  I have since followed up with this question, “Why does the repair of this circuit always come down a card replacement at the CO?”  No response as of yet.

As we push to air an HD2 channel, the question of EAS came up.  I am still looking for any ruling regarding the necessity, but we are going to cover it anyways.  Better safe than sorry.  As we prepared, we discovered the old MSRP (multi-station relay panel) of our Sage Endec was not working.  After serial data checks and a quick call to Sage to verify how it is supposed to work (we have never used it), I found the problem.  The electrolytic capacitors had small holes and leaked.  Not obvious until the circuit board was removed.  Once replaced, the MSRP worked flawlessly.  Usually the wall-wart power transformers are to blame, but this time we did the rare component level troubleshooting.

Why the MSRP?  We wired the contact closure in conjunction with our SAS frame to create a “priority” interrupt and cross point to feed the EAS to the HD2 channel whenever the mother station (main channel) ran a test or relayed one.  Who knows what other fine thinking we will come up with next.

We installed the new UPS’s after the failure of a couple weeks ago.  We did both racks as the two that were in there were of the same age and type.  As this was on our radar, when we visited our pee-shooter site, we did a simulated power outage on the UPS there.  All worked well.  This begs the question, “how often do you check on your critical UPS installations?”  I have another question:  What type of UPS installation do you have?  Why did you choose the way you did?

That’s all for now!  The little one is calling for me.  Enjoy your day!

Cheers!