Tech Notes from the Field

Ever get the feeling things stay the same, but then discover they are not?  We had anotther UPS fault this week. This time on the processing rack. I did the early morning swap without incident. Off air time was that of the reboot. Phew.  Then tonight a surprise;  station drops off the air!

There are many frustrations when dealing with old infrastructure.  We have an Aux site for three stations, but only the remote control for one operates it!  So, said station goes off, it calls me and I go to the Aux transmitter:  no audio!  I instructed my assistant to turn on the Aux site, if not him I would have to dial up the Aux site and turn it on. Then I would dial back to the main site to make sure all is off there.  Annoying and a waste of time.

So much for my rant.  We need a better remote system!  Anyways our Harris HDHT+ dropped. I could not find a problem. Ran it in a load. Ran it back on air. Nothing. No log entries. These are the very symptoms as last year. I suspect the Flexstar exciter did some barf. Again no logs to confirm or deny it. I checked UPS logs and found no indication of a power event. I looked at other devices for tell-tale signs, and found none. For piece of mind I rebooted the exciter. Let’s see where this goes. Of course all this occurs days before I take a few days off.

Next I will lay out what should be a reliable remote system.  All busy work, but becoming necessary. That along with how to deal with the emminent NextGen system being forced upon us. Our 20 year old infrastructure cannot handle this extra hardware.  No space and no power. I should detail that story in a future post!

Cheers!