Anything but Webers

[MINIgrillin]

My MINI. Purple haze JCW

[SmokenJoe]

GoG, I wish I had a 22" MBH in that color

SJ

[Cellar2ful]

Took these photos a couple of weeks ago at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. The jellyfish are mesmerizing.

[LiquidOcelot]

[Lightning]

What the heck, here's half a dozen random selections from my phone's camera roll.














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[eLLWOODgGLEN]

My vehicle stable...

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[james1787]

One of my hobbies, ham radio..

[Lightning]

One of my hobbies, ham radio..

That looks like a nice setup of vintage gear there. What are you using for an antenna system?

One of my American friends wants to get a ham license but has been taking forever to do it. He keeps pestering me for technical information (that I can help with). But anything to do with FCC ham regulations, that's something I'm not familiar with at all.

Anyhow, this is what's feeding the combiner in the picture I posted above:



And out onto the air:




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[SteveMBH]

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[kemmons]

Here's me at work and my work vehicle


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[Crunch]

Love the rex.

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[james1787]

One of my hobbies, ham radio..

That looks like a nice setup of vintage gear there. What are you using for an antenna system?

One of my American friends wants to get a ham license but has been taking forever to do it. He keeps pestering me for technical information (that I can help with). But anything to do with FCC ham regulations, that's something I'm not familiar with at all.

Anyhow, this is what's feeding the combiner in the picture I posted above:

And out onto the air:


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Thank you! Yes, I have a few old pieces that I put on the air from time to time. My HF antenna is just a dipole up about 50-60 feet up in the trees. I have one or two other antennas up for VHF and UHF as well. I have a few other antenna projects in the works. Your friend will like the hobby. There are so many facets you can get into. I've been in it almost 30 years since I was a kid.

Very neat pics! Is that an FM broadcast transmitter? In your other pics those appear to be large filters with copper coax exiting? The biggest coax I have around here is 1 5/8" Andrew hard line for a 1296mhz project I am slowly working on.

The racks look fairly similar to what I saw on a tour of WOR, AM 710 several years ago (they also had a nice Harris 50kw transmitter).

[Lightning]

Thank you! Yes, I have a few old pieces that I put on the air from time to time. My HF antenna is just a dipole up about 50-60 feet up in the trees. I have one or two other antennas up for VHF and UHF as well. I have a few other antenna projects in the works. Your friend will like the hobby. There are so many facets you can get into. I've been in it almost 30 years since I was a kid.

Very neat pics! Is that an FM broadcast transmitter? In your other pics those appear to be large filters with copper coax exiting? The biggest coax I have around here is 1 5/8" Andrew hard line for a 1296mhz project I am slowly working on.

The racks look fairly similar to what I saw on a tour of WOR, AM 710 several years ago (they also had a nice Harris 50kw transmitter).

What my friend needs to do is read through the ARRL books he bought and write the exam and get licensed.  Then he'll be free and clear to buy equipment and set up a station as time and money permits, instead of being perpetually being stuck at square one due to no license.  For a while there, I was getting emails with different antennas and other gear with questions about recommendations etc. but it's been a while since he's sent me anything.  I can't really help with any of the regulatory parts of the exam since the FCC and Industry Canada regulations aren't exact mirrors of eachother so he'll have to study up on that on his own.  To be honest, I'm not totally up on the IC regs either.

As for the pictures, here's a guided tour:  There are actually three broadcast FM transmitters in those racks, down from four a few years ago.  Two radio stations go on air from there and each one had a pair of transmitters for redundancy.  One pair got pulled and replaced with that modular Eddystone transmitter closest to the camera which has a pair of FM exciters (for redundancy) that are switched into the modular RF power amplifier section.  Since that whole setup is modular and is fully redundant within itself, it wasn't doubled up with second separate transmitter.  The modular architecture is similar to how Harris did those solid state 50 KW transmitters like what you probably saw on that WOR tour.  You can see a legacy of the old four transmitter setup in the metering - there are still four sets of forward and reverse power RF wattmeters in the racks.  There's a bunch of STL type equipment to bring in the audio which is then processed by Orban Optimods and fed to the transmitters, and some miscellaneous TV RF stuff for TV STL and off air monitoring.

There's an RF switching system to select the output of whichever transmitter is going to be used on air and the RF from each of the two live transmitters is fed into that combiner which is a network of several different filters.  Each input is a bandpass for the frequency allocation of each of the two stations and a band block for the other station so that the transmitter outputs are very, very deeply attenuated with respect to eachother - but not the output section of the combiner which functions as an antenna tuning unit so that the combined output of both radio stations is applied to the same antenna system.  That would be the three bowties at the top of the mast where two of them aimed at the city being served, one of them to the suburbs.  Power levels are pretty low and the radiation pattern designed to minimize interference in the US since this site's pretty much right on top of the Canada/US border.

I wish I'd thought to take pictures of another transmitter site that had four Continental C317-B 50 KW machines all in a row.  It was another two station facility where each station had a pair of transmitters for full redundancy and the outputs were combined into the same mast radiator.  It got modernized a few years ago not long after I started with solid state Harris 50 KW machines for primary duty and smaller solid state backup transmitters instead of a fully duplicated A/B setup for each station.  Those solid state Harris 50 KW machines are technologically interesting, power efficient, work well, and are totally boring.  On the other hand, I don't think I can ever look at a Continental Electronics C317-B without thinking of my old boss putting salt in someone's coffee.

[Hell Fire Grill]

[HiDesertHal]

 
AAAAH...that's so much more refreshing than looking at a bunch of old cooking pots!  Thanks to all of you!

HiDesertHal