33,000-Acre Line Fire Threatens Big Bear: Broadcasters at risk

[davideduardo]

There are numerous TV and radio transmitters on Big Bear, the tall mountain overlooking San Bernardino and serving LA for some TV outlets.

"The blaze also impacted key radio towers, including major communication channels for the fire incident."

33,000-Acre Line Fire Threatens Big Bear: 'Critical Resources Needed'

The blaze also impacted key radio towers, including major communication channels for the fire incident.

patch.com

Where I live in the Palm Springs metro, the outdoor smoke is so bad there is a highest-level warning for those with respiratory problems. The visibility is less than a couple of miles, in fact.

 

[radiofan2023]

Stay safe, David!

 

[secondchoice]

David do yourself a favor and have some M95 face masks in the house. They are not as good as the fireman's mask but they have helped me when we had a smoke episode from the forestry folks doing a planed burn. Just a little "insurance".

 

[radiofan2023]

There are also plugin HEPA air filtration machines you can buy for a few hundred dollars and the filters last about 6 months, those are good to use too. The ones I have are made by a company called Coway and I got them on Amazon, they have filters included.

 

[xmtrland]

I just strap a 20x20x2 merv 13 filter on a box fan and place it in a window (with tape around and a little cardboard if needed to make it seal good) even just in the room to filter the air helps. Blue painter tape works well or tapping the fan on since it's easy to remove every 2 months or so. Usually run the an on low or medium. When in the window on low it can provide some filtered air.

 

[davideduardo]

David do yourself a favor and have some M95 face masks in the house. They are not as good as the fireman's mask but they have helped me when we had a smoke episode from the forestry folks doing a planed burn. Just a little "insurance".

We are among those who are ridiculed for still wearing masks when out. Our valley was more cle ar today due to shifting winds, but we see the smoke to the Northwest and it is ugly!

 

[davideduardo]

Fortun

Stay safe, David!

Fortunately, we are well inside the Coachella Valley (just a mile from the venues of Stagecoach and Coachella) and there are no forests nearby… just sand and rock. But the mountains above us rise to 10,000 feet and are full of very dry vegetation after a record number of days over 110 degrees this summer.

 

[davideduardo]

A slew of point to point communications antenna sites have already burnt, and flames are approaching Mt Baldy which is f ull of TV and FM and all kinds of government services.

 

[kwthom]

Some of that smoke may be oozing into central and southern Arizona...gray and hazy this morning.

 

[xmtrland]

Actually I have upgraded to 20x20x4 merv 13 filters so I don't have to dust as much.

 

[MadMan]

Some of that smoke may be oozing into central and southern Arizona...gray and hazy this morning.

It's out here in the Tri State area. Fort Mohave/Fort Mojave & Needles reminded me of Riverside in 1979

 

[radiofan2023]

We are among those who are ridiculed for still wearing masks when out. Our valley was more cle ar today due to shifting winds, but we see the smoke to the Northwest and it is ugly!

When your lungs stay healthy and theirs aren’t, you will have the last laugh.

 

[MadMan]

There are also plugin HEPA air filtration machines you can buy for a few hundred dollars and the filters last about 6 months, those are good to use too. The ones I have are made by a company called Coway and I got them on Amazon, they have filters included.

I have the Nuwave OxyPure with 5 filters and cost $499. The filters are washable. I had their original unit, it ran $599. and the filters were very expensive to replace. Somehow Amazon must have felt sorry for me, I placed an order for a another filter & they mailed me a new unit instead? This isn't the first time strange happenings happened at Amazon for me

 

[davideduardo]

I have the Nuwave OxyPure with 5 filters and cost $499. The filters are washable. I had their original unit, it ran $599. and the filters were very expensive to replace. Somehow Amazon must have felt sorry for me, I placed an order for a another filter & they mailed me a new unit instead? This isn't the first time strange happenings happened at Amazon for me

This is way off topic, but: I recently went on Amazon ordered a RAID card that has slots for 8 NVMe SSD's on it. I ordered it "unpopulated" as I already had 8 SSD's to put on it.

The unpopulated card is around $900. The one with 8 1tb SSD's is about $2400 (and more with 2tb, 4 tb or 8 tb ssds). I wanted it to finish a build I was finishing, and it arrived the next day. On it were 8 1tb SSDs but the invoice was for the bare card.

I called Amazon for them to get me a bare card fast and authorize the return of the other. They had no bare cards. they told me to take out the 8 drives, worth well over $1200 in total, and keep them.

So I got a bunch of free SSD's and kept the card for the new build.

Apparently it was more expensive for Amazon to replace the board (which was out of stock) and get back the populated one than to just take the hit and move on.

It makes me wonder what the actual profit margin for those components actually is!

 

[yeoldeschool]

So I got a bunch of free SSD's and kept the card for the new build.

Apparently it was more expensive for Amazon to replace the board (which was out of stock) and get back the populated one than to just take the hit and move on.

It makes me wonder what the actual profit margin for those components actually is!

Amazon is a terrible company.

Watching the video in full is recommended, but in short, returns with broken seals or removed shrinkwrap cannot be restocked as new, and since Amazon can't easily move "open box" items, it prefers to either liquidate or just destroy them. Computer electronics frequently go the destruction route because returns are assumed to be due to "intermittent obscure technical problem #418 that high school graduate warehouse worker #94,118 cannot diagnose in the 1 minute he has to look at each return" and that will therefore just result in another return if re-sold open box. Long story short, Amazon is too busy making money to feel the money they're throwing away.

 

[crainbebo]

The wildfire smoke has been horrible here in Cascade for over a week and counting. In fact, the air quality was OFF THE CHARTS from Sunday night through to Wednesday morning. This is the worst fire season I have ever seen. We have 150,000 acres burning in the county and nearby counties, plus more 50,000-100,000 acre complex fires in central Idaho.
Dry conditions and drier winter than normal led to this, plus too much dry lightning. NONE of these fires were human caused. All natural.

School canceled recess and put it indoors but should have closed school on Tuesday for the health and safety of everyone, staff & students. It was off-the-charts all day and into the night.
They also dropped the ball big-time...there wasn't a single N95 to be found in the building!!! WTH?!!? WHY weren't we staff members wearing N95s to take them to the buses or lunch?!

My voice is raspy, I've been coughing a lot, taking cough drops, but thanking God today for the sprinkles, the cooldown, and the rain that is coming. I want these wildfires out of here, contained, and this nightmare to end.

 

[Ryan Williams]

Looking at Calfire's maps, it appears that the Airport Fire in the Santa Ana Mountains has reached the area around Santiago Peak. Lots of communication equipment up there and one radio station: KWVE-FM (107.9). They have a full AUX site in San Clemente, so they probably never went off, but anyone know how the site faired?

UPDATE: Here are some fire videos of the towers on Santiago and it doesn't look good.

 

[Signal Geek]

flames are approaching Mt Baldy which is f ull of TV and FM and all kinds of government services.

I wasn't aware any FM's were on Mt. Baldy. I know nearby Sunset Peak used to have TV transmitters back in the analog days (Channels 18, 30 and 56), but I thought all three of those stations eventually moved to Mt. Wilson or Mt. Harvard.

 

[davideduardo]

I wasn't aware any FM's were on Mt. Baldy. I know nearby Sunset Peak used to have TV transmitters back in the analog days (Channels 18, 30 and 56), but I thought all three of those stations eventually moved to Mt. Wilson or Mt. Harvard.

I may be wrong, but understood that there are still a couple of FMs and TVs in that vicinity... of course, telling two mountains apart is a challenge just as differentiating between Mt Wilson and Mt Harvard over LA. I've been up there "a lot of times" and can't really say where one ends and the other actually begins.

My first mountainside FM was just under 14,000 feet and even there knowing if one was on Ruku Pichincha or Guagua Pichincha was not very easy until you were near the actual summits.

One thing to keep in mind about all "mountaintop" transmitter sites is that many are not a the true and absolute top but on a side of the mountain that is both accessible and which faces the market one wants to serve. The tops of many mountains are very hostile due to winds and weather and prone to dangerous driving conditions to access them.

I'll bet that BossBill and Kelly can tell us some stories about accessing such sites in the Seattle region!

 

[crainbebo]

Rain came today. It only got to 52 degrees today at 4800' elev. where I live in Cascade. Very thankful. I can breathe (at last) again. The air quality is...good!!