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Eagle 106.7 Running Two Transmitters

S

ssnake

On my commute home today, around 4:30, I heard 106.7 running two transmitters simultaneously! These were not phase matched signals, and the audio, too, was out of sync!

I'm guessing that they were transmitting at the same time from both the Hall County and the Walton County sites because the audio of one was a few seconds behind. (Maybe HD Radio delay on one but not the other?) Every few feet in my car, I'd get essentially no signal, then good signal for station 1, then no signal, then good signal for station 2. Sort of like ordinarily co-channel interference, but much worse.

I presume they are dealing with antenna icing too; I just wouldn't have expected them to run both at the same time. We have WREK at about 15 kW ERP now.
 
The original antenna on the WFOX tower had deicers... it ran happily at full tilt even when the original WFOX antenna (which was also heated) had them off the air from ice accretion. They're combined on the Salem tower, on a multistation antenna. Usually, those are broadbanded enough to withstand a substantial amount of ice. It isn't uncommon to have thermal inversions kill off the microwave link to these sites however. Makes me wonder if perhaps the current main site doesn't have wireline backup, causing a switch to the old site and no one remembered to turn off the main. Or vice versa. In any event, it sounded like both were running.
 
WREK has the stereo pilot off too.....maybe that is intentional.
WRAS, with it's mammoth 10 bay antenna, chugged happily along with all the ice. An ERI antenna is set up to actually match somewhat better with some ice....my VSWR (reflected power from the antenna[ for the unwashed])actually goes down a smidge when we have icing.
I was at the site this afternoon to have prayer meetings....big 'ol hunks of ice were comin' down!!
My other FM's....further south....were all OK!
 
taylorengineer said:
WREK has the stereo pilot off too.....maybe that is intentional.
WRAS, with it's mammoth 10 bay antenna, chugged happily along with all the ice. An ERI antenna is set up to actually match somewhat better with some ice....my VSWR (reflected power from the antenna[ for the unwashed])actually goes down a smidge when we have icing.
Click to expand...

Not sure why our pilot would be off, but we've had a lot of remote control alarms today, so it's possible someone was careless hitting the wrong key on their phone.

Wow... I didn't realize that you could have that result without deicers. Icing always reliably kills our VSWR, and our automatic power control doesn't lower the power fast enough. Then, plate current peaks above the internal limit and causes the whole thing to shut down. It took us a while to figure that one out; now we lower power manually as a precaution.
 
We fold power back when we get severe icing on the antenna too! And the transmitter gets really out of tune with the load changing and at some point we make more heat than radio signal. But we usually stay on the air.... But keeping student staff in place is difficult......
We have just begun using Prophet for our audio delivery.....it will be fully implemented by the first of Febuary. It is what you mainly hear during regular rotation. When that's fully operational we will leave it on even if we don't have a warm body!
How did WUOG fare?
 
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