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Flashover kills AM radio, gecko

Since this is a newspaper and written by a staff writer, the chance of technical inaccuracies is high. Since in the story they mentioned "insulator" the most prominent of which is the base insulator on the tower, it may not be the transmitter at all but the tuning network at the tower that got fried. I can remember as a kid back in Clark County waiting for Roger Sharp to sing on WBLY and they couldn't because a field mouse had snuggled up in the tuning house overnight while they were off air. By the way the mice never survived.

For critters to get inside the actual transmitter is more difficult, especially now with the compact solid state ones of today. I sure hope this wasn't the "Geico Gecko" :D
 
Still spare parts are cheap, even in an ATU. If it's this difficult to get parts, they should be ordering two of whatever it is they need should this happen again.
 
Read the Gecco newspaper article.

Station management reports they will be broadcasting dead air until the part comes in.....
 
A squirrel once caused me to lose a 5 page essay that I forgot to save. That squirrel ate a power line and caused an outage.
How did a gecko get into the transmitter at all? It should have been inside a locked shack.
Maybe Geico should buy some advertising.

The station wishes it was broadcasting dead air, it's not broadcasting at all.
 
No spare transmitter or spare parts? That's no surprise to me...it's Hawaii. Technical things often take very low priority for some Hawaii station owners. The transmitter sites are often terribly inadequate too. Might be the same company whose site I visited that had wet green slime growing inside and out of their high power CCA FM transmitter up on the side of the Haleakala volcano on Maui. The antenna bays were mounted on a telephone pole and I could have easily touched the bottom bay! (don't try that if you go there) Cows would scratch their itch on the transmission line connector. I'm not exaggerating.

In Honolulu, years ago, I became a contract engineer of a class C station with an RCA BTF40 that could only make 50% of TPO because of old soft tubes. It had "been that way for a while" the owner argued to avoid spending the money and it was six more months before the owner would finally spend the $2400 for a pair of rebuilt tubes to bring the power up to legal TPO of 33,000 watts. After I put fresh tubes into the transmitter people started calling the station saying that they had never heard it before. People on Maui started to call too.

My experience in Hawaii radio in the 90's was that it was often a radio ghetto where engineers could get terribly robbed.
 
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