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If You Have A Few Minutes...

L

Laurence Glavin

Guest
Perhaps some of you read about the AM station near San Francisco that was the flagship station of Michael Weiner/Savage declaring bankruptcy. When stories from other markets like that appear, I check out the radio-info board that is closest to it. So I decided to visit the San Fran board and read the posts about KTRB; there are two...one called KTRB: Say What?, and KTRB:RIP. Laced throughout all the posts are comments by Dan (Bicoastal) Strassberg. The story of how KTRB's nighttime transmitter is powered is UNBELIEVABLE! Propane is trucked to the transmitter site because there's no normally distributed power at the site. If you think some of the "management" around here is bizaaaah, check out the Pappas family if you have a few minutes to spare.
 
Propane and diesel are widely used to power generators, as is natural gas., It was probably more cost effective to run their own generator and fuel it than to pay the cost of getting a electric line out there.

The other thing is they are not going off the air if the local power goes out.
 
All of Block Island, including stations WCRI(FM) and WJZS(FM), is powered by diesel generators located near the stations' shared tower. The tower itself is built on the foundation of an experimental NASA windmill that was built in the 1980's and dismantled some years later when it was found to be impractical. There are, however, residents of the island who run their own wind turbines rather than buy power from the local utility, whose rates are said to be the highest in the country.
 
Then there's KTAO in Taos, NM, that is a Class B station powered solely by solar cells and batteries; it's way up on ~11,000ft Picarus Peak so it only needs about 600w TPO, but there's no power service up there and anything that involves regular delivery (like fuel) is out, too. Supposedly it works fairly well...there are times when it's cloudy for a long time and the batteries run down, but NM is pretty sunny overall so it usually works.
 
Whoops - my mistake. Class B = 50kW @ 150m HAAT, Class C1 = 100kW @ 300m HAAT (in both cases, or equivalent). Considering KTAO is licensed for 1.2kW, that sure gives you an idea of how far up above reference HAAT they are!

BTW, speaking of islands...I know Cuttyhunk Island (near the Vineyard) also gets all its power from on-site generators (diesel, I assume) and I believe there WAS an undersea telco line but its been abandoned and everyone uses microwave links back to the mainland; virtually every house on the island has one. So they're pretty much self-sustaining...beyond the fact that there have to be fairly regular deliveries of fuel.

I don't know if the Vineyard and Nantucket self-generate their power or if there's undersea cables for them. I would think it'd be a hefty job to lay a cable all the way out to Nantucket, but the Vineyard wouldn't be TOO tough to do.
 
Didn't Jaws-2 get fried in a sparky death when Roy Scheider was able to hold up the island's underwater electric cable, as the shark attacked him?
 
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