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Snakes at the transmitter

earshot

earshot

Strictly speaking, this isn't a technical issue, so I hope you don't mind me posting this here. I think I'd regard it as an engineering issue though!

A few years ago, I rode out to a site with our engineer and we stopped to shoot a huge rattlesnake that was in the road about 20 yards from the building. We were happy it wasn't IN the building.

That incident wasn't a big deal but it's fun to talk about. I did a search here and couldn't find a thread about snakes. I'd love to hear anyone else's stories from the wild kingdom (scorpions, spiders and other critters too).
 
earshot said:
That incident wasn't a big deal but it's fun to talk about. I did a search here and couldn't find a thread about snakes. I'd love to hear anyone else's stories from the wild kingdom (scorpions, spiders and other critters too).
Click to expand...

At WISC-TV we had a Harris analog transmitter that had a hole in the bottom right under a high-voltage interlock switch. It was about mouse-height above the bottom of the transmitter. Yep, more than one mouse met its end that way.

A co-worker there once worked for a station in Charleston, SC. He said they occasionally found recently-shed snakeskins in the cabling troughs. To my knowledge they never found a whole snake...

I'm *certain* you'll hear better stories from other engineers.....
 
About 35 years ago, I was engineer for a small AM station that had its remote-controlled transmitter in a 10' x 10' cinder block shack in the middle of 20 acres a couple miles outside of town. One evening, I got a call that the station was off the air and couldn't be revived via remote. When I arrived, I found that a good-sized snake had gotten into the building and had crawled into the power supply deck of the old Gates transmitter. It appeared that the tip of the snake's tail had touched the high voltage and the back half of the snake became an instant cinder. The front half of the snake was still alive and kicking with its mid-section fused to the chassis. I had to pull it off and "dispose" of it. The stink in that shack was unbelievable! I then inspected the damage, and it was immediately clear that the snake had totaled the old transmitter. The wiring harness was completely fried, and many major components looked as though they had just been pulled out of a fire. I called Harris to see what they could do for us in this emergency; the result was amazing. They said that they could have a new BC-1H to us in about 24 hours, flown in from Quincy to our small local airport. The BC-1H arrived the following night as promised, and we had it on the air by the following afternoon. So endeth the tale of the SNAKE.
 
Arrive at a transmitter site with another engineer and his two teenage sons. I notice a 4 foot Bull snake sunning himself just in front of the door. So, I pick it up and turn around just as the oldest teen walks up. The kid ran away screaming. The younger one thinks that's the funniest thing he's seen. That was fun! I name all the snakes I find out there "Floyd". They eat the rattlesnakes.
 
Napthalene. Snakes, racoons, skunks, and mice HATE it! Mothballs are a health risk. My wife hates the smell. She likes snakes, mice, skunks, and racoons even less.

Your dollar store has this for $1. When we had the skunk it was in an area under an outer part of the building. It even tried pushing all the balls out! 10 boxes got it to find a new home.

Over the years in sites where mice have been an issue and there are no people regularly this is a great fix.

My first snake experience was in 1978 or 1979. Just wished it would have destroyed the BC 1H. The days when the station signed off and the radio stayed tuned. Local newspaper reporter apparently heard our exploits that night and it made the paper the next day with a report of the snake in the conduit in the old quonset hut.
 
Back in 1979, I was CE for WGTO, Cypress Gardens, Florida.
One morning, I picked up a push-broom to sweep the floors.
There was a Pigmy Rattlesnake coiled around the broom handle.
That very day, I purchased a couple of bags of cement and patched every hole and crack in the exterior walls.
Never saw another snake in the building but it sure did scare me.
What if the snake had been coiled-up in a wiring trench?
 
At the first station I worked for, which was in Mississippi, I went back to the transmitter room with another jock to get a patch cord from the workbench. We had the old patch cords with the woven green insulation. I was standing behind the other jock in the doorway when he reached for one of the patch cords on the bench and it moved! There was a small green snake curled up among the patch cords. He turned around and almost mowed me down getting through the doorway where I was standing. Needless to say, we were both careful about picking up patch cords after that.
 
ChiefEngineer said:
Napthalene. Snakes, racoons, skunks, and mice HATE it! Mothballs are a health risk. My wife hates the smell. She likes snakes, mice, skunks, and racoons even less.

Your dollar store has this for $1. When we had the skunk it was in an area under an outer part of the building. It even tried pushing all the balls out! 10 boxes got it to find a new home.

Over the years in sites where mice have been an issue and there are no people regularly this is a great fix.

My first snake experience was in 1978 or 1979. Just wished it would have destroyed the BC 1H. The days when the station signed off and the radio stayed tuned. Local newspaper reporter apparently heard our exploits that night and it made the paper the next day with a report of the snake in the conduit in the old quonset hut.
Click to expand...
Yep...I was there. Station goes off the air, switched from the BC500H to the BC500GY backup and headed to the Quonset hut. Opened the back door & there was a 1" diameter snake in two pieces with the end of both pieces burned nicely by the 2100 volts it came across. I agree with the earlier post about the smell. You think human skin stinks when it gets burned by RF? This is exponentially worse. Newspaper did mention it the next day...seems the tiny headline was "Electric Eel?" That transmitter still works 32 years later but it's only standing by in case the BE AM 500A fails. For the record, that was a good transmitter. 3db down at 15khz, -59db noise & 0.5% THD...and that was with the tube type audio stage.
 
Not a snake but something much worse.
I was CE of a 500w AM station back in the early eighties that had their tx in a brick building. The building origianlly housed the studios and offices and those rooms were full of old LPs, business records and other junk. On a weekly inspection I smelled the faint smell of dead rodent . . . not too strong and I just assumed that a mouse had died in the building. Went back on a really hot day a week later. When I opened the door I was almost overcome by an incredibly powerful odor, an odor like I had never smelled before, so strong that it almost turned my stomach. After searching through all the piles of stuff I finally realized that the smell was strongest near the Gates BC-500H transmitter. I switched over to the back up rig and opened the back door on the Gates to find that a large squirrel had climbed in through the hole in the top and been electrocuted by the HV up in the RF output area at the top of the chassis. It was a disgusting sight because the poor critter's bodily fluids had leaked out and down into the power transformer's windings which is what made the terrible smell. Went out and got a surgical mast and some rubber gloves to remove the rodent which was a messy job. The transformer continued to work but the transmitter smelled foul for years afterwards.
 
Ditto on the mothballs. I keep a half box in each antenna tuning unit and haven't had problems with spiders or other critters since I started doing this.
When I worked at KIMN (The orignal 950) in Denver, a prairie dog ate through a transmitter sampling cable. The tx field had lots of the critters. Cute but we couldn't continue to let that happen. At the advice of the county AG agent, I bought a bunch of dry ice, cut into golf ball size pieces and dropped one in every hole I could find and covered the hole. This had the affect of killing by oxygen deprivation, the rodents in their hole so we didn't have to bury them or put up with the smell of their decay. The next day any hole that had been reopened were treated again and I looked for the other end that I had missed.
The AG agent also suggested a small dog size hole in the chain link fence near the bottom to let the neighborhood dogs keep the prairie dog populatin down. That probably worked.
Bill
 
WMC AM/FM/TV Memphis has a spare parts back room in the transmitter building that has been known for decades as the “snake room”.

No explanation needed.
 
The weather sweep on the bottom of the door into our Transmitter Bldg.'s Front Room had worn down over the years so much that a driving rain from the right direction would leave a puddle indoors and I had been meaning to replace it. One day I entered that door and opened the inner door into TV Transmitter Room and there was a small garter snake the size of 10 or 12 inches of RG58 coiled up right there. I got the broom and "swept" him out the through the Front Room to outside. Somehow that made him angry because when I went to leave a couple hours later he was still there, waiting for a rematch I guess. I hope he gave up and slithered away because I often hear the screeching of hawks that live out there, and he'd make a nice snack for one of them. By the way, we now have a new sweep on that door and no more puddles nor garter snakes since.

George M. at WNDU
 
About 15 years ago, I was the OM at a small AM station. We were running an ancient RCA BT 1-MX. It wasn't unusual for it to not want to make 1kw at sunrise, but this morning, nothing, nada. I went to the shack to investigate. Went in and found the breakers all thrown on the transmitter. After a little more investigation, I spotted a black snake wrapped around the rectifier stack. He had arc marks on him, so I proceeded to remove the corpse. Problem is he wasn't dead and had developed a very bad attitude. :mad: He tried to bite me. After regaining my composure, I found a broom stick and got him to wrap around it. Out the snake went. The things we do for our job.
 
I was at one of my sites near New Orleans doing some work one day. I went outside to sit down and cool off for a minute. My peripheral vision caught something moving and when I turned my head it was a coiled 6 foot cottonmouth with his head up ready to strike about four feet away. I went from sitting to airborn in a nano second. The kill is to get those very large rat traps and place them around the perimeter of the building with raw egg on them. The snake smells the raw egg even after it's fried and whammo. Moccasins are very territorial and will come after you.
 
I spent a good bit of my life in Hawaii. We did not have snakes in Hawaii, but we did have plenty of "one ohm" cockroaches. Not dangerous, just a pain when they crawled into any high voltage stuff that they seemed to be drawn to. ZZZZZZAAAAAAAAAPPPPPPPPPP.

These were not your garden variety cockroaches mind you, these were big flying mothers, we called them B-52's!
 
Next time I get stung by an angry wasp at a site, I'm going to think back to some of these stories & not feel so bad by comparison.
 
boiseengineer said:
How about the 'gators & other nasties around the WWL site.
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Keep talking like that...the wasps are sounding tamer all the time.
 
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