• Get involved.
    We want your input!
    Apply for Membership and join the conversations about everything related to broadcasting.

    After we receive your registration, a moderator will review it. After your registration is approved, you will be permitted to post.
    If you use a disposable or false email address, your registration will be rejected.

    After your membership is approved, please take a minute to tell us a little bit about yourself.
    https://www.radiodiscussions.com/forums/introduce-yourself.1088/

    Thanks in advance and have fun!
    RadioDiscussions Administrators

Tower Jumper at Rattlesnake?

Good I hope the idiot did climb the WTIC tower, and was especially slow climbing through the WRCH panel and spent some quality time on top at the Candelabra with all the UHF's at full power. Soak in that RF!!. We certanly don't want this idiot to reproduce!
 
It doesn't mean as much now with the much lower DTV power levels as it would have when WTIC was analog at 5 megawatts.
 
Well, it's not as though there are any signs or anything warning that Rattlesnake is private property and trespassers aren't welcome... ;)
 
Necrat said:
Good I hope the idiot did climb the WTIC tower, and was especially slow climbing through the WRCH panel and spent some quality time on top at the Candelabra with all the UHF's at full power. Soak in that RF!!. We certanly don't want this idiot to reproduce!
Probably only got enough to mutate a few genes in already-produced reproductive cells.
Which means if he fathers some children in the next few months, there might be an even stupider "next generation".
My *uts hurt just thinking about this.
 
Scott Fybush said:
Well, it's not as though there are any signs or anything warning that Rattlesnake is private property and trespassers aren't welcome... ;)

I remember they put the security gate there with the sign "this is not the Metacomet trail". As a former hiker and of course a radio/tv geek as well, I miss being able to get up to the site and gaze up the towers as I once did but I know it's a necessary thing with problems from NIMBY types and the crazies who would try to topple the towers like out there in Washington state recently. I think they should have security closer up to the sites though as that one fence at the bottom of the road is really not enough because if you just follow (and I hope no one here uses this for anything other than observation from a distance), the rerouted "trail" takes you off to an area that has another trail leading up to some of the sat dishes and to the tower anyway. it might be this path the guy used to get there. I don't remember seeing anything other than a camera in that area, but this was at least a dozen years ago, maybe things are a bit more secure than they appear.

Also, I posted a mention of this on Facebook and someone replied with this link to a study on RF effects on 3 UHF TV engineers:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1128704/?page=1

I guess I shouldn't have said the guy would have been "cooked" if the tower still ran 5 megawatts analog?
 
DJKraze said:
It doesn't mean as much now with the much lower DTV power levels as it would have when WTIC was analog at 5 megawatts.

You have WTIC running 495,000 watts, WTXX running 52,000 watts, WEDH running 490,000 watts, all in one field.
Thats "average" power too. In digital the peaks can go much higher. Would you want to be standing up amongst all that?

DTV powers may be "much lower" but they're still signifigant, enough to cause cell damage up there at near-field.
 
Necrat said:
DJKraze said:
It doesn't mean as much now with the much lower DTV power levels as it would have when WTIC was analog at 5 megawatts.

You have WTIC running 495,000 watts, WTXX running 52,000 watts, WEDH running 490,000 watts, all in one field.
Thats "average" power too. In digital the peaks can go much higher. Would you want to be standing up amongst all that?

DTV powers may be "much lower" but they're still signifigant, enough to cause cell damage up there at near-field.

Ummmm, in digital there are no peaks.... thats why they specify it that way.
 
Ron said:
Necrat said:
DJKraze said:
It doesn't mean as much now with the much lower DTV power levels as it would have when WTIC was analog at 5 megawatts.

You have WTIC running 495,000 watts, WTXX running 52,000 watts, WEDH running 490,000 watts, all in one field.
Thats "average" power too. In digital the peaks can go much higher. Would you want to be standing up amongst all that?

DTV powers may be "much lower" but they're still signifigant, enough to cause cell damage up there at near-field.

Ummmm, in digital there are no peaks.... thats why they specify it that way.

Or are they all peaks, all the time?
 
Ron said:
Ummmm, in digital there are no peaks.... thats why they specify it that way.

There are indeed peaks in 8VSB DTV. As Necrat says, they can go well above the quoted power.

(he's a transmitter engineer, he knows what he's talking about)

We don't know *when* the peaks will happen; that's why the quoted power of a DTV station is averaged over some period of time.

(as opposed to an analog station, which has (had?!) peaks at predictable intervals - so we could easily measure the peak power)
 
Necrat: Yeah, I wouldn't want to go near that, I wonder how close someone would have to get before damage would happen if all the DTV and analog were still running.
 
Ron said:
in digital there are no peaks.... thats why they specify it that way.

Mr Barnes. With all do respect, you are incorrect on this one.

The FCC liceneses DTV stations at "average digital power", not "peak digital power". The peak digital power in 8vsb transmission can be upwards to 6db over the average power level. Because the difference varies from 0-6db in 8vsb from average to peak power, the FCC says the maximum effective radiated power is the average (RMS) digital power level.

If I may, take a look at this document from Axcera, one of the top 5 dtv transmitter manufacturers in the US.
It will explain how it all works. (It's actually a comparison of 8VSB to COFDM, but it still is a excellent document).
http://www.axcera.com/downloads/technotes-whitepapers/technote_4.pdf
 
If he's spotted climbing the same tower, perhaps the engineer should turn ON the 5 megawatt analog transmitter for a few minutes.
 
State charge of trespassing would be the biggie here. I don't see any federal charges here.

BASE jumping, while stupid, isn't technically illegal.
 
Status
This thread has been closed due to inactivity. You can create a new thread to discuss this topic.


Back
Top Bottom