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WICC off-air since Saturday evening

R

RadioMan203

Since about 9:30 pm last night (10/25) WICC has been missing from the airwaves. As I write this their stream appears to be in full automation mode. The Italian show is on the air as I just heard Tony Reno intro a Connie Francis track. It very well may be a canned show off the automation system.

Nothing on their web site noting the outage. It's possible they suffered a lightning strike last night. Perhaps Ed will chime in once they're back on the air.
 
Bill DeFelice said:
It appears the technical difficulty has been resolved, as they returned to the air at around 12:35 - 12:40pm.
Click to expand...

I wonder what the issue was?

When they came back, was it in the middle of whatever the automation was playing?
 
The reason WICC was off the air was due to a blown fuse on the power pole at Pleasure Beach.
The reason the fuse blew is still up in the air. It could have been caused by the heavy rain and wind. Or the birds nest on three of the power poles. The United Illuminating company could not say for sure, but they did clear the nest off of the three poles. WICC was off the air from 6:40 pm Saturday night the 25th to Sunday the 26th at 10:20 am. I myself was out of town three hours away when the fuse blew.
The next problem was how to get out to the beach to start the generator when there was six to eight foot waves the Bridgeport Marine Police and Harbor master did not want to take a chance to head out and I respect that. The best they could do for me was a ride out at 9:30 am sunday morning the 27th and at that time I was able to start the generator at 10:20 am and get back on the air. We were on generator power until 4:15 pm the same day when commercial power was restored. I hope to have a new transfer switch installed by mid November that will start the generator and transfer the load on it's own Which will replace the old defective switch that I can not get parts for to repair. Something to remember you can always listen to WICC on the Internet just click on listen live as the stream was up with all of are regular programming during our transmitter outage. I think someone said they thought the house part was on tape ? No the show was live that day. Thanks to the Bridgeport Harbor Master and the Bridgeport Marine Police and the crew from The United Illuminating company for restoring the power. with out there great help we would still be off.
 
Wow, I know it's a rarity when the AM is off the air. That's the big bummer about not having a bridge to access the transmitter. Of course, if it's going to happen it's going to be Murphy's law that the weather will be bad and you being out of the local area.

I could only imagine that the old transfer switch probably dates back some time. When I was engineering WMMM the old automatic switch failed log before I got there and was replaced by a manual switch. Not the most convenient when power goes out, but at least at the time it was only a couple of miles from the studio.

Perhaps Tony didn't mention anything about the WICC outage due to the similcast of the Italian show?

Thanks for filling us in, Ed.
 
Ed mentioned in a previous thread that the switch is too old which is hindering his efforts to repair it. The upcoming replacement should resolve that problem and will allow automatic operation.
 
Wow! One bird's nest over 3 poles, that must be one ginormous bird!
 
The bridge is finally gone, eh? Bummer. That always was a test of faith years ago. One time, during a raging storm, all the antenna wire (back in the day when there was a "third tower") came down, with the bucket insulators just missing the xmtr building. I was hauling wire with Phil Cutting while the engineer was adjusting for non-directional on one tower.

When we had a First on duty 24/7, we could go live from the xmtr and, one day, a boat's prop cut the phone line between the mainland and the island. We did full programming from the island for at least a day.
 
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