Reid and I spent the past few days traveling and working on a number of projects. Our final destination was Jackson but we checked out several issues in Rawlins and Rock Springs during this trip as well. This time he actually got to take some pictures of me rather than the other way around. 🙂

We started by stopping in Rawlins to investigate an issue with the satellite dish. Earlier in the day the site had gone off the air. A local contractor on site found that the feedhorn had fallen apart. He was able to get it fixed and got the translator back on the air. Reid and I decided to stop in since it was on the way.

Apparently the pole that had been installed for the dish was not exactly stable. I accidentally bumped it with the truck on the way out of the site and it caused the dish to lean! We were able to get it back into position but will need to revisit the site to reinforce the dish mount.

Once we left Rawlins we stopped by Rock Springs while en route to Jackson. The Rock Springs HD signal had been off the air since the main transmitter failure in February. In addition to the main analog transmitter failure the HD transmitter had suffered an exciter failure.

We installed a replacement HD exciter and various other gear to get the HD signal back on the air. Once we finished in Rock Springs for the night we headed for Jackson. We finally arrived in Jackson around 2 AM.

Around 6 AM I received a call saying that audio from the Rock Springs transmitter sounded like it was “underwater”. Great… A call to the Rock Springs transmitter verified the audio impairment. We decided to go back to Rock Springs to see what was going on. By the time we arrived at the site the audio was back to normal. It was impossible to pin down EXACTLY where the impairment happened but we did a number of things to attempt to resolve the issue. By the time we got back from Rock Springs it was midnight.

The next morning we went up to the Jackson transmitter site to work on the projects we had originally came to work on. Reid started pulling the old STL antenna and cable down in preparation for relocation while I worked on the remote control system.

Me working on remote control wiring for the main KUWJ transmitter

Saturday morning we finished up some work at the transmitter site and headed back to Laramie. On our way back to Laramie we found that Rock Springs was off the air again. We apparently had not fixed the problem on our last visit. As we approached the transmitter site the signal slowly started to come back. We got to the site JUST before the signal came back entirely. Since we caught it in the act this time we were able to pin down the problem and fix it once and for all!