Our Copper Mountain transmitter site (KUWT, Thermopolis) had been giving us a number of issues for the past few months.  These issues were somewhat inconvenient to say the least while I was trying to add both an HD2 (Classical) and HD3 (Jazz) service to the site.

The latest technical issue was a failed power supply…This won’t generally take the transmitter off the air but it will reduce the power output until the fault is repaired.

First task, replace the failed power supply module.  This one had actually developed a fault that shorted one of the input connections to ground.  You can probably imagine this isn’t a good thing…Look at the blackened fuse on the right (my mistake after trying to swap the fuse hot before actually replacing the power supply)

Success!  Back to a full 2 kw of output power…

The equipment rack on Copper Mountain…Note the pair of audio decoders at the top of the rack (silver colored units).  The configuration is very similar to what was required in Casper.

Next step, add the HD2 and HD3 signals.  The device that generates these additional signals is called an “Importer”.  This is a Windows XP based PC.  It is unfortunate to require a PC on a mountaintop for this purpose, but this particular one uses some very rugged hardware (solid state hard drive, single board PC, no moving parts).

Once again, mission accomplished.  I’m sure I’ll be coming back to this site again as there are still a few lingering issues…