It’s the end of the summer which means it’s time to visit every single one of my transmitter sites…First up the eastern half of the state.  I started back at our Torrington site.

The building and tower with a lone FM antenna bay at the top sits on the Eastern Wyoming College campus.

As you may recall, there was previously an FM receive antenna haphazardly mounted to the lower part of the tower.  I had just climbed up to remove it.  The tower looks much neater without the extra clutter.

Next task at this site, sweep the antenna to see how close I was able to get it.  I used a PowerAIM 120 analyzer attached to a small Netbook PC.  This combination works pretty well and is much cheaper and more portable than comparable test equipment for these functions.

Antenna sweep…89.9 is the frequency of the translator and is in the center of the sweep.  The dip corresponds with the resonant frequency of the antenna.  It is slightly low in this case but not too bad considering I retuned this antenna “blind” without the aid of test equipment!

Finally, I interfaced the satellite receiver to the transmitter so it will turn off either on command or if the satellite signal goes away.  Note the blue cable connecting to the three silver connectors.

On to the next site…I’m going to be doing this for the next two weeks…