Last week while at the new tower site for Lingle, I received a report that our Casper HD2 and HD3 services (Classical and Jazz) were off the air.  We have a number of faithful listeners to these services so I drove to the Casper site to attempt repairs.  Once I arrived, I found the importer powered down.  The importer is a Windows XP machine running some proprietary software to generate the additional HD streams.  Very odd but not impossible for Windows to shut things down after a software update is complete so I didn’t think much of it.  I powered things back up and drove back to the new tower site.  Unfortunately I received a call the next day that it was down again…So much for that…I suspected now that the CPU fan had failed and the system was going into thermal shutdown.  Now that my new “Lingle” tower and antenna is up, it’s off to Casper again to investigate this issue further.

Made it to the site…Fortunately the road is plowed all the way to the top but look at those snowbanks in front of the building!

Wyoming is currently experiencing one of the coldest days of the year with temps of -20 and lower, windchills down to -60…Plenty of frost on the trees!   Remind me again why I go out in this stuff?

The monitoring equipment indicates two faults consistent with the HD2 and HD3 signals being off the air.

Here we go again…No signs of life on the importer.  Without this system operational there is no HD2 or HD3 data.

The CPU heatsink and fan…Either the heatsink grease has dried out or the fan has failed.  We’ll deal with both issues.

Removing the heatsink and fan from the CPU…These processor chips generate a tremendous amount of heat and it is very important to keep them cool.  Without proper cooling they can fail in a matter of seconds!

This is thermally conductive heatsink grease.  The purpose is to join the heatsink to the chip for proper heat transfer.  Without it there would be numerous small air gaps between the heatsink and the chip that would prevent proper cooling.

Here’s the problem…The fan has in fact failed.  It will still spin but the bearings have worn out and it is not spinning nearly fast enough to keep things cool.

I was looking for either a replacement heatsink/fan unit or a replacement fan.  I couldn’t find a replacement fan but after much searching I DID find a solution.  The heatsink/fan unit I found won’t fit but I can scavenge the fan from it to replace the faulty one.  It’s getting tougher and tougher to find replacement parts for these Pentium 4 machines…Time to do a bit of surgery…

The fans are removed from both heatsink/fan units…

Heatsink compound is applied to the processor…Only a very small amount is necessary.  This is a case where less is more…Some people would probably say I have applied too much here but I wanted to better distribute it across the chip.  The heatsink will squeeze it down and distribute it further once installed.

The fans have been swapped and repairs are complete.

The CPU temperature is down to a mere 70 degrees C.  Shutdown occurs at 95 degrees C so 70 really is not all that bad.  Yes, it could probably be lowered even further with more exotic cooling but that was not the goal here.  The replacement CPU fan is spinning along at a healthy 6,250 RPM.

Our friends at WYO.COM remind you not to disco…It’s not the 70’s any more…  🙂

The importer software is once again up and running…Service restored.

Another day, another radio crisis averted.