I’ve been doing work for another broadcaster recently–a large Christian radio network based out of California. Since engineers are so hard to come by, I told them I’d give them a hand by checking on their sites once a month (at least those closest to me when they aren’t snowed in). One of these sites happens to be on the same local hill as my own Laramie transmitter site. They mentioned that the site was running at low power and that the remote control was not responding properly. I went to check it out.

Leo looks on as I inspect the equipment rack…(Yes, the blur is normal with him–it’s tough to get him to sit still long enough for a good picture!)

Here’s the problem…The transmitter had momentarily experienced high reflected power and a VSWR trip.  This caused it to go off the air to protect itself.

Reflected power looks fine now…

Back to full power.  Just shy of 25,000 watts out of the transmitter to produce 100,000 watts total from the antenna.

Wiring in the equipment rack…I replaced the remote control at their request.

Unfortunately they were still not able to access the site so I put the old remote control back in.  A few more reconfiguration attempts and they were finally able to access it.