As I mentioned in my previous post I had received a call from a listener reporting an outage of our HD and HD2 signals in Casper.  I thanked them for the report and made the 3 hour drive to Casper to investigate.

While I was en-route to Casper I discovered that Douglas was down as well!  Grrr….  It appears that the HD exciter suffered a hard drive failure of some sort.  I pulled it from the rack and decided to bring it back to the shop to troubleshoot.  This particular exciter (and all of the others like it) have given numerous problems.

Greeted by an error message on the exciter screen after a reboot…

I finally arrived in Casper.  It was a gorgeous snowy afternoon and I was easily able to access the site.

Finally arrived at the site

Plenty of snow on the trees…

Another shot of the shack and tower

Looking further up the hill toward the other towers

On further investigation I discovered that the power supply for our HD exporter had apparently died.  When I took the cover off it appeared that the capacitors on the motherboard had all failed!

Note the bent and bulged capacitors…

Once I realized I was not going to fix this problem on site I pulled this unit out and brought it back to the shop as well.

Two HD exciters on their way back to the shop…

I packed things up and headed back to Laramie to (hopefully) enjoy the rest of my holiday weekend.