Parts have arrived to repair the Rock Springs antenna array…Time to go back to the site with the tower crew and replace the top antenna bay.

Plenty of activity on site as another crew installs antennas and a building for another tenant.

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Recently there was a tower climber up the tower at our Rock Springs site for another tenant.  The tower climber HAPPENED to look over at our antenna while he was working and discovered a large hole in the radome for our top bay.  I had noticed a slight increase in reflected power but not really enough to be concerned about.  It appears that the array had taken a lightning strike at some point.

Ouch!  That is a seriously melted radome…

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Sheridan is the fourth site out of five to get Voice over IP.  This was another site that had terrible cellular connectivity.  With the move into the Central Wyoming College transmitter building it gave us the opportunity to migrate the phone connection to Voice over IP at this site as well.  The final site will be our transmitter in Laramie.

Another VoIP terminal…

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The next site to get Voice over IP was our Thermopolis site…You may recall that I was recently at this site repairing an issue with audio dropouts.  The existing cellular connection was notoriously unreliable.  VoIP will provide a huge improvement at this site.

Another VoIP terminal…

Three down, two more to go!

The next site I visited to install Voice over IP was our Cody transmitter site.  Certainly some beautiful scenery on the way down the hill…

Driving down the hill…

Sunset from McCullough Peak

Our remote control systems rely on dialup access for alerting us to alarms and for us to control equipment at transmitter sites.  Some of our sites unfortunately have no wireline connectivity and were relying on cellular connections for control.  These cellular connections proved to be very unreliable.  Fortunately the sites with no wireline connectivity are on the Central Wyoming College microwave network.  We were able to take advantage of this to use Voice over IP.  Essentially we installed phone lines at our studios and then extended them over the network using Voice over IP.  What used to be unreliable cellular connections requiring a long distance phone call are essentially now local on-campus extensions.

The first site that we installed the equipment at was Casper.  While we had a pretty reliable standard POTS phone line at this site, migrating to VoIP would provide better quality and save money on long distance.

The equipment consists of a small box which connects to the network and provides a standard POTS port.

Finished! One site down, four more to go.

Now that we had installed the transmitter and were up to full power, it was time to do an RF survey to ensure that we are in compliance with FCC rules regarding RF radiation exposure.  I suspect we will find some hot spots and need to build a fence (particularly since there is also a 10kw FM station on site).  We surveyed and measured radials from the base of the tower.  Once we had established the radials we took RF level measurements at intervals along each radial.

Reid unloads the equipment for the survey…

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We suffered an outage at our Sundance transmitter site…After driving to the site to investigate we found that our equipment (and the equipment of others at the site) had been seriously damaged by a direct lightning strike.

Made it to the site on Warren Peak…

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We had been working on getting a new station on the air in Rawlins (89.9 FM, KUWI) for the six months or so.  This 2,000 watt station was a replacement for a 250 watt translator.  After getting the antenna mounted on the tower and preparing the (used) transmitter to go into the site, it was time to transport the transmitter to the site and bring the station up to full power.

All modules and auxiliary equipment removed from transmitter cabinet for transport…

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Back to our Jackson transmitter site…Apparently the remote control has decided to stop answering the phone line.

Made it to the top of Snow King courtesy of UW214, a rental from Motor Pool.

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