I received a report that our new Riverton translator was off the air.  Apparently it was “motorboating”.  When I got close enough to hear what was going on, it sounded like the same little snippet of audio had gotten “stuck” somehow.  I tried to access the site in the truck but needed to take a snow vehicle into the site instead.  Apparently it is 25 miles each way from the road to the site!  I had never actually paid attention to the distance before…

The equipment rack…It is weather tight.  This is the first time I had installed a translator this way but so far it seems to be working out pretty well.

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The station has been on the air for the past couple days and it’s our last day on site…Constrution is for the most part complete aside from some physical site details that the contractors will be taking care of once the ground thaws a bit.  Ben, Reid and myself clean up the site and get ready to head back to Laramie.

Finishing some last minute programming on the remote control…

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Now that the building is in place, it’s time to finish any wiring that was not completed before the building was brought to site.

“Luna” joins us on site…

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While working on my new transmitter site, I received notice that we were off the air at our Buffalo transmitter site.

The road to the site is blocked by a large snow bank…Fortunately I was able to maneuver the truck around it to access the site.

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Over the past few months we’ve been “staging” a transmitter building in Laramie while simultaneously building a tower site in Eastern Wyoming.  The building is complete and today it gets delivered from Laramie to the tower site.

The building is loaded with a crane onto the trailer in Laramie…Ready to head to the site!

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Today’s task was to finish up the other half of the tie line wiring I started yesterday.

The box at the top is the remote control…Next is an equipment block for connections to the remote control.  Finally, at the bottom, is the other end of the connections I wired up yesterday.

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Today’s task was to do some additional work on the building before hauling it up to the transmitter site.  I decided to wire up a “tie line” between the miscellaneous sensors in the building and the equipment rack which houses the remote control for the site.

Starting the process of connecting the wires to the punch block…

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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!

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I have spent the last week working on the tower and antenna for my newest station, 90.7 KUWV.  The crew has made tremendous progress but there is still work to be done.  My goal by the end of the day would be to have the antenna complete and line hung so that I can test the antenna and start broadcasting a signal for test.

The crew prepares to send the last two antenna bays up the tower…

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Today’s task: finish installing the final section of tower and start hanging the antenna.

Finishing some final details…The area between the concrete pier and tower leg flange is grouted to provide some protection for this critical joint.

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