[BC] Silly engineer tricks

[RichardBJohnson at comcast.net]

More real engineer tricks:

When I became the Chief Engineer of WCHA in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, I inherited a beautiful looking studio and a nice clean looking transmitter site. The owner, John Booth (just like Lincoln's assassin) had a magnificent office with a marble-topped desk, set up on a platform so one needed to look up, as though addressing a judge, when communicating in his office. Ahaa! What evil lurketh behind the facade?

The custom-made remote-control system had three meters, plate voltage, plate current, and antenna current. I would calibrate them weekly, adjusting the meters so that they would correspond to the readings at the transmitter site. Eventually, the calibration potentiometers were at the ends of their ranges and the meters would no longer calibrate. Therefore, I looked inside the studio remote-control unit, attempting to discover what had gone wrong.

What went wrong was the nine-volt battery was dead! The remote control unit was phony. The battery was simply switched into the calibration pots, in series with each meter, using a double-pole-double-throw ON/OFF switch. The other pole on the switch was used to short-out a remote-control line when the transmitter was to be ON. It had 120 volts AC on it, connected at the transmitter in series with the plate contactor!

I brought this to the attention of John Booth and his response was, "Change the battery!" Two weeks later, I was working for a union TV station in Baltimore, WJZ-TV. I never worked in "Radio" again.

Cheers,
Richard B. Johnson
Book: http://www.AbominableFirebug.com/