[BC] AM tower 9 feet of snow

[Mark Humphrey]

On 2/12/07, Rob Atkinson <ranchorobbo at hotmail.com> wrote:
> What do you do at an AM in upper N.Y. state when the snow is 9 feet deep?
> Anything at all?

I lived in that area 25 years ago (the snow belt north of Syracuse)
but don't recall any antenna problems that were simply caused by snow.
 However, at the AM station I took care of during college, we had
trouble with ice forming around the tower base and pushing the
"lightning gap" together, shorting out the tower.  Until we had a
chance to improve drainage, I had to improvise an insulated spacer to
hold the two sides of the gap apart.

There was once an FM station located at the highest point of the Tug
Hill Plateau, due east of Lake Ontario in the area that has been
getting so much recent snowfall, but it only operated for three years
before the owner gave up.  At that time, the site wasn't served by
utility power; they had two Diesel generators on site and needed
a12,000 gal fuel tank to make it through the winter.  I recently wrote
the Wikipedia article about this "ghost station":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WVBN

Mark