[BC] Ill-starred Starguide

[Tom Taggart]

Interesting 24 hours.  10:30 Wednesday night--call from the GM. No audio on one of our satellite fed stations.  Starguide in an "acquiring" mode. Mind you, that I'm 56 miles away, and the county still has a "level II" travel alert in place from the recent storm.

Now we have three Starguides, all fed from one satellite, and two on ABC.  The LNB has an independent supply, and the two ABC Starguides are in different rooms. The one on classic rock is grooving along quite nicely, while the AC receiver is the one that's lost it's way. So it's a receiver problem, not a dish problem.

After a call to ABC NY, the GM finds that the confused receiver is off frequency.  Adjusts it back, but it still won't lock.  A reboot is suggested....except the power cord is somewhat buried.

We remodeled the control room last year, replacing the 36" rack on-top of the butcher-block countertop with a minimalist design. Everything moved off the top of the genuine imitation granite Formica save the console, computer monitor, and a small rack with a dual CD player.  Everything else out of sight. Mounted into rack rails bolted into Lowe's best kitchen cabinetry. So the GM pulls the receiver half-out of this "rack," reboots the receiver, but still can't get it to lock.

Meanwhile, the ops manager has been busy. He has the station programmed through noon the next day with music off hard-drive (he just got done with loading some 300 more songs into the system--whew!).  Scheduled in the spots and alternating school closing announcements every stopset. 

The ops mgr. was at home 20 miles away-(gotomypc very handy--especially coupled with a home studio & Sound Forge 6)--so after he recorded the last revised school closing announcement, (called in at 10:30 PM??) and dropped it into the system, he went to bed around 11:30. As did I, around midnight. The GM went home--he's just down the hill from the station.

Got out early this morning.  Half way over to the station, the satellite receiver suddenly came back to life (pot still open).  Once I finally got there and opened up the box, I found some dust on the fan, but nothing else unusual.

Pulled the fan out, cleaned it off, and re-installed. Ran fine--moved air. Stuck the Starguide back into the rack, everything normal.  My best guess is that the fan got a dust bunny stuck in its throat, and quit, and the receiver overheated.  But that doesn't explain why it took until 8 the next morning to revive (it was left balanced half out of the rack).  Since it was about 2 degrees outside overnight, our heat pump was struggling to keep up, so the building hasn't been overly warm.

The "rack" is a 24 inch kitchen cabinet base--door pulled off, couple of 2X4's used to shrink the opening to 18" and rack rails mounted to the 2X4's. A Middle Atlantic 3 1/2" fan panel in the bottom two slots forces air into the cabinet.  Up top, the "kitchen drawer" was removed and replaced with a vented rack panel to allow warm air out.  There's some heat producing equipment besides the Starguide: power supply for the Auditronics, and a BGW monitor amp, but everything was quite happy this summer. So I can't quite figure why heat would have been the problem, or why the fan  just decided not to move any air, then came back to normal. 

The more logical explanation is that the cold weather chased the trolls in from their caves. One holed up in the cabinet, and stuffed one of his socks over the fan opening to keep things quiet....
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