[BC] Stations that sign off

[patrick roberts]

When I took over the CE job at KGOU we were set up to shut off at midnight
and return at 5am.  It was mainly to keep from having to send their aging CE
that I replaced on his retirement out to the transmitter site at night.
There was also some concern of what to program overnight.  We quickly went
to full-time operation when I came on board because I would rather KNOW of a
problem and fix it overnight that be under the gun to fix something during
morning drive when people care more about an outage.  Honestly, the tube on
our tube rig has lasted longer than previous tubes have and the number of
failures have went down greatly.  It's hard on equipment that is intended to
run 24/7 to cycle off (cool) then back on (hot).  It's just asking for more
trouble IMHO.  The other thing that I really enjoyed about 24/7 operation is
that I didn't have to mess with keeping the silence sensor off (via the
remote) during the off times.  That was always a big pain in the butt to
keep running right. (much more than an occational off-air emergency IMHO)

We also kicked our Norman stick up to it's full 6,000 watts ERP soon after I
arrived.  There was some concern that the air conditioner wouldn't handle
the transmitter at full power during the summer months.  A quick call to
Harris and a look at the efficiencies of the transmitter brought to light
that the heat BTUs off the solid state transmitter wouldn't increase much
due to the fact full power is much more efficient offsetting the heat
because of increased power out.  The extra 3db has helped us during tropo
ducting events to blanket over it a bit better.  Since I've kept a close eye
on the air conditioner coils to make sure they stay blown out outside
instead of relying on the university's physical plant to actually do their
job right the air conditioner is able to keep O.K. enough, even during the
several over 100 degree days we had this season.

PR