[BC] Class "D" AM Towers

[Dana Puopolo]

Yes, I have also heard this. The two BE 50s are still there as far as I know.
One is used as a back up to the DX-50. The irony was that I completely rebuilt
that DX-50, which is the reason it's so reliable today. When I started there
it would only run for about 14 hours at a time before it's drive dropped to
the point where it shut down.  They had home box fans cooling its driver and
had put a macro in the remote control to automatically put the 10 kW aux (a DX
10) on the air 15 minutes after 7 PM (their paid programming ended at 7 PM).
The macro woud put the DX-50 back on again at 5:45 AM-meaning it had the
overnight to cool down, so it would run again for paid time.

Pathetic, huh? 

I had Ralph Wegman from Harris Field support come in and we did about 35 field
modifications that had never been done. It took almost three weeks to get them
to agree to pay the for Harris to even come. Ralph, Marv Collins and I worked
on that rig about 15 hours a day for four days. When Ralph left he gave me
several large bags of parts, a mod paper and said: "You have to do this to all
150 (give ot take) RF modules in the transmitter".

Marvin and I did them in groups of six. He pulled and re-installed them and I
did the bench work. When we started doing them, we discovered that there was a
FET source resistor made up of two 220 ohm 5 watt resistors in parellel on
each set of fets on each module. Over half the resistors were cooked-and would
disintrgrate when touched-leaving my hands covered with carbon. We wound uo
replacing every one of these resistors on every module too.

Of course this meant that they were on 10 kw for almost an entire week. Every
day the LMA client would call screaming that he was still on 10 kW-and every
day I'd get screamed at too by MRBI. 

In the middle of this I got a call that a week old printer in traffic at the
studio wasn't working. I told them to use the old back up printer-I had a
transmitter in pieces. Ten minutes later I got a call ordering me back to the
studio-a 45 minute drive in rush hour traffic. I got there and found they had
put over 300 sheets of paper in the 150 sheet cartridge. How did I know this?
In big black letters on the cartridge it said: "Do not put over 150 sheets
into this cartridge or printer will misfeed". Disgusted, I took half the
paper, pulled it out of the cartridge, threw it in the trash and shoved the
cartridge in-and the printer began to print. Later on I got called on the
carpet for wasting paper!

I was responsible for five multi tower DAs, the 1230 hammock, two leased and
locally programmed SCAs, and a class A FM-spread out all over the LA basin. I
also was the only studio engineer-and then when they discovered that I could
do IT, they got rid of the part time IT guy and put that on me too.

This is what happens when one worker has 15 bosses. Ten of them are pissed at
you at any one time because you can't clone yourself and JUMP for their
problem, no matter how minor it is.

Are you beginning to realize how miserable it was there?

-D

From: Dave Hultsman <DHults1043 at aol.com>

In a message dated 2/15/2010 10:46:57 AM Central Standard Time,
cozy659 at yahoo.com writes:
>It never worked and I believe it was returned to BE.. and they are
>still running on the Harris DX-50.
The last I heard there were two of the BE 50's sitting in the building in LA. 
The second was a replacement for for the first unit.  The replacement had some
of the same problems.
 
Dave