[BC] Snow.blizzard fading?

[R. V. Zeigler]

Dave and the group,
I have been here for almost 3 years. It might have been me as I was 
charged with "getting our range back" by the Board of Directors in my 
first meeting with them. What it turned out to be, and found by Kevin 
Kidd, was simply our audio processing. He explained the "strange" 
modulation display I saw but could not change no matter what I did. One 
new processor later and we have our range back to what it was in the 
"good ole' days" and the Board is happy! Our mod was peaking at 
+105%/-100, but then sinking back to +/- 50% giving us a 75%-80% 
average. The old processor was unable to maintain a decent average mod, 
no matter what we did to it.
I lost track of everyone whose brains I picked during that ordeal. We 
finally hired Kevin to check out the ground system, which passed with 
flying colors along with the rest of the plant. It was one of those 
situations where I knew something was wrong, was looking right at it, 
but it just did not register. One more thing to store in the organic 
hard drive for future use!
If it was me, I would like to thank you now for your input. If was 
longer than 3 years ago, it would have been the previous engineer, but 
if I was going to bet the rent, I would bet it was me.

As to Richards suggestion regarding static in the snow. Would make sense 
to me. We had something similar happening last Spring/Summer with a 
digital 950 MHz STL hop, but ONLY when  storms were 10 miles away or so. 
If we were under the storm, and it was raining or very humid, everything 
worked fine.  I finally watched the Rx signal level one night while this 
was happening and it would slowly move up in strength, and we would drop 
out.  The Rx level would peak, fall quickly back to normal, and we were 
back on.  We were building up a static charge which desensed the 
receiver, but fooled the level circuitry. I had seen this before in the 
2-Way biz so I recognized what was going on. Improved grounding for the 
tower fixed the problem.
I have seen static in snow, dust, and grain harvesters on hot dry days 
do this.

I am  completely convinced that if you keep reading this list long 
enough, you will learn most of what you need to become fairly competent! 
All of the people here with a whole lot of good experience and knowledge 
is too good a resource to pass up!

Rod

-- 
R. V. Zeigler, Dir. of Eng.
Nebraska Rural Radio Assn.
KRVN-KTIC-KNEB
rzeigler at krvn.com