[BC] Night time jock at a studio located at the transmitter

[Tim Sawyer]

I'll share a bit of a funny story - (funny now - not so funny at the time).
Maybe you've all heard something like this before:

The station was a 5-kW, 5-tower directional night - with studios located at
the transmitter site. They had a new Midnight to 6 AM jock that seems to be
an ok guy - showed up on time, etc. Filled out the operation and program
logs, etc. - in those days he was a keeper just with those two
accomplishments.

One night the chief was headed home from being out, he drove by one of the
deep pattern nulls that just wasn't there anymore. Well that was odd - so he
went to the transmitter/studios to investigate.  

According to the story, the look on the Jock's face show some level of oh-oh
- something was up - but exactly what wasn't clear until he took a look at
the antenna parameters - they were out on a couple of towers - odd - back to
the phasor to look around.  Well, well, well - seems somebody had done a bit
of knob twisting - bottom line the Jock would adjust the pattern each night
so that his girlfriend that lived in a null could hear him better, and then
he'd reset it at the end of his shift.  

No he wasn't fired - remember? He showed up on time! - he never touched the
phasor again - The work around was that his girlfriend was given the phone
number of the station "listen to"  line - remember those? - dialup coupler
to the audio.

TZS