[BC] When the heater is left on too long

[Broadcast List USER]

I had a problem-child 7-Midnight jock at one station.  He was a nice enough guy, but thought he was technical.  He wasn't.  He had many run- ins with law enforcement, mostly for driving issues, but he never took a ticket lying down.  He got in the face of the cops and always made it into a much bigger issue than it should have been.

He also did middays Saturday.  One Saturday he called to say the station sounded funny.  I tuned it in, and it didn't sound funny, it sounded bad.  It was very distorted, like it wasn't tuned in properly.  I asked for the transmitter parameters and they were OK.  I asked about alarms on the Remote Control.  High Temp was lit.  Since  important alarms turned on two big red flood lights, I asked him why he didn't call me when they came on.  He didn't want to bother me!  I  came to believe he was one of those guys who filled out the technical log at the end of his shift.  He would lie about the time he took the readings.  I have always made it clear that if you miss a reading, you missed it and when you do it, record the actual time.

I made the 90 minute drive to the transmitter and opened the door.   On the way to the transmitter, I heard the left channel quit.  I was not a happy camper.

Once I opened the door the heat was totally un-tolerable.  We had a second door to an area for two-way equipment, a "room"  that was separated by a a wall of expanded metal.

I had a mercury thermometer that had a top reading of 135 degrees.  it then had about another 12 degrees of unmarked tube, then a second bulb 
area at the top.  That bulb was full of mercury.  It was at least 147 degrees!

I couldn't get the AC to run, and I couldn't stand to be in the building for long, so I went to Wal-Mart and bough half a dozen box fans, and bottled water.

I came back and blew Summer air into the building.  It got cool enough, about 110 degrees, that I could stand it and got one of the two AC units to run.  I ran the closed circuit AC, but left the doors open.  I finally got the second AC unit running.

Well, we had a Wilkinson Aux, and all the aluminum square channel trim fell off the transmitter onto the floor.  The name plate on the front  did too.  The Continental main transmitter shed all of it's trim too. Funny that that stuff is glued on, but it makes sense if they don't want to show screws.  The reason the left channel dropped out was that the left channel STL receiver went so far off frequency that it lost the transmitter.  The reason for the horrible distortion were the STL receivers going off frequency.

Strangely enough, the 2-Meter and 6-Meter GE Mastr Pro ham repeaters kept working fine.

I should have made a big deal about him not calling earlier and gotten him fired, but I didn't.  However, he was fired soon after for unrelated issues.

--chip