Trip's WDBJ Job Blog

Today was an interesting day.

As soon as Scott came in, we dashed out the door to head up to the mountain. Of course, there were severe thunderstorm warnings in the area, with Leo Hirsbrunner having given the ominous phrase "hail reported." But that didn't stop us, as we went up Poor Mountain in the pouring rain.

We got up there and Scott says "there's two of us, but only one umbrella." We looked at each other for a second and then I asked "you want me to go?" He was grinning and nodded. I went "okay." Took his keys, got my umbrella to almost open, then jumped out into the rain. Of course, it was raining sideways almost (3500+ feet in a thunderstorm, what did I expect?) and of course the rain was coming from the direction of the gate. So attempting to hold the umbrella in such a way to keep from getting wet would have blocked me from the lock. I put the umbrella over my shoulder and removed the lock, then latched open the left gate, then the right one. Knowing I couldn't possibly close my umbrella and get in without getting myself and my stuff inside the truck wet, I made a mad dash for the garage door, which I then opened as Scott parked the truck.

I was only soaked on the front of my clothes, at least.

Got inside and the transmitter looked fine. Went in and fired up our little DTV-watching rig to find we couldn't decode our own signal with the roof antenna. Unhooking the antenna entirely, however, got a clean decode. Then Scott brought in a spare monitor that we'd brought from the studio to replace the one we had up there, which was much too dim. Put that in place and were most pleased with it. We also tested another spare monitor that turned out to not work at all.

Brought the other stuff in and then I decided to break out the spectrum analyzer for a while. There was tropo out, so I had some unusual signals.

Poor Mountain Airwaves

Anyway, when I was done playing with that, we went back down the mountain to the studio. I sat with Scott in the lobby for a while until the President's Club Award ceremony started at 12:45. I think it's something Jeff started that basically rewards people who've done outstanding things at the station. And there was free pizza.

It's amazing just how many people are so dedicated. I would not mind working at WDBJ permanently.

Jeff asked me before it started if I would "miss the free food." And I told him that I don't care about the food, I'm going to miss the environment. And I will. One week left.

After that ended, I chatted with Tom for a little bit and other than Jeff asking me a question about 16:9 formatting, I just poked at my website for most of the rest of the afternoon. Oh, and Alan gave me a shirt!

I want to step off the normal path for a minute and comment on the passing of yet another commercial classical station.

On my wall in my room at home, I have a list on notebook paper of all the commercial classical stations in the United States, AM and FM. It doesn't fill the 26-ish lines on the sheet. When I get home in a week and a half, I will have to erase yet another line.

That line is the station on the top line of my list, WQXR 96.3B in New York. For those who have not heard, the station is about to be part of a three-way sale and swap. The New York Times is going to swap the 96.3B frequency for 105.9B1, also on the Empire State Building but 10 dB weaker, and then WQXR will become a part of non-commercial WNYC (AM 820, FM 93.9B), who will drop classical music from the 93.9 frequency. The end result will be all NPR talk on 93.9B, Spanish-language "La Kalle" on 96.3B, and non-commercial Classical on 105.9B1.

I've always been a rock music fan, but I also like classical music. It's music that's beautiful, deep, and truly international. That music of this caliber and strength has been fading from commercial airwaves and can only be preserved on a non-commercial basis is a sad reflection of the shortened attention span of people today.

My list has grown shorter and shorter as the years have gone by. I had to erase 102.5B from WCRB and replace it with 99.5B. I had to erase KKGO 105.1B. I had to move WGMS from 103.5B to 104.1B and 103.9A, and then erase them outright. Many of the remaining signals are weaker stations or rimshots trying to get a signal into a place where it probably doesn't do too well.

I can think of a few remaining commercial Classical stations in major markets on good signals. Among them are WFMT 98.7B, WRR 101.1C, and KDFC 102.1B. I will need to check my list when I return home, but I thought of all of them, WQXR would be one that never went anywhere. With it seemingly on its way out, I'm left to wonder if these stations are also going to disappear soon.

Perhaps I should make a list and put it on RabbitEars. It'd be like the VOD page--completely unrelated to site topics, but still important in its own way. Something to consider.

It is here! WDBJ is now operating at 675 kW ERP.

Got there in the morning quite excited about it. Scott arrived and we grabbed some coax and some other cable to use as rotor wire, plus some parts, and some dead monitors and drove up on the hill. We set up the probe and adjusted the phasing on the two cabinets, which was actually quite a bit off. Got all the gear out and set up for when Alan arrived to do the power boost.

He arrived and we turned it up!  I have pictures, but my camera cable is not with me so I cannot upload them as I'd like to.  (When Wally gets here, I'll ask if he knows where I can find a card reader.)  Went to confirm our numbers and Scott disconnected something out of order and the transmitter crowbarred.  Upon hooking it back up, only cabinet 1 came back up.  Cabinet 2's power supply had a lovely "breaker tripped" light on it.  Trying to push the reset button had no effect.  There was a breaker on the front of the cabinet that tripped too.  Fixing that one and then pressing the power supply breaker reset would trip the transmitter breaker again.  Alan joked that we'd burned out the beam power supply, since the "breaker tripped" light would only come on if the beam power breaker was on.  Anyway, Scott shut down the cabinet, breaker box, and switch outside, and then when everything was turned back on, the transmitter came back up.

Did some more fine tuning to it, including shoulder adjustments (which I was responsible for) to try and bump the SNR and EVM but it didn't get any better than it had been before the power boost.  Once everything was settled and handled, Alan headed back to the studio.

After all of that was settled and the mess cleaned up, we took the coax and the to-be rotor wire and ran new cabling from the roof to the workshop. It didn't take long and was quite fun to run.  Put some ends on, taped up the outside, and then came in and tried it.  This table shows the results, as whether it decoded or not:

Station		Fusion (Old cable)	Fusion (New cable)	Zenith DTT900	Harris ARX-H200	Notes
(02-1) WFMY 51		Yes.	Yes.	Yes.	Yes.
(04-1) WUNC 25		No.	No.	No.	Yes.	Low power.
(05-1) WRAL 48		Yes.	Yes.	Yes.	No.
(07-1) WDBJ 18		Yes.	Yes.	Yes.	Yes.
(08-1) WGHP 08		No.	No.	No.	No.	VHF antenna sections disconnected due to FM problems.
(08-1) WGHP 35		Yes.	Yes.	Yes.	Yes.
(10-1) WSLS 30		Yes.	Yes.	Yes.	No.
(13-1) WSET 34		No.	No.	No.	No.	Antenna aimed wrong for this station.
(15-1) WBRA 03		Yes.	Yes.	Yes.	Yes.
(16-1) WGPX 14		No.	No.	Yes.	Yes.
(20-1) WCWG 19		No.	No.	No.	No.	Probably swamped by WDBJ on 18.
(21-1) WWCW 20		No.	Yes.	Yes.	Yes.	Antenna aimed wrong for this station.
(24-1) WDRL 24		No.	No.	Yes.	Yes.
(27-1) WFXR 17		Yes.	Yes.	Yes.	Yes.
(38-1) WPXR 36		Yes.	Yes.	Yes.	Yes.
(40-1) WLFB 40		No.	No.	No.	Yes.	Antenna aimed wrong for this station.
(43-1) WLXI 43		No.	No.	Yes.	Yes.
(45-1) WXLV 29		Yes.	No.	Yes.	Yes.
(47-1) WGSR-LD 47		No.	No.	No.	Yes.	Picture is both highly compressed and using analog source.
(48-1) WMYV 33		No.	No.	No.	Yes.
(50-1) WRAZ 49		No.	No.	Yes.	No.

Anyway, after that, we closed everything up and came down the mountain. =)

After two days of relative quiet, Friday was a day filled with excitement.

On Wednesday evening, I had sent out six e-mails requesting programming information in the event I was to buy a low-powered TV station. Of those six, I got two e-mails back telling me they were forwarding it to other people, and one (from Untamed Sports TV) who wanted to call me on Friday morning. So at 8:30, before my day technically starts, I took his call. He basically told me there was no way to make money in TV without cable carriage, and even WITH cable carriage the market is depressed enough that it doesn't make sense to get into TV. So I'm thinking I won't do it, even though I'd like to do it just for fun even. I might still think about it, but I'm not nearly as enthusiastic.

Anyway, earlier in the week, one of the two KVMs on the automation server died. Now we've had a problem with one of the server programs locking up, and it required the screen to be active to fix, so this was rather urgent. We'd had a replacement KVM screen overnighted, and despite having the same names on it and everything, the plugs were completely different. Since I was sick of sitting around doing nothing, I ran around with Brian (the IT guy) trying to figure out what to do about it. Eventually, we figured out that we could swap some parts from the KVM on the traffic servers into the automation serviers, and put some of the new gear in traffic, and it would be able to work properly. Alan was supposed to be on vacation this week, but he came in to attack this since it was so urgent, and at 11 during The Price is Right, we hurriedly swapped all the gear around and were back up on the automation by 11:45. It was quite the hectic morning.

After noon, it started off slow again. Wally left at 1:30 since he'd be coming in on Saturday to reboot the servers, so we got a reception call that I took, and then a call about My 19 breaking up on Cox cable. I checked and sure enough, it was breaking up. I ended up telling the MCO since I didn't think any other engineers were in the building. She, in turn, called Alan who was also seeing it at home. After that, I hung out in master control for a while, and then I went back to engineering and sat around for a while. At 4PM, I was called by a reporter from the Associated Press who had found my VHF Nightmares page and wanted my thoughts. So I spent 45 minutes on the phone and explained what I thought and what the situation is. He said he didn't think he had a story, but was just seeking information. Fine by me!

I spent some more time in Master Control before coming back here for the weekend. And the weekend is exciting in itself. I'll post an entry about that later, when the weekend is over. =)

Well, I'm back from vacation, which was quite interesting. Made lots of stops for station captures, got some new ones I really needed. Also saw the Armstrong Tower, but it was gated so I only saw it from a distance.

On the way to Roanoke on Sunday, I did some signal checking. I used Linux instead of Windows and just watched the signal. In a few places, I checked that it decoded, spot checked 10 and 27 to compare, etc. I could find nothing wrong with our signal.

Anyway, yesterday was a rather dull day. Alan's on vacation this week, and a lot of little things have to get done. I helped Wally as much as I could with some short cables he was making but he wanted to do the soldering himself so I spent a lot of time bored. I made a spreadsheet of all of TBN's translators while he did that. The rest of the day was equally uneventful.

Today, it was back to the mountain! Got up there with Scott just in time for the generator technician to come. He does inspections every 6 months to make sure everything's okay. While he did that, Scott and I shut off half of the transmitter to check on an oil leak in one of the supplies outside. We opened it up and found out that a piece of pipe had been cross-threaded and it had taken til now to start leaking. It's not a bad leak, so we're going to wait until Alan gets back to try to get something done about it.

After that, Scott had some things to take care of while I played with the antenna. I'm so amused with the amount of signals I can see, but disappointed with how few of those signals decode. I blame WSLQ. I decoded the usual suspects from the shop (7, 10, 15, 27, 38, and 40) and then went out to the room where the analog exciters are located. From there, I was able to decode WXLV, WGHP-UHF, WLXI, WGSR-LD (broadcasting nothing but null packets), and WFMY. I chatted with the generator guy for a few minutes, and then he was showing Scott some things about the generator while I tinkered with the source code for the Linux signal utility.

Then it was lunchtime. After lunch, we attacked some unlabeled switches on the generator with the label maker, and then opened some windows in the downstairs apartment. The goal was to clean it up to make more room for storage, but the mold smell was so strong I was having trouble breathing. We left some windows open to let it air out, and when we came back at the end of the day (having not gotten back to it) the air was clear, so next time we're up there the windows will be opened as soon as we arrive so we can get to it.

After spending a few minutes commenting to each other about Michael Jackson, Scott decided to take some readings. While he did that, I hooked up the roof antenna to my tuner and observed that nothing would decode except 15 and 27. So, it was off to the roof! Scott went up with me and we observed that the antenna was aimed straight into a pole, thus explaining the non-existent reception. I hooked it straight into the laptop and had a ton of trouble getting it to decode anything. We determined that WSLQ was probably swamping it, so we disconnected the VHF end of it. Suddenly, UHFs from North Carolina started coming in! Scott went in to do some things that he did not need me for, and I played with the antenna aiming. I played with it for a while until I got too hot sitting on the roof, so I bolted it in a position where I found the maximum number of signals and came in.

I arrived inside at the hookup to the roof antenna (right behind the exciter cabinet and across from the transmitters) and showed Scott what I could now receive. He asked if I could still receive the locals. Just as I tuned to 7-1 to show him I could, the power dipped and the transmitter crowbarred. Cabinet 1 came right back up, but cabinet 2 wanted to warm up again. The timing could not have been better. That was taken care of, and then we discussed running a cable from the antenna into the shop. But I can now receive these channels on Poor Mountain:

2-1 WFMY HD (CBS)
2-2 WFMY SD (Wx)
2-3 WFMYSD2 (Blank)
5-1 WRAL HD (CBS)
5-2 WRAL 2 (This)
7-1 WDBJ (CBS)
7-2 MY19 (MyN)
8-1 FOX8 WGHP (FOX)
10-1 WSLS-HD (NBC)
10-2 WSLS-DT (Wx)
15-1 WBRA-HD (PBS)
15-2 WBRA-SD (PBS)
15-3 World (PBS World)
24-1 WDRL (IND) - WDRL scanned in but wouldn't decode. Interestingly, I monitored the signal for a minute or two and it spiked to about 17 dB once and then disappeared entirely. I do not know why.
27-1 WFXRHD (FOX)
27-2 WCW5 (CW)
38-1 ION - WPXR, but of course the PSIP didn't give the call sign.
38-2 qubo
38-3 IONLife
38-4 Worship
40-1 WLFB SD - This one was scanned in from being received indoors, but cannot be viewed with the roof antenna in its current position.
45-1 WXLV-DT (ABC)
50-1 WRAZ-HD (FOX) - WRAZ and its subchannels were very broken up but the Zenith would have decoded them had I hooked it up.
50-2 RTN (RTV)
50-3 WRAZ 2 (FOX)

Afterward, we called the WSLQ engineer about the lights in his transmitter room being left on, and then came back down the mountain. Scott will not be in on Friday, but next Tuesday WDBJ will be increasing power from 460 kW to 675 kW. I cannot wait. =)

It was another dull day. The Z-Tech didn't show up so we couldn't do the field testing, the new PSIP software didn't show up so I couldn't play with that. I took a few phone calls including one that was a follow-up from June 12--a success story!

I ended up adding a new page to RabbitEars. I call it VHF Nightmares. I am hoping to keep it up and follow what happens with various VHF stations until the issues get resolved.

With the DTV transition stuff absorbing most of my time, I was unable to write as much as I wanted to, although in all honesty, there was nothing to say. I mostly took phone calls or waited to take phone calls. So, that's that.

I did go up on the mountain with Scott on Day Sixteen, but it was so foggy as to be impossible to do anything outside. I got a few pictures of it though.

Head in a Cloud

I was reading up on the transition on AVS for a lot of June 12.

Seriously, what are the chances that DTV Transition Day just happens to be the day of some of the most intense e-skip in a very long time?

Something about it seemed almost perfect. People were watching local analogs sign off only for stations 1000 miles away to pop in and fill the void that was left.

It was as though analog TV was saying "look at me, here's what I can do." Analog TV was saying goodbye in the best way it could, at least to DXers like me.

I'm saddened that I was stuck answering phones instead of searching for skip. (I now realize I should have tried the TV in the engineering shop and watched channel 2.) But I'm glad that it worked out for others, who were excitedly enjoying the last big analog propagation event.

It almost brings a tear to my eye. I can't think of a better way for analog to end than with a bang like that.

Not a whole lot of note yesterday. I mostly hung around with Wally the engineer and ran some cable, repaired some weather gear, soldered some things, etc. I also helped with the HD logo inserter for the ID at the top of the hour, and listened to Rush a bit with Wally. =)

Today is turning out to be alright. Bit busy trying to juggle phone calls and my website. I'll be working on a post on and off all day probably.

Pics from yesterday.

There will be no day 12, for I spent 16 hours at WDBJ yesterday and those extra 8 hours count as today. No lie. And it was exhausting! It shouldn't have been as bad as it was, but it was. Just you wait and see.

The day started out alright. I lugged my digital radio, laptop, and digital tuner along with me to take up to Poor Mountain today, so I had a lot of stuff to carry. Sat in master control with the MCO and did a bit of nothing for a while. Then Scott arrived and we headed out to the mountain, with all my stuff plus a roof antenna for the roof of WDBJ's transmitter building. Stopped at that convenience store again on the way up, and she complained that the box shuts itself off after a few hours, so I disabled the auto-shutoff.

We got to the mountain and checked everything. Because there was a chance of rain later and it needed to be done, Scott said he would cut the grass. While he did that, I was to look at the roof and figure out what to do with it. So there were some mounts for a mast on the side of a part of the building that were unused, and an old antenna that had most of its elements stripped off by wind. I traced the wire (RG-6) of that existing antenna and found it wasn't hooked to anything inside. So I brought the new-ish antenna up to the roof and assembled it, then noticed that one of the pieces that makes the connection between the UHF and VHF elements had broken. I decided to wait for Scott before doing anything with that, but I played with the existing antenna, had it hooked to my digital tuner and was seeing what I could receive. Managed the Poor Mountain stations and WUNC-DT, but that was about it. I tried turning it and playing with it, until I was satisfied. I then took the old antenna and its mast down and put it on the other mounts, which were higher up on the building. I secured it in place and decided that I'd done all I could do until Scott finished, and just then, he finished.

I told him about the broken piece so we procured some copper wire and made a piece to fix it. Went up on the roof and fixed it, then put it on the mast to test inside. Performance was not as great as we had hoped, and I think that has to do with the high noise floor on the mountain. Every analog but 7 had herringbone interference, probably from WSLQ right there. I'll need to try an FM trap most likely to see if I can filter it out, but I am not sure I'll be successful in filtering it. Anyway, then we decided to have lunch.

During lunch, I strung up my dipole and played with my digital radio. Whereas any other FM receiver I've tried up there gets swamped by WSLQ, my Sony filtered it out very well. I heard 94.9 in one or two places it didn't belong, and 99.1 in one or two places it didn't belong, but everything else was very well isolated. I heard some things I didn't recognize, probably from West Virginia, and it was amusing just how much you can hear up there when you're not getting demolished by intermod and noise. I heard 102.5 from Marion, which is amusing since there's a vacant allotment for 102.5 on in Shawsville, which is right at the foot of Poor Mountain.

After lunch, we had to tune the transmitter. The replacement small signal board arrived (I made a point of remembering its name!) and so we shut off the right cabinet of the transmitter and the part got replaced. I did a lot of the work on that while Scott checked over some other things, and upon replacing it, we found that the R7 pot now worked properly. We then tuned the transmitter. First he played with it a bit, and then he gave me the screwdriver and I fine-tuned it to be as good as possible. We closed it up, let it warm up, and upon trying it, it's better than the left cabinet now. He then adjusted the phasing since the new board made it out of phase. The EVM on the signal overall is now down to 3.5, which means it should be easier to pick up today now.

Once we'd cleaned up all the tools and checked all the measurements, it was back up to the roof with us. A few times I turned the antenna and tried reception inside, but we figured out this was a really inefficient way to do it. Instead, we dragged an extension cord, some RG-59 that was handy, and the spectrum analyzer up to the roof. I was disappointed with how little I saw. I couldn't even receive WSET-DT from Lynchburg, which can be seen on analog with just a wire for an antenna. I'm tempted to blame the noise floor and WSLQ for it, so hopefully it can be cleaned up. We locked the antenna with it aimed at Greensboro, though nothing from there decodes for me. Scott said he's going to try to get a rotor so we can work on it from inside.

After that, Scott got cleaned up and we left to go down the mountain back to the studio. We left around 4:40 and needed to stop for fuel in Roanoke. Right after we left there to continue to the station, at 5:20 Scott got a call on the cell phone--the analog signal was running at 25% power. So, we had to turn around and go back up the mountain. On the way, Robert from WWCW/WFXR called to ask me if I could check signal for him since WWCW-DT 20 had just signed on. This morning I checked and it's maxing me out at, and that's at low power!

We got there (5:55) just in time for a torrential downpour mixed with hail. We sat outside the gate for about 10 minutes, then drove down toward WPXR and sat under a tree looking back up toward WDBJ. I called my dad to ask what the radar looked like since neither of us could remember the master control number, and he said there was a lot more coming. We saw lightning hit the WBRA tower and the WSLQ tower, and I snapped some pictures of the hail. Then the hail got bigger and we realized this tree wasn't going to protect the truck, so then we rolled up toward WXLK and sat under a tree there. Around 6:20, the hail ended and Scott decided to go through the rain to unlock the gate. I offered him my umbrella but he had one in the truck he had yet to use. Well, it wouldn't open, so he eventually chucked it out the door into a puddle. I gave him my umbrella and he got out and opened the gate as quickly as possible. He pulled right up next to the garage, I jumped out and opened the garage door, and we dashed inside just as the hail started again.

He reset the breaker on the transmitter and up came the other half. It wasn't lightning-related; the power supply in one half of the transmitter is on death's door, and has been doing this sporadically for a week or two. We walked around and looked for leaks for a bit, then when the rain let up, we left for Roanoke again. We got down the mountain and stopped at Kroger so I could get a drink. Dad called when we got back to the station because I hadn't called him back, but cell phones are flaky on the mountain and there was rain on the way back so it would have been difficult to hear.

Upon going inside (7:45), I gave my pictures to Brent Watts, who ended up using one of them on the 10PM and 11PM news. In particular, this picture. After giving them to him, I went and sat in master control. The MCOs were trying to juggle weather crawls and election crawls which use the same equipment. So until about 9, I helped them keep that straight. They kept joking that the viewers were "going to hate us" by the end of the evening, since WDBJ cannot yet crawl over HD. I was later sent across the street to get some food (I hadn't eaten anything but my sandwich at lunch and a cookie around 4) and we ate for a bit during some primetime shows. Watched the 10 and 11PM newscasts, and watched election results and weather while handling a few more weather warnings. There was a problem with the lottery feed but WTVR called and warned us ahead of time that they were having issues, and that there would be no feed this evening. The time was filled with 30 seconds of the lottery numbers on a static slide with the news music as the background.

Just before midnight, the MCO shifts changed and I was taken back here. I went to bed around 2:30 last night after getting caught up on AVS and other odds and ends, and now I'm just sitting here typing this up. I still need to sift through the pictures and get them posted to the gallery, and I have new ones from yesterday, so it'll be coming soon I hope.

Choice quote of the evening, while in master control: "He [Brent] didn't say he [me] was an intern because it would look bad. 'Yeah, we sent the intern up on the mountain during a hail-filled thunderstorm, because we're completely trying not to kill him.'"