In this letter to the editor, Doug Irwin responds to the story “Dodgers Win! Let’s Hear Some Kudos for Dodgers Radio,” which has since been updated to reflect the events outlined below. Irwin is regional engineering lead for iHeartMedia Los Angeles, which owns KLAC(AM). Radio World welcomes letters to the editor on this or any story. Email radioworld@futurenet.com.
Elle,
For starters I know I asserted the facts in the article weren’t accurate but now re-reading it I see the real issue was with the “note” from Paddy O’Reilly, quote: “I read on social media that the KLAC 570 AM transmitter went off air just ahead of the game” and “ … just like to say “Nice Work” and give much kudos to the KLAC engineers who restored the service before the end of the game.” While I appreciate the sentiment therein expressed, the reality is that KLAC was never off the air, and it then follows that service wasn’t “restored” before the game ended.
In fact what happened is that our transmitter site was broken in to, on this of all days, and essentially “vandalized.” The intention of the perpetrators (as all indications are there were two people) was criminal in nature, though the one perpetrator I did speak with before his subsequent arrest by the LA police department tried to explain to me that he has been hearing “tones” in his head for several years, which he claims are caused by RF radiation at 13.56 MHz. He recognized our towers are some sort of radio source and said he was trying to turn it off in order to see if the tones would go away. This is the story he also gave to the police.
What he (and I believe) an accomplice were able to achieve was the detuning of the phasor, the common point matching networks and diplexing filters. Fortunately, the detuning of these various controls was not enough to knock out our BE AM6 transmitter; the VSWR was vastly increased, as one would expect, and thus the transmitter folded back its power out to compensate. The power was rolled back to about kilowatt (into our non-d tower).
I was alerted the fact that this issue occurred by our remote control just after 10 in the morning of the day of game 5 of the World Series. I quickly tested the night antenna mode and the aux transmitter and found that both presented the same symptoms. At that point, I jumped in the car and headed to the site.
On the way, fighting the typical LA traffic on the 5 freeway, I called my friend and associate Burt Weiner, who’s an icon in Los Angeles radio engineering. Fortunately, he was in town and available to help out, and said he would meet me at the transmitter site. When he drove up our driveway he noticed that I was in the middle of a conversation with the one perpetrator who described the ringing in his head. This person was actually handicapped — walking around on crutches — and so when I caught him in the act at the center tower, and told him the police were on the way, he couldn’t do much to get away. Basically he told me the “ringing” story while we waited on the police.
Once the police had arrested the one perpetrator and taken him away we began in earnest seeing what the real issue was. Based on the evidence at hand, Burt suggested that many controls critical to the antenna operation had been touched. In Burt’s own words: “We discovered that all of the phasor control ‘crank counters’ had been turned to ‘zero.’ All of the variable/adjustable branches in the Phasor are by way of Vacuum Variable capacitors and the inductors are adjusted only by way of bolted clamps.” Those controls are actually located in a structure at the tower base, by the way — not indoors in the transmitter space.
Clearly we were going to have to return these controls to their original positions, but at this point in time we were about four hours ahead the pre-game show (starting at 4:08 PT). Since the transmitter was operating in a stable mode, it was decided by local engineering, local programming and our corporate counterparts, that we would not touch the system to effect repairs till after the game was over. The last thing we wanted to do was to inadvertently make something worse that would take the transmitter power down to zero with no time left ahead of the game (or even during the game).
After that decision was taken, our local programming folks decided it would be great to simulcast the game on KFI as well. KLAC was still getting out well, but at 1 kw the coverage was diminished.
The game and post-game didn’t end till midnight, after which we dug into the system and had it operating at full-power into the day and night antennas by about 3 a.m. No outages were experienced during the game.
An enormous thanks goes to Burt Weiner, along with Maurice Mischook and Matt Anderson (members of my staff) for hanging in there and getting KLAC back in shape. It was a long day indeed!
— Doug Irwin
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