In this letter to the editor, the author comments on David Bialik’s recent story “Cleanup in Studio 3: All in a Day’s Work.” Comment on this or any article. Email [email protected].
David Bialik’s story reminded me of one of my favorite “Bill vs the GM” stories.
I was contracting for an FM that was owned by an estate. The estate lawyers would begrudgingly pay for repairs but would not spend a penny for preventive maintenance.
The station had an old, aging RCA BTF-10D transmitter. It had many known problems but no money would be approved to bring it up to snuff. One issue was that the original RCA driver had been replaced by a Sparta 250W driver that would eat a 4CX250 every couple of weeks.
Anyway, late one afternoon, I started getting pages. At that time the transmitter site was staffed for another station so I called the operator and asked for a favor: “Hit the reset switch and let me know what happens.” He came back to the phone and said “A bright flash came out of the PA and it tripped off again.”
So I fought my way through afternoon traffic to the transmitter. When I got there, I found the same bright flash.
Then the station phone rang. It was the GM. He asked “How much longer will we be off the air?” My answer was “It will be longer if I have to answer stupid questions” and hung up the phone.
I knew that sooner or later the estate would finally sell the station to a new owner and new staff would be brought on board. The existing GM and I did not get along. He was a big, tall guy and used his size to manipulate people. But I’m 6′ 4″ and tall enough that he couldn’t do it with me. That bugged him. And to make it even better I called him “Shorty.”
Turns out that the PA problem was that the plate DC came through the plate capacitor as a Teflon-insulated wire. The wire had broken off at the plate terminal lug. I was able to push enough slack up the capacitor and resoldered the lug and got it working in an hour or so.
Back to David Bialik’s story. There’s a story — perhaps urban legend — that an LA rock station put their engineer in a hospital after he inhaled the copious white powder inside the console.
— Bill Ruck, San Francisco
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