Things a broadcast engineer learns on the job:
- Putting a big roll of coax in the back of a little pickup affects your ability to steer around switchbacks when going up a transmitter road. Those front tires need some weight on them.
- No matter how much you may swear, you still must drive back to the transmitter site to throw the switch to put the transmitter back into remote control.
- Devices that trigger on pulses to ground need to have a ground to pulse to.
- AM antennas located in auto junkyards radiate much better without chromed bumpers shorting the tower to ground. (How they got that over the fence I will never know.)
- The moment that you realize you don’t have keys to the transmitter building is after you’ve already made the snowshoe trek into the site. Check first or hide a spare on site.
- A properly maintained lightning gap at the base of an AM tower will attract insects at the most inconvenient moment.
- When the question is, “Should I stop here to use the restroom or hope there’s another one somewhere ahead,” the answer is to stop here.
- An engineer who does not carry toilet paper has never made a bandage from TP and electrical tape.
- Never call up your engineering associate at 3 a.m. to ask why the FM exciter audio is playing on the SCA and not on the air. Just move the cable from SCA to composite input. (When he asks you the next day whether you really called him or if he’d been dreaming, you might not be able to lie your way out of it.)
- Contact cleaner and WD-40 are NOT interchangeable.
- Things that are NEVER funny: Lightning. Snakes and rodents. Not being able to find the tweaker screwdriver to finish calibration.
- Radio Shack is out of business. If you are in a small town and do not have it with you, there’s no place to get it.
- Alligator clips and wire seldom correct problems in digital devices.
- Never look a gift horse in the mouth … but don’t buy a cheap used transmitter without serious investigation.
- Always tell the station manager the truth, in conversation and in writing, even if it is not what they want to hear. They will come to respect your honesty even if they don’t like your expenditures.
- Clip leads with a coating of dust on them are an indication of a temporary fix that has been around way too long.
- If you are working for a station that funds a drinking fountain but cannot afford parts for the transmitter, stop.
- Which is more dangerous to reach your hand into: a bag of rattlesnakes or an old high-power FM transmitter? Answer: Don’t try either unless you really know what you’re doing.
- No matter how many times they are told not to, air talent will bring drinks into a control room. Some will bring watermelon on a paper plate and drip it into the ventilation holes of an on-air computer. You can clean a CPU and socket with contact cleaner and get back on the air.
- If the station has been off for more than 10 minutes, the listeners are gone. Racing to the transmitter site and risking yourself to save a few minutes of downtime is unnecessary. Ignore the pressure from others and concentrate on solving the problem. No matter how long it takes to get back on, everyone will be happy when it is. If your station has done its job, your listeners will be back. After that, push for whatever is needed to reduce the possibility of the failure repeating.
- In moments of stress, remember: “If it’s not fun, I don’t do it.” Repeat until you almost believe it.
- Those jumper cables in the back of your vehicle can conduct a lot of current when pressed into service, even RF in some cases.
- When parking your open pickup truck at a transmitter site near a farmhouse with lots of cats, do not leave the station manager’s bucket of chicken in the back.
What are your ideas? Email them to radioworld@futurenet.com.
