If I touch this tower, I die

this is the camx am Tower and it pumps out 50,000 watts of RF camx is a station that's been around for almost 100 years they're one of the first news talk stations that did it 24/7 and my dad has a special history with this Tower yes I do 20 years uh watching over this guy one of my first uh duties here at KX we put this Tower up we took the old one down and put this new one up so behind my tripod is the uh the building with the transmitter and everything and then underground the pipe leads over over here to this building what is this building called uh this building is called the ATU or the antenna tuning unit so inside of it is uh enough uh components to match the antenna to the feed coming to the antenna So the antenna being the tower as opposed to FM where the antenna is a device that hangs on a tower uh this whole Tower is the antenna so you you match it with capacitors and inductors basically inside the building underneath underneath the uh base here there's a big copper screening and uh inside in a ring of of copper strap and then from that the radials go out in every direction it's a single tower system even if it was a multi- tower Ray Every tower has the uh uh ground plane is built to be circular around the base of the Tower and then if this Tower is an antenna and it has 50,000 watts how do you do things like light light bulbs on it well if you see the cable carrying the 50,000 Watts that cable with the loop in it it bonds to the tower so right away the tower's got all the RF but that cable is a hollow tube so inside the tube is where we run the cabling to take care of the lighting there is a they call them an Austin ring Transformer we'll see that in there too so it isolates the power feed from the building to the power feed to the tower lights cuz ultimately the lights are also grounded to the tower I also noticed there's a bunch of weird Contraptions like there's this weird little thing with two balls on it and there's like a little gappy thing over here with insulators and it looks like something out of a movie like talking about Tesla or something what are those things for uh they help direct lightning energy away from the ATU components so you've got the ball Gap here uh that can direct lightning to the ground the ball Gap is interesting too because if you get it too close together it might be more effective in uh in transferring energy from light in strikes but it also might change the impedance look of the tower if you get them too far apart the tower becomes more stable and and its measurement or whatever but the uh effectiveness of the Gap it goes away and then there's a there's a loop there I know for some things you have like a water drip Loop but I'm assuming that might not be for water well water is number one you do you want always want to have a water drip Loop you want to have the water that's coming down off the tower and not have a chance to get in the building but it's like one last loop I was told the uh impedance uh you know a loop causes a little more impedance is there anything special you have to do with a fence like this around a tower like this I would say you kind of try to make it electrically disappear and not be dangerous at the same time we had the fence post uh buried and and uh that came up and each post had to be bonded and they even carried the bonding up to the uh uh security wire at the top it creates a condition where it's safe and then stuff like that gate pole that's just your 50 kilowatt station uh that pole is grounded and I can still get an arc off of a floating gate from grounded on one side grounded a pole here and I think you're just seeing a little energy every once in a while the big brown thing there is the porcelain insulator you know if you figure that's a tower has energy you can't ground it you'd be just shorting out all the energy so that floats the tower above the Earth ground so that it can actually transmit and there's a lot of weight pulling down on that too there is a lot I mean I I've seen toilets that can hold a 300 lb person and I would imagine that has to be even stronger than that yeah same principle however they make and bake that stuff in the thickness the science of that keeps that Tower off the ground and I notic even the dogghouse has these little grounding straps around it yeah the room is grounded inside there's also a gated uh area it's like not safe on the on the other side of the gate safe uh to be there you know you don't want to live out here you wouldn't want to put up a shack and get a Coke and sit around with your buddies hanging out inside this room but it it's safe enough for work as long as you stay out of the internal Gates I think I can hear camo X in here is there a tuner inside the building uh no but there is energized copper energy so there's just sound that much power inside of here that you can hear the signal and look at this there's an old uh an old Crank phone on the wall here yeah at one time in a battery pack there uh Mel is it lunch time yet you bring it down you got the barbecue going here I see an AM meter here that looks like we're definitely in the zone of like yeah don't sit here for too long well this is the uh am meter that is telling us the uh common Point current if for people who know am with directionals and things but there is only one point in a single Tower so that's the antenna current uh which is a licensed level that you uh can't exceed by such a percent or or you don't want to be under it by such a percent and uh it's measuring from a device that is mounted in inside so the whole of the energy going to the tower goes through that and if you wanted to start you could start at the end and go backwards but you could also start over here where the where the energy comes in so you can see the cables coming in from from uh out it's actually outside they've got a concrete barrier uh the cables come from underground and they go to a switch there so we can choose which cable coming from the building that we're going to use on the air and from that every component out here the task of all of these coils and capacitors is to tune the signal to the tower so all the energy is as much as possible goes that way and uh with the at the right current what are these giant coils of wire that is a coil that's exactly what it is it's a coil in in electronics you have them in your cell phones and everywhere they're I've never seen one quite that big I think I'd have to have a car to carry around my cell phone if I had one of those that's a big one you want them clean enough to perform perfectly you know you don't want to get them where there's grunge on them or or how about nesting of animals things like that so so here we have like snakes and spiders are the biggest thing that we've ever had and a snake is rare spiders are less rare and we had one of those you know pow off the air moments that was like what was it and started looking around and eventually got out to here and found the mouse right up there against the uh uh area where the cable comes out crawling around and dead that's why we got the gate here the fence here another part that is really fascinating me is this big dual disc thing over here so that is a open air Transformer right so power comes from the building into the windings of this uh part of the Transformer they're drawn in to the other part you know the magnetic field and induction and so forth so you get the AC power and it goes into that box right there so now you've got AC going into that box and that copper tube coming out the top carries the 50 Kow cuz you can see it connected over there but it carries the 50 Kow out because of the bonding up there a high but inside is the tube is the voltage coming from the Austin ring Transformer and it goes out to the Tower and comes through the tube into an El electrical box uh and that's this is for like the lights that's for the tower lights yeah okay so there's there's an AC power signal here it floats inside of the cavity with the RF so the RF is a uh 1.12 mahz and the uh electricity is 60 Herz you can also see we ducked in some uh Fiber Optic Cables uh that we bring over that gets us signaling that gets us signaling off the uh off the tower Light Equipment out there that tells us the fault conditions of the lights so those go into the box here and then they go inside that inside the tube and out to the thing and they they break out there the Optics break out to to closure uh things they send it back through the fiber before we had the idea for the fiber optics I actually hung a uh uh a Wi-Fi type box from around 2002 or three and it was talking to to a Wi-Fi box up there we put it in and tested it with the station off of course cuz it had to be in there as soon as we turned the station on it worked for like 5 minutes came back out looked at it that is the antenna of that unit right there that's the antenna there's another huge coil over here yeah that's called a static drain coil and I don't know how many I've seen AMS with and without them but it's a static drain it's just it's tied right to the RF cable uh and all it's doing is trying to help you in a condition when the tower is built up static you know that wind blows creates amount of static the box back there with all the wires coming into it and a little like seesaw yeah is that a switch of some sort yes it is it's an RF switch that looks like an Amper there that's a newer one it actually is mainly meant to ground the tower when this is not the tower that's on the air oh so if it goes offline you can switch that Tower's grounded can't build up charge see there's these uh these big straps are those for or if you need to do service you have to if you get service for safety you literally will clip that to the uh coming off the tower uh coming out of the transmitter like wherever your safety point is depending on what you're doing and you'll clip that to ground and there's a lot of ground spots in here so you shouldn't have any trouble finding one uh and again I've seen guys and to Tower too you can you can take and go to the ark falls out on the tower and you can clamp to it bonding spot clip around and then clamp down and you're basically taking the tower to ground that way too if you want to that's a AR a spark detector huh so it's kind of fun that you have a spark detector uh you can take those uh you know the guys who do ettline torches and things you have those little things you squeeze and yeah you could take one and hold it in there and squeeze it as kind of testing to see if that detects and what would it do if itth found a spark well it would send out a a closure out that thing which again goes down over up to the remote control up there and tells us that a spark was detected unlike some sites there's an auxiliary backup Tower right there you have a spare Tower sitting there yeah so right if if you turn that tower on and this one's off could this Tower receive the signal and like blow everything it actually would receive a lot of the signal in fact when we were working on the tower a couple of different times we have to you you actually go to the base of the Tower and you clamp on some of these components and you tune them to to draw down energy or float the make the tower invisible to that Tower so there's a there's a tower here but as we were walking back I noticed dad that there's a garage door above your head that doesn't seem like the best place for a garage door can you explain why yeah why that door exists on this building well as so uh the original transmitter that went in here uh power supply was in the lower level transmitter was the upper level it was brought in in parts where they got a new transmitter could not get it into the stairwell and up the steps uh where it was going to be installed and so in uh think thinking of options they ended up cutting out the brick and installing a garage door unit here so that they could uh Fork that thing up and get it into the building and since then it's been used like a dozen times for air conditioners new transmitters and other big items we also noticed there's a scrap peap over here but you said it's more of a his history lesson yeah well part of it is you can see things like the racks that we took out in the past we've removed some stuff it's a lot of metal and and then uh back here you've got these pieces they were built uh they literally supported the tower for the period when we replaced the insulator at the base when it was cracked uh we clamped these things to the Tower and they basically made a uh a movable uh section on the tower clamped on the tower and then base on the ground with threaded Rod between them and they would move those threaded rods up and down and there's this massive concrete thing yeah so this uh like the other one since they added the underground at some later time from the original construction there's another one right here the the cables come out they come out of the building curved down they go underground and they go out to the tower so this is the uh the protective uh Shield if you will for those cables and that is the tower that was put up in 1947 that's the base of the Old Tower with the pin with the tower sat on top of that and then the new one this is the uh top where the tower sits on top so you can see the exhaust of the generator and then you got a intake air so that generator can run and then I noticed this uh satellite dish over here you have a cover on it is it not in use that's a cover for snow uh if a satellite dish builds up too much snow or ice on it it deforms the shape and you lose signal if you lose too much signal you lose the satellite sign but the cover would block the signal the cover does not block RF right so uh that's the main thing is it's like if you had clothes on you held your heart it'll jump through the clothes it'll jump through that stuff this is the pep world that uh in the FEMA uh planning at some point in the last 20 years they came up with uh creating EMP proof buildings putting a generator in one and broadcast equipment in the other locating them at the various uh pep stations so that they can uh uh if they had to all of this would work after the EMP waves came through and they could get it on the air 6,000 gallons keep it running for 30 40 I don't know how many days but a lot of days and they have the engineers at the sites do some of the checks throughout the year and then they send a guy out every once in some while so do they have a signal that goes out to the tower there's cables going into the building like the fuel that fuel also uh goes to the generator in the building because that would be the first preference is if they can stay on the air like if it was an earthquake the tower could be up and this building could be work but the power would be out for the whole area so in an earthquake scenario if KW can stay on the air with its main tower that's the best uh 50,000 Watts here uh under 10 Kow out of that uh uh building over there there's an air compressor over there air compressor keeps those door seals so what what would the door seals be good for a pressurized seal is going to be better for everything from the environmental inside the building to if they have RF mesh stuff in inside of that the door seal it's spiders giant spiders spiders so this is the transmitter building but this is more than just a transmitter building do you can you give a quick history of what this whole building is well it's it was also at one time you know they used to have a full-time operator here to manage the audio levels coming from the studio uh to the transmitter say transmitter operators audio guys there'd be two or three guys here around the clock a lot of times the transmitter itself was a thing to just keep running it the transmitter power supply was down in the basement the big blower system is they had a big air filtration system with bag filters on it uh and then uh nowadays it's all the transmitting stuff is done upstairs when something blew you know you you had uh Parts on hand you would make a coil or you would adapt something uh as needed and so they had a full shop here can we head on inside and see what's in there yes we will you can see the shop stuff that's been put down here got a drill press there they had Parts here uh but back here was a blast room so a little room where they could communicate they had a radio uh they still have some batteries down there you can if you get over here you can see so batteries to run radios a turntable and this is the generator room here so you've got uh it's going to be loud it sounds like yeah that's it's funny but that is the compressor yeah that's the compressor to keep the lines pressurized going out to the tower okay as with a lot of uh facilities have been around a while some of the things you see are related to this happened in the 6 s this happened in the 80s this happened in the year 2000s you got a big transfer switch Yeah there's a transfer switch that's one of three so each transfer switch is handling a particular load one is the building load and one is for the main transmitters and one is for the backup transmitter is that is that a supercharger that I see on the front turbocharger turg little turbo turbocharged diesel generator yeah so the air flows this way so the air comes into the room here and goes over the engine and then there's exhaust for than that but the exhaust for the engine itself is here goes up so this room is kind of interesting lots of things flow through it that are super hypercritical for the operation this whole room is just different and so I it's it's an added uh room and you'll see why here we come in it's uh oh I see the uh the RF going out there yeah so here's that pole outside we had the uh concrete barrier protecting it you can see the water goes in one cable goes to the ox Tower Main and the main cable that we splice these cables go to the tower so you can see this pipe goes down with that one that cable comes out that cable goes down so these cables are all they give us pairs of wires into the building and of course over time a ton of those cables will fail due to some reason or another over 40 50 60 years these two were put in before the ox Tower mhm so again everybody you have to decide like well if I was building new and I knew I had an ox Tower would I put that in and then over here is at the third transfer switch these Transformers are taking 480 down to 240 for some of the panels in the building and and some of the equipment uh and the transmitters can take 480 so they don't have to go through these Transformers uh so you've got all of that going on in this room you got the main panels so here's Illinois Power and this is the generator power power supplied by the generator so both of them come in and of course they both feed so you've got you know ins and outs uh going to the different panels where they're needed based on whether there's emergency power running uh to that space you can also see right there where it goes to the flex cable that goes underground we transition uh to air pressurized air into these cables you could see where the cables come in they go into the uh room up there to the uh dehydrator and is that the same kind of coax as you'd have at the FM sites yes that's 3in coax same stuff and it handles more power on lower frequencies so you know we have two panels uh each panel is on a different ATS uh switch transfer switch so we got one transmitter one of the big 50 kows on there one of the 50 kows there that way if a transfer switch blows or has to be replaced the other one is still serviceable and working just fine this whole area here was the power supply room for the original transmitter but it had uh bag filters like this you know bag filters all across here just to keep the power supply room cool and it had a ginormous fan sitting over here somewhere here's the motor base yeah and then the power pieces were all popped in here there was a lot of stuff up above you can see where things uh uh have been taken out a lot oft seems like that's a theme in a lot of these tower sites is they were built back when you needed like four rooms for one transmitter now it's like you just got one rack yes and you're lucky like here uh for the first 10 years I was here we it it took a long time where it made sense to take pieces out you know sometimes you found a guy who says I take old Motors I'll take them and I do this um other times you had a project and you would cut you know you just you just have to find reasons to make sense to take the old stuff out I see over here too there's a fun little uh this looks like a remote a remote control that was in and friends that's a remote control and uh it literally you calibrated uh each input so yeah you could go in you see you got Rays lower local when you didn't want the guy at the studio to turn something on while you're working on it what are all these it looks like there's a tower light there yeah so there's enough Parts here to test test a tower system Tower light uh on the ground there's a couple of spare bulbs these Mount inside of these cabinets so that's a tower bulb so yeah so this is the Flasher so inside here are the mounts for these kind of things this is this one that goes with this guy so that mounts inside are those LEDs up on the tower they are not LEDs no these are uh flash flash bulbs in that I don't know if that's Zeon or whatever whatever the gas is but they they are totally built to flash flash flash so it's like build up uh voltage charge current and Flash build it again flash so what are these weird looking Contraptions these are vacuum switches which is great because you don't get any uh on the connection the switching connections don't have any uh open air oxygen and and whatever else is in there bugs crawling so you would connect your RF Source here and then this one would switch you get it come out there this one would switch it come out there that looks like an FM Tower over there is that yeah we have an FM antenna over here so this one came off of a tower that we owned uh this is full power this this would be it's a two Bay you can see two bays Bay one and Bay two it's an ER antenna and they called them Roto tillers you can kind of see why right is that a TV antenna up there that one with all the little ovals no those are uh uh two-way radios that we used to use we were licensed on the 450 band and the 160 band uh for broadcast then what are these giant circular dishes yeah these these were our microwaves so we we also were licensed on 950 to uh to broadcast to um from Studio to transmitter so a lot of these like these are also uh 950 dishes so it would be uh one would be on a tower like we have here and it would shoot back downtown and hit the receiver on top of a roof of a building or wherever but look at this thing so you guys would know what what goes here so that's the rubber puck right so the rubber Puck is now that without anyone touching it for probably 30 years maybe this was a talent clock where you would sit in front and you could do uh your show your recording and it gave you a way to listen to different things and uh hit you know the uh your profanity delay this would be hung up clamp to the Tower and then the guywire would leave off of this end here and why is that important uh this is an insulated material so this is not steel or metal of any kind it's so that why you're not transmitting through the guy wires that's right that helps keep energy off the guy wires that's a good thing to get that signal out and the guy wires are also broken up by uh insulators when they have a uh the guywire coming out it will go through here and back and then the next guywire will go through here and that way so these are also isolators for the guywire so you can break up instead of having a 200t guywire that could radiate energy you break it up by putting these guys in of the appropriate size with the tension and all that stuff you want and then these kind of guys are what goes through there and then they wrap they literally wrap and once they're wrapped they're tough like there's no bonding welding nothing you just wrap these at the uh the aasbo radio dish they had that kind of thing set up to hold the radio dish and those all failed is there any kind of inspections that you guys have to do for guy wires over the no but you can see one see this one is set up like it's just perfect for demo but see how there's no connection between the guywire going that way and the guywire going this way mhm and you literally this this is strong enough enough will you wrap this around the guywire and and it will not tug loose so the second level here looks a lot like very wellmaintained I just noticed there's actually there's a bathroom with stalls yes we have a well we have a stall and we have a shower oh wow that's the most premium Tower site I've ever seen in my life it's very nice and a bathroom modification City this is again the kind of stuff that happens so you can close all this up but uh you can see the original panel was huge for some reason a panel change out happened this is the transmitter room yeah and I'm guessing that it didn't used to be this quiet yeah no well it's still noisy to me but it's much quieter than some this is that current Transformer I tell you about that gives us the reading the uh 50 KW uh connection the RF flows through this it gives us a reading and these get go back and get calibrated and then put back in they have a paired meter since we're high up off the ground we do have some storage here you know cuz it's never going to get wet hopefully the roof wouldn't leak when I started the main transmitter was here you could see the floor area that was the main dx50 the old mw50 Ran all the way you can see where the tile is discolored there so the dx50 and Associated racks ran all the way across here so we put in the uh transmitter over here the 3DX uh that's 50 Kow transmitter we put that in and we put new racks in at the time we only put one rack and an HD rack so we put in the the rack that matches there for HD radio the next rack was for our inter communication equipment and so forth then we got a new remote control system we put that in over here the new remote with uh complete we did everything into one rack and then uh we had other accessories the security system and and monitoring and things going to that rack so all of these uh things that happened over different time uh when I was the 20 years I was here the one Focus I had was trying to make this room smaller uh so that we could keep it clean and cool and still get work done and and get rid of that door being a part of the air that comes in and out so so you can see now we we've basically made the whole room only need to be about this big uh and then you have that the blower there that old blower okay that's a dummy load you can throw 50 Kow in it turn on the blower and it blows that air out and uh and you can test a 50 Kow transmitter so there's a transmitter over here it says tx1 yeah and that's a Harris what is it a Harris they call it the Harris 3DX 50 and then over here there's tx2 which is the same thing yeah it's like a twin both of them are capable of HD and then over there I saw tx3 yeah that's a that's like the Doomsday third transmitter it's small I think it's like a 6 Kow so and the site was built to have three transmitters and so the company let us buy a third one we got to see inside the FM transmitters and it just had a bunch of like modules or something how is the am this is really going to excite you cuz when you open the door here this is the RF section it's a bunch of modules but at 50 Kow it's an awful lot and if you can look you can see the the lights that are glowing some are blinking some are on a little more steady and some look like they're on all the time the way system works is each module if you look at like a block uh as you modulate they turn the blocks on and off and they add and they create the waveform it made am transmitter so efficient that people could change the transmitter and the electric savings were so great it paid for the cost of the transmitter fairly quickly fanss are in the back of this housing and you can see all the fins that air just coming straight out the modulation system sends data into these things which turns the units on and off as needed so it's all a serial data system I keep seeing these little XY links these fpgas looks like these transmitters they don't make enough of them to make it worth building their own ship so they literally build like a prototype on each transmitter yeah in broadcast you'll see those some consoles and other things they use that Zink chips all over the place there's camera here camera down here yes camera up here so what's all these cameras for I mean we're in a secure place when you're not here and things are going on or you have work going on or you just want to see the light pattern here because the remote control maybe was not making sense you have a phase out or some weird thing happening so it's great uh in the in the case of this camera system here we also had some cameras from a building we moved out of so then you're like well if we got the system we can put them in let's do it this is exhaust oh so it sucks in if you go around the back we'll see where it's sucking the air in blowing through but this is the exhaust and you've got the cool air feedback there so on this one we did we deflected the air to keep it away from what we wanted to happen was cold air flushed the back and warm air gets sucked out uh you know up higher the air it draws in through those filters so it it has its feed line come out here just like the FM sites yep and it comes down here you got the same thing you got switches because there's three transmitters and two towers a little more switching goes on but if you followed them you'll find that this transmitter is either going to go this way or that way and if it goes this way it goes to this switch and if it goes this way it goes to that cable which goes around and out remember that hole in the wall downstairs yep these are the cables going down and in the wall what is this big box here I see a couple cables come to it yeah so this this box was built when we got HD and it was to help the uh trans better match uh more broadly I kind of think of it as like what we in EQ and audio it was like eqing the RF specifically to make it a flatter RF uh signal and then I see another cable coming up here what is this one for so that one goes to the dummy load so this is a dehydrator it has a a desicant pumping system in there so it sucks air dries it out as much as it can and it sends it out uh you can see these are the tubes we're talking about sending air into the lines that are underground and this is where that originates and you could have a tank here and take this and and hook it up to a regulated tank but these are super reliable this guy runs 24/7 whenever he needs to he kicks on so that's the pressure in the line right now is a little over 4 lb so 3 to 6 is kind of the Target and the settings are in there to give you the window you like and what what's the importance of keeping the moisture out and the pressure in well the pressure so anytime you have a cable uh you don't want water liquids bug dust nothing to get inside of those uh uh cables so in it especially underground so if you have pressure on it anything's going to want to go out it's not going to want to come in is there a lot more loss in an elbow because it's doing that 90° turn there is loss in every elbow and it's uh they they measure it calculate it and we put it in our calculation so if you follow the path when this is on the air and you wanted to get your maximum RF allowed power to deliver to the antenna you're going to figure in the loss through the filter and the loss through every elbow the loss through every joining connector they all have little tiny losses but you're going to add them all up cuz you want that last 50 Watts or 300 watts there's a bunch of hard drives is it is there like uh the ability to run everything off site here too yeah so you can run your whole the whole uh radio format can be handled out here that drive is saving all the commercials and so forth that KX uses the shows uh it's it's mirrored to hear through the network cuz you got you got a super micro server there along with a disc shelf underneath and UPS's on every rack so I imagine besides the transmitters are the transmitters battery back up too or just no the transmitters are not uh but they're built to kind of they're designed to know that they're going to have outages so you know the whole thing here with the UPS is it's designed because there's a generator and the generator takes up all power there's nothing in here that isn't on generator power eventually the three switches so these UPS's are there for that 10 seconds so if they have 5 or 10 minutes of battery power that's plenty there's a lot of burk boxes here are those remote controls for all the different connections or yeah so every every uh transmitter you're going to turn it on you're going to turn it off you want the forward power reflected power other readings you want the status that's just for the transmitters then you've got like a switch to switch which antenna and Which transmitter are live so you want to do that remotely there a lot of control switching uh uh STL you got your main and backup audio so all of those kind of things are brought into the remote control system and these boxes here now they report really back to the system it's right here the the software system and this guy could be anywhere that your network send the packets so in the new world like I'm in I'm looking at putting this my studio building and these at transmitter sites on their own this is the old antenna switching system and as we modified it we took stickers on it cuz we knew it its time was limited but you've got a transmitter uh and a transmitter and a transmitter so three transmitters so you've got all of this switching happening through this which was handbuilt the whole of all of this thinking and logic is now inside this box right y so on this guy we've got three transmitters a dummy load and two antenna and so that box actually physically controls like the the connection switches I do see a few interesting things over here I see the uh the old analog am meter yeah still a very valuable tool looking at your modulation and uh in am you can actually go higher than 100% but except you're modulating the the entire signal yeah you're you're going up but when you go too low you hit zero and that's what would be the negative modulation so on on an FM one of cuz you had one of these in the super Tower video but it was just kind of staying the same right yes so yeah the the the uh it depends on the format and everything else but FMS are also licensed at 75 uh khz modulation which would be 100% so you'll see those will hang around 100% when it's music and processed you you'll see the needle like that but when it's a talk show you'll still see it yeah so this is literally the speech that we're seeing yeah we're see that's the AM signal yes on here yes this is a digital version of this so you can get a lot of the you get a lot more information from here uh than you can from here and this probably gives you remote control rem remote uh remote over IP web interface it's a web interace camera to view it but that one you just Jack right into it yes I mean how often do you see an analog oscilloscope on a crash card like that yes the lab the lab card this is you roll it from transmitter to transmitter take the readings you need to uh roll it back out of the way when you're done as we're heading out of here too I saw there's there's two of these things up here what are these guys yeah so these are the air handlers for the uh Heating and Cooling of which heating is not as needed as you might think but you do for that part of the building but not for this room if we wanted heat we could get it uh but these are two systems A and B they're completely in independent uh we do have over there on the wall you see that case yeah uh there is a uh uh it does switch systems so every week it switches as you know one is the main and the other is the backup so we got a differential temperature there so that they both get kind of evenly worked that's the garage door so so uh you can see the safety uh the safety thing is that you're smart and you don't walk out open doors but if I open this here it probably set off an alarm h but uh there you go Hey look it's the outside yep and what's cool is you can stand here and inspect that Tower with a with a uh binoculars you need to stand stand here inspect the tower check the lights so right outside the transmitter room there's the stairs from the front entrance but there's another whole studio here it's actually like an emergency backup studio uh we have a little area in there we could have news people in that room board operator in here a little Newsroom at the transmitter site new and look at this uh old blueprints or something forage yeah so you yeah you do like you could see what they were doing when they built the place uh even though it was out in really out in the country when they built it they did some beautiful stuff nice touches and if they have it here you can see this building actually in these uh concrete pillars they have a grounding uh either wire or strap I don't remember so this whole building is like a faraday screened cage but you wouldn't know that unless you looked at all of the drawings like these and found the uh drawings for the concrete work so you can see there's the guy wires yeah 180 radials every 2 de to okay it's the tower 180 we go all around here so that's what they did they go the base of the tower copper screening and the and the uh guy wires so that's an aerial view yep so this is this is where we are in the building yep and the line is now underground and the tower is here and there's radios all the way around it yep 1938 H so that Tower was moved to St Louis from Chicago that's an actual blueprint so this is this is that Newsroom from the other side here's another there's that's just cuz of cool that's for the effect if you that was the uh the backup studio and then this is a backup Newsroom right with its own console my goodness there's you could have another whole studio here yeah you could you could have a whole or you could have an FM here at an am in there that kind of thing so yeah it's all all possible there's boxes full of MREs so you could really live out here for a little while at least yeah all right and finally we have a real Workshop yeah this is one of the fun rooms it's probably the most fun room in this building for me you got you got batteries today and it's still in use that's the best thing about a workshop is this one and look at that there's an old an old cone speaker up there does every Tower site that you go to have a workshop like this no some of the workshops are the backseat of my car so yeah no none of them they they're not as well uh outfitted again you know you got the grinding wheel with the stand but I'd never buy that now at a site but I would have a grinding wheel if I had a site this big with this much to maintain this is the most famous meter of my life everyone who still has one working uh man am I had one you had one of those I had one you probably remember as a kid I had one that was the meter that I learned on the meter yeah the Simpson 26 loved it a screw for every yeah this isation you know 60 70 years of collecting screws and organizing them that different people have done that over the years so every big project you can see some of the things that came out went in uh extra parts purchased some for spare and you got a history of speakers here too it looks like that one was an original to the site up there oh yeah and then you got some JBL monitors the jbl's came out of the FM Studios the jbl's have the uh Y2K sticker and easy Communications that's yep that's they came out when weip ago how many of you guys have a fuse holding organiz like you see at the store if you need electrical P Parts you you got to have electric like a whole Home Depot in here we used to use these to wire you know to do wire numbers for labeling labeling yeah I remember using one of those you can see here there's a bunch of them in there thank you to camx and to Odyssey yes for letting us come out and and check out the tower site yeah one's wonderful so we're back at home uh we forgot to mentioned a couple interesting things I you have a picture up on your screen there can you explain what is happening here yeah this is the 10 kwatt frog so uh I was at the studio one day we kept going off the air come back up and I was Raising it you hit around 10 Kow snaps off the air again I went out to the site looked all around the inside of the building looking for the problem and uh right here is a frog who is in full stretch leap and snap and he was electrified and fried pretty quickly but it took sever several transmitter restarts to clear that problem to really dry them out yeah and then that that wasn't the only Frog story I've heard from out on this Tower site there's yes there's this little fella here so when you go to sit down to go you don't want to see that there I flushed him down like any good engineer would and he came right back out the septic tank came right back out guys like this fellow they they find a way in in the basement not quite as uh big as it might look but they grow big fast when they eat the frogs when you find one of these things and you're like going out there to fix something what's your reaction I try the he snaky snaky thing holding the frog in front no no it's uh usually most of them are dead by the way most of them are by the time you get there they're going to be slithered away uh so what you find is that they found something to eat they shouldn't have and they died so this a little uh those little uh crawdads we call them craw dads crawfish whatever but every once in a while the water's right there for so long that they would these would just be there around in areas around the Tower or off the tower out in the field and this one I'm guessing was probably a dinner or something for one of the flying animals or animals that or somehow it crawled up the tower touched it Zapped itself fell back into the gravel

Channel: Geerling Engineering

Views: 1,058,101

Keywords: tower, radio, am, transmitter, xmtr, harris, gates air, broadcast, antenna, tuning, unit, doghouse, base, insulator, ground, lightning, protection, danger, rf, radiofrequency, frequency, modulation, amplitude, 50kw, fifty, kilowatt, 50000, watts, power, amplifier, building, satellite, terrestrial, america, american, clear channel, dial, modulate, engineer, engineering, design, circuit, mod, monitoring, remote, control, workshop, ancient, old, historic, history, saint louis, stl, st louis

Id: Aax-ehkRTnQ

Length: 43min 19sec (2599 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 16 2023