Sometimes you just know it is going to be a bad day. Especially when you get a call that the transmitter went off the air and as you drive towards the transmitter site you can only count three quarters of the towers that are supposed to be standing. This is the sight that greeted our transmitter tech, Lou Schneider, on December 13, 1988, when in winds clocked in excess of 100 mph, a guy wire on tower three called it quits and tower three, after 39 years of duty, came crashing to the ground.

The station was only off the air for 10 minutes and at first we had no real idea that the tower was down. When it fell, the feed line to the tower shorted to the tuning house and the load looked good to our MW-50 transmitter. It kept pumping out power close to 50,000 watts. Later when Lou arrived and ascertained the damage, we started working at a lower power.

Sometimes it is not too bad to have something like this happen. With the loss of the tower we started a rebuild of the transmitter plant. The result was four new towers, a new phasor, the installation of a solid state transmitter, our Harris DX-50 replacing the old GE BT-25A, and a remodeling of the interior of the building.

Updated 10/22/98