Road trip, continued

Today's the last day before taking a few days off, so naturally everything hits at once. Fiber outage in Binghamton. Overflowing heat pump next door. Overflowing urinal here. Conference call to talk about disaster preparedness. A succession of cruft to keep me from wrapping up the paperwork for Elmira's microwave inventory.

The battle against our resident Canada geese has escalated. Now, in addition to our fenced goose exclusionary zone (which now doubles as a rabbit and ground hog sanctuary), we have a pack of cardboard coyotes stationed around the buildings. Too bad I don't have a camera handy: the flock is surrounding one of them. We used to have a plastic owl in the garage to scare away the sparrows that nest in the joists; it was retired in ignominy, covered with sparrow poop.

Some quick random leftovers from the Elmira trip. First, a closeup from the front of their original transmitter, built in the late 1950s here in Syracuse:



Amazingly, it still works — they fired it up several weeks ago when the much newer Acrodyne died. The GE was the centerpiece of the master control room back when the entire station was at Hawley Hill. On the left, racks full of tube-type equipment supported their two studio cameras; the video switcher and audio console, long gone, were on the right where they faced the small studio. Other rooms in the back housed the power supplies and filter networks for the transmitter, plus the tanks and pumps for the cooling system. You could easily fit ten modern transmitters in the same space... but this one sneers at lightning strikes and power line surges and keeps on going. One reason: there's not a single transistor in it. The only silicon here is in the glass of the tubes and windows.



One last snapshot, from the other station that occupies our transmitter building: a microwave transmitter of 1960s vintage, back when such devices used klystron tubes. I have no idea why this is still around since it has no useful application — the FCC has long since allocated the frequency it uses to other non-broadcast purposes — but it's amusing to look at.



Time to finish cleaning up the loose ends. See you in a week or so...

Road trip!

Yesterday was a marathon: first, off to Binghamton to troubleshoot the ABC satellite downlink. The waterproof tubing around a matching transformer turned out not to be waterproof enough and the combination of moisture and electricity made part of the connector disintegrate. Replacement parts were ordered and arrived today, and the station engineer should be changing them out now.

Left Binghamton just before a thunderstorm got into full swing. Good timing: I don't much care for being next to a 600 foot tower that's taking strikes. The memory still lingers of being in the penthouse of the State Tower Building when lightning hit the flagpole immediately above us — the whole room turned a weird purple-blue and shook with the noise. The two of us managed to find the men's room immediately thereafter.

Got to Elmira by early afternoon, equipped with a notepad and digital camera to take their preliminary inventory of 2GHz microwave equipment for the Sprint / Nextel swap, and to look at their transmitter link, which will need some attention to relocate a couple of dishes. The studio is located right next to a pair of elevated railroad tracks that cut through the city before passing over the Chemung River. When Hurricane Agnes flooded the city in 1972, this railroad bridge was one of the few ways to get across the river. Nowadays if you listen closely during WETM's local news, you can occasionally hear the rumble of a passing freight train. While I was on the roof checking out a microwave dish, this came tooling by:



I'm told that it's a track grinding car. I had no idea such things exist, but such are the wonders of Elmira. After counting and photographing everything I could find at the studio, their engineer and I went up to the transmitter, where it had become a beautiful afternoon.



Their engineer was thinking about possible replacements for some of the microwave dishes, and remembered the original equipment that had linked Syracuse to Elmira. WETM started out as WSYE, a satellite of then WSYR-TV in Syracuse (now WSTM). In an ironic twist, our Syracuse ABC competitor is now WSYR-TV, and we own the Elmira station. Back in the 1960s, programming went from Syracuse to Elmira via a series of microwave links that started at James Street in Syracuse and went through Sentinel Heights, Spafford, Connecticut Hill outside Ithaca, to Hawley Hill overlooking Elmira. At the time, the studio facilities were at the transmitter site on Hawley Hill – not a fun drive in the winter.

Elmira's engineer was thinking about bringing back and reusing the dishes from the Connecticut Hill relay site. I made a slight detour on the way home to take a look; the site is in the middle of nowhere, accessible only by steep rutted single-lane dirt roads through the state forest. Most roads are unlabeled, but the ones with signs are all called Connecticut Hill Road. When you finally reach Tower Road and find your way to the top, you find a small clearing with an FM radio facility on one side and a public safety relay on the other. In the middle are the remains of our former microwave repeater:



There used to be two dishes here, the second mounted between the wooden crossbeams and aimed in the other direction. When WETM built its downtown studios and became self-sustaining some 25 years ago, the microwave links were decomissioned. The (then) chief engineer thought to salvage the old equipment and trekked up to Connecticut Hill to remove the dishes. After attaching a one end of a long rope to his truck, he climbed the pole to the dish, ran the rope over the crossbeam and tied the other end of the rope to the dish. He then unbolted the dish mount from the pipe, allowing the dish to hang free, suspended by the rope, and climbed back down the pole.

It apparently never occured to him that a large microwave dish might weigh at least as much as a chief engineer... but when he untied the rope from the truck, he discovered that it did. The dish came down and met the engineer as he was going up, but happily he had the presence of mind to keep holding on until the dish made it all the way to the ground, and then shinnied down the rope, slightly battered but still in one piece. The whereabouts of that dish are unknown, but the experience obviously dampened his enthusiasm for salvage: the other dish remains there to this day. The building that housed the repeater is long gone and the forest is quickly reclaiming the spot.

I don't think we're too anxious to reclaim this dish, either.



I left, somewhat anxious to avoid the types of people who apparently hang around nowadays, stopping in Dryden for supper at the McDonald's / Mobil station where you find this vending machine by the front door:





Have it your way.

A two-for-one special!

From James Lileks, whose day yesterday sounds much like mine but who nevertheless produces more amusing output.

Mondays on Wednesday

As I mentioned in passing yesterday, someone had made it an honorary Monday: one of those days when stuff stacks up faster than you can clear it away. That episode of I Love Lucy with chocolates zipping along the conveyor belt faster than Lucy can handle them must have been shot on a Monday.

To begin with, Inspector #3 was on hand to verify the equipment in our microwave trucks, dispatched by the folks at Sprint/Nextel. This was the easy part of the day, as the fellow went quietly about his task with very little needed from us. A very nice fellow indeed, and he shattered my assumption that people named Nigel were only found in England. I was all set for a morning of "I say... is that another blooming Nycoil? Jolly good!" — but this particular Nigel is from Utah. Exactly why Wolf Coach sent someone from Utah to Syracuse when their headquarters is in Massachusettss is a question I never got to ask.

While Nigel was climbing through and atop the trucks, I turned my attention to the backup satellite dish for ABC, which partially crapped out the day before. Fedex had just arrived with a replacement LNB, so I fetched a twelve foot ladder and climbed up into the dish to change it. The dish is about 15 feet in diameter, mounted about six feet off the ground, which means that you have to tilt the ladder against the edge, climb way up and lean into the dish to reach the feed assembly. The LNB is mounted to the feed with about ten bolts, each with two washers and a nut, and there's a law that requires that you drop at least one piece of hardware into the grass. Got the new LNB temporarily mounted with two bolts to see if that fixed things, hooked up the cable, and... nothing.

Okay, maybe the cable went bad between the dish and the rack in the control room. Not terribly likely for Heliax only six months old, but possible. There are two cables, one for the horizontal feed, one for the vertical feed... so I swapped them at the dish and went inside to swap the other end to match. But before I could make it to the ABC rack I was arrested by a cacophony of beeping and hollering from the video area, where an uninterruptible power supply decided to become the interruption, killing half a dozen tape machines that were recording shows to air later in the day. I bypassed the UPS and got the machines going again, making a mental note to change the batteries later. Made a move to continue to the ABC rack and one of the operators stopped me.

"Net two is down," he said. I told him, yes, that's what I was working on. "It was down this morning," he continued. Yes, I said, it's been down since yesterday afternoon. "Well, nobody knew what was wrong and I didn't know what to tell him," he persisted. I observed that apparently nobody looked at the status screen for the network system, where I had left a post-a-note yesterday explaining the problem. "Why should anyone look at that? Nobody knows nothing about it because nobody tells us nothing," he went on. It's fruitless to get drawn into these moaning sessions; this is the same individual who refuses to work a training shift at the transmitter and still complains because he doesn't know about the equipment. I finally disengaged myself from Mr. Surly Whiner and made my way upstairs.

Swapped the cables at the ABC rack and proved that the problem wasn't in the rack, and it wasn't the cables. Very strange: the odds of having a brand new LNB that's bad out of the box are slim, but what else is there? The dish is obviously aimed correctly, as the vertical feed is working just fine. So back outdoors with a third LNB just to see... and oh, nuts, the ladder's gone, and the hardware that had been in the recessed area of the top step is scattered all over the ground.

Back into the building. The ladder was in the prop room leaning up against a wall, so I grabbed it and headed out the back door — right through the middle of our flock of geese, which were milling around the dumpster. The babies have grown and are gawky adolescents now, not nearly so cute. And their output is on a par with their parents'. None of them were happy to see my bright yellow fiberglass ladder, and left their marks of disapproval all over the driveway. Dodged that, got the ladder set back up, found nearly all of the bolts, washers and nuts, and climbed back up to try the third LNB. And... still nothing.

This is crazy. The dish is peaked up on the satellite, and the feed assembly obviously works: the vertical feed is just fine. It's a pressurized feed, so there are no openings for bees to get into (they love to make nests in open feed horns and get rather annoyed when we evict them). There's nothing else except for a filter, a completely passive aluminum box the LNB bolts onto. No way it could be the filter. It's just a piece of specially machined metal, right? There's nothing in it that can fail, right? Wrong, apparently. Removed the filter and the horizontal feed came right up.

The folks down the road at Microwave Filter Corporation are very nice, and when we explained our situation they politely remarked, "That's most remarkable." Whuh? That's the sort of comment one would have expected to hear from someone named Nigel, but by this time our Nigel had finished his work and gone, leaving us with a new problem to consider.

One of our trucks has a dish-style antenna; that will work just fine with the new digital equipment. The other truck has an older disc-rod antenna that looks like something a six-year-old boy might make with TinkerToys. It's worked faithfully for 24 years, and was part of our original live truck. Except for having to rebuild the rods occasionally after fencing matches with low branches, it's been as reliable as anything can be that has to sit forty feet in the air in a snowstorm. But it won't work properly with digital, and has to be replaced. Sprint/Nextel will cover the cost, so that's no big deal... but this old antenna is on a truck with a mast that only clears the garage opening by an inch. The approved digital-compatible dish antenna sits about two inches higher. We've already modified the doorway to put the fascia as high as it can go, tacking it right onto the steel beam, back when we bought the truck and discovered that it wouldn't fit through the doorway. I'm thinking the folks at Sprint probably won't pay to replace our building, so we have a challenge ahead...

And all of this nonsense only got us to 11 o-clock. Our personal conveyor belt kept going the rest of the day, but there sure weren't any chocolates on it.

Plop, plop, fizz, fizz...

Very short on time today... someone went and made it an honorary Monday, and I've been running since I got through the door.

But some people have too much time on their hands... at least they clean up after themselves.

Others don't.

Classic blogstuff

I feel so cultured: this morning I washed my hair with Classic Prell. Not just your ordinary run-of-the-mill Prell for the unwashed masses, but Classic. It looks and smells the same, so maybe its distinctiveness takes time to appreciate. For sure, it still stings when it gets in your eyes. We're a discriminating household — we also have a bottle of Classic Ivory dish liquid.

Perhaps I'm overly sensitive, but adjectives like "classic" should be reserved for less pedestrian objects than soap. And it should never apply to things you grew up with. "Classic rock and roll" ought to be an oxymoron. The Rambler Classic my folks had back when Kennedy was President was unremarkable except for how hot the seats got in the summertime. Classic Coke was the retreat from a colossal marketing faux-pas. Don't get me started about the "classic" iPod.

Perhaps the reason manufacturers are so free with the word is that they can't come up with anything better to say about their product. "Yep, it's the same old stuff we've been cranking out for the last 37 years" doesn't have the same ring, but at least it's honest.

The vending machine down the hall has bags of Original Fritos. I think I'll pass: that first batch must be pretty stale by now.

How dry I am... not

It's the rarest of events: a quiet uneventful Monday. Nothing broke over the weekend (or if it did, nobody reported it and we haven't found it out yet). While it's a rather pleasant novelty, it also dries up the well for blog ideas. Or maybe it's the Drixoral I took this morning... it certainly hasn't dried up my nose.

So in the absence of original thought, here's something from the bulletin board in my office:

TYPICAL PROJECT MILESTONES
1) Enthusiasm
2) Disillusionment
3) Panic
4) Search for the guilty
5) Punishment for the innocent
6) Praise and honors for the non-participants

Pondering the traf

Yes, I'm still alive... the whooping and hollering you might have just heard was me, celebrating the completion of a pile of paperwork supporting the Sprint / Nextel news microwave replacement. Four drawings the size of a large welcome mat, and a book about an inch and a half thick. Laurie and Hannah stopped by the station yesterday and noted the piles of technical bulletins, sketches, path calculations, and product literature that obscured my desk. If they came back now they would be amazed: you can actually see the Formica.

It's been a day for silliness all around: Laurie and I were convulsing ourselves this morning with the notion of reverse flatulence, and whether it could absorb odors rather than emit them. It would be an excellent solution to Solvay on a hot summer day, or to the skunk that likes to wander past our house at night when we have the fan set to intake. I have no idea how this stuff gets started, but it's part of the dubious charm that glues families together. Odd little noises or a few disjointed words that make no sense to passersby have the power to make us laugh uncontrollably or to recoil in revulsion. Even our reaction changes over time: the idea of visiting Ralph on our vacation would have made Hannah turn green a few years ago, but chances are that if she reads this today, she will just chuckle and shake her head. There are better things to do in Freeport, like sitting on the rock wall in front L. L. Bean's main entrance and licking a cone from Ben and Jerry's.

Part of our mood is inspired by Laurie's new mouthguard — I keep calling it a mouthpiece, as if she were going about biting attorneys. Probably not a bad idea... some lawyers definitely need a good sharp nip, but the diseases she might contract aren't worth the risk. The guard fits over her upper teeth, and already seems to be quite effective in reducing her jaw pain. It's also quite effective in giving her a spectacular lisp which is just ithing on the cake, if you will. Listening to her gives me a whole different outlook on the abuse I received after my last dental appointment, when folks kept stopping by my office with questions designed to elicit detailed sibillant responses: it's a lot more entertaining when it's someone else.

Time to get back to work. It's the last day of regular classes for Hannah, so if you listen closely in a few minutes, you might hear another distant cheer.

Too young

Today's sandwich is in a ziploc bag with the notation "11–13 min". There's nothing particularly noteworthy about the sandwich: wheat bread, pepperoni, two slices of American cheese, margarine. I'm hoping this is a recycled bag, and that nothing untoward will happen in a few minutes.

---

My mind keeps drifting, thinking about Andrew Sleeth. He's an eleven-year-old with a ready grin who, like Hannah, studies piano with Linda Auser. We missed him at the recital last Saturday: he is University Hospital now, fighting leukemia. He's been through several rounds of chemotherapy, preparing him for a bone marrow transplant from his younger sister. Yesterday was particularly tough, and now he's in the pediatric ICU to stabilize his body temperature and blood pressure, and to deal with a fungal infection.

I've visited Upstate's pediatric ICU a number of times over the years, mostly doing remote broadcasts for the Children's Miracle Network. The doctors and nurses work so hard to make it a light and pleasant place, yet I come away feeling a dark chill that says, "these kids are much too young for this."

Andrew's family knows better — more important, they know that his health is in the hands of a faithful and powerful God. Their faith shines through the online journal as they make their way through the tough days.

See the world... 146 years ago

I'm in the midst of writing a rather lengthy document justifying why one of our microwave links cannot be directly upgraded with digital equipment — part of the Sprint / Nextel project. It passed the 100-page mark this morning, complete with charts, maps, and pages of calculations. You can understand that even recreational writing isn't exactly high on my list of diversions today.

So as something of a make-good, here's a link to antique maps of Onondaga County, circa 1860. This was about forty years after the Erie Canal had been completed through Syracuse (it was named Corinth then), and about twenty years after railroads began to dominate the streets.

One of the local hot topics, when folks aren't debating the future of Destiny USA, is the impact route 81 has had on the near-south side. The oft-repeated claim is that the highway created an artificial divide between the University and the residential area to its west, south of downtown. It's an engaging theory, and one I bought into — I remember when the cranes went through with their wrecking balls to clear the way for the roadbed. It was exactly the noisy, dusty, destructive spectacle that appeals to small boys. The problem with the theory is that while it sounds logical, a look at maps over the course of the city's history shows that it wasn't route 81 that created the division: it was the railroad that predated route 81 by a century.

The antique maps vividly illustrate the degree to which the city's development was dominated and its communities defined by its transportation arteries: first, by ancient Indian trails; the Erie and Oswego canals; the railroads; the major surface roads; and the interstate highways. Some of our local politicians seem to have things backwards, assuming that the communities came first.

I love maps; they have the power to tell stories of things that are only dim shadows on today's landscape... like the tunnel that took the New York Central's main line under the Erie Canal just east of Beech Street. You can still find traces of it near the Burger King.

Darn. I didn't think I was in the mood to write. Now I need to get cranked up about microwave paths again.

How special do you need to be?

Hannah and I pulled up to school this morning behind a bright red brand new Hummer. It's so big that the two kids it disgorged didn't exactly climb out — they sort of fell out. Perhaps their family has a loading dock or a forklift at home to make it easier to embark. As it turns out, it was headed the same way I was — so I got to observe it for several miles and learned some interesting things about red Hummers:

• They don't need to stop for stop signs, even in a school zone.
• They have impressive acceleration, especially when there's a stopped car 100 yards ahead.
• Turn signals are optional, which saves on bulbs. After all, you have to economize where you can in order to afford such an outstanding vehicle.
• The horn is quite loud, all the better to inform the car ahead that the light turned green 53 milliseconds ago.
• The handling is phenomenal: this vehicle managed to oscillate across all three lanes of Seneca Turnpike at the traffic light within five seconds, making it eligible to turn both left and right at the same time. Even the oncoming cement mixer was impressed, and swerved to avoid it. It would have been a fair contest: the bumpers are all at about the same height.
• Double yellow lines are only for lesser vehicles, especially when you urgently need to pass a school bus before it stops halfway up the hill to pick up passengers.
• Hummers like to stop to ogle young women moving traffic cones around construction zones, even if it means that the school bus catches up. Unfortunately for the cones, Hummers can see young women much better than cones.

I was really starting to wish that I, too, could be so special, when it pulled into the Mobil station (cutting in front of an oncoming Nissan). And it dawned on me that my monthly car payment is less than it was about to cost Mr. Hummer to fill his tank.

Now that's special.

Free at last, free at last...

Four o-clock, and I'm just now sitting down to lunch. The folks verifying our microwave equipment inventory have finished up and left, so this is something of a celebration... or it will be, as soon as I deal with the fly that keeps racing through my office.

* * *

Back again. The fly is gone, dispatched by a can of freeze spray I keep in my cupboard. It was either that or the blaze orange spray paint I use to mark where to bury electrical conduit.

* * *

Hooray for the end of the inventory verification! Several weeks ago we tallied up every piece of equipment we use for news microwave pickups and entered it into Sprint / Nextel's web site; Tuesday they sent a two-man team from an independent company in New Jersey to verify our counts. Nice folks — a quiet, studious youngster learning the ropes and an older fellow with network experience and a bottomless supply of stories to match. The inventory could probably have been finished by the close of business yesterday, except that seemingly everything we ran across reminded the team leader, whom I shall call Inspector #1, of a story. And since he's a conoisseur of RCA broadcast equipment, our still-functional 1962 vintage TT-11 transmitter proved to be an irresistable diversion. Our poor transmitter supervisor was sorely tried yesterday as the inventory dragged into the evening hours, especially as thunderstorms rolled in and the stories rolled on.

I had the duty today, going through everything at the studio and explaining how it fits together into our different systems. And listening to more stories. Turns out Inspector #1 has worked with some of the same folks at ABC I've done satellite uplinks for, including a Good Morning America producer who was annoyed with our phones because, as she put it, "Dial tone hurts my fingers. I need a touch tone phone, not a dial tone phone." You just can't make these things up.

Finally everything's been tagged, logged, and photographed from every direction. We all agree on the final count, a remarkable feat considering that this is hundreds of items spread over three sites and two towers. It also represents a successful effort on our part to get ahead of the curve: we are now roughly a month ahead of the Sprint / Nextel timeline. If we can keep this up, we should be able to get our tower work done this autumn, rather than in December or January as they forecast. Obviously the folks drawing up the timeline have never tried to hoist a large antenna 880 feet up a tower during a snowstorm.

So now Inspector #1 and Inspector #2 are on their way back to New Jersey. I imagine that for Inspector #2, it's going to be a long ride.