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.