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...