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.