Interesting Shares

I used to work as a broadcast engineer. A lot of stations (in the US at least) have their studios some distance away from the transmitter, often with the studio in a more central business area while the transmitter and broadcast tower are on cheaper land out in the country. Usually there’s a direct microwave link to carry the signal from the studio to the transmitter pointing at a dish mounted partway up the side of the tower. It’s either the primary studio-transmitter link (STL) or a backup for a fiber link.

Transmitters are their own beasts and my last station hired an outside firm to handle most of the transmitter maintenance. One day one of their engineers was telling me about a crazy client he had. A radio station brought him in because they’d lost the signal on their STL. IIRC the client was in another state and he wasn’t their first call; by the time he got there station management concluded someone must’ve built a taller building somewhere between the antenna on their roof and their transmission tower, blocking the signal. They decided to build a small STL tower at their studio to get above this building but brought in this consultant to figure out an interim solution. After checking some things out he asked for a bucket. The puzzled radio staff found him one and he disconnected the waveguide that took the signal from the equipment rack to the antenna. Water poured out of the tube into the bucket and the consultant told the manager, “there’s your building.” The water was getting in somewhere and absorbed the signal before it could ever reach the antenna. From his story it sounded like the station still wound up building the tower anyway.