So those of you who check my blog on occasion may have noticed I’ve not posted for quite some time…

In 2014 I left Wyoming Public Media to pursue a brief stint in trade journalism as the editor of Radio magazine. After about 10 months, I discovered that writing FT wasn’t for me, so I went to work for the Telos alliance in their marketing group. It didn’t take long for me to move from my original role into one doing support (though oddly enough for the Linear Acoustic series of television audio processors). After about 4 years at Telos, I realized that I really missed broadcast engineering and went to work for Educational Media Foundation (K-Love/Air1 radio). While they have approximately 945 or so broadcast signals nationwide, I’m responsible for maintaining 30 or so of those signals around Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho. They are a great bunch to work with and I’m really enjoying my time here. It takes me to many places I never even would have imagined.

If you want to catch up with me, the best place is probably on Facebook. I generally hang out in the “I Take Pictures or Transmitter Sites” and “The Broadcasters Club” groups.

Thanks for dropping by! Send an e-mail to shane@broadcastengineer.org if you’re so inclined.

The next stop on this network tour is wonderful Driggs, Idaho. Today’s task is to move the equipment out of the building into an outdoor equipment rack.

Looking up one of the tower legs…We have a two bay antenna toward the top. Ultimately it will be moved to a pole on the very top of the tower and changed to a single bay antenna but that will require filing for a modification first.

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This week has consisted of traveling to a number of my sites to inventory equipment and perform necessary maintenance. One of the first stops on my trip was Medicine Butte outside of Evanston, Wyoming.

The towers atop Medicine Butte.

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We seem to have a theme here lately–Another possible satellite receiver issue in Evanston.  This site has a relatively small dish so it does not surprise me too much that it might have blown off point.

The whole area is coated in a pretty heavy layer of snow.

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No sooner did I restore service in Pinedale than I received a report of an outage in Afton. It is possible this may have been related to the satellite bandwidth switch as well but this site did initially seem fine after the switch. Quite possibly another receiver failure.

The Polaris has easily made it through the deep snow to access the site.

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I had recently upgraded the bandwidth on our satellite network.  This required sending a command to all of our satellite receivers to remotely switch to the new bandwidth.  The risk was that the receivers might not follow the command to switch and require a trip to manually reset.  All went well except for my receive in Pinedale.

The (now cab equipped) Polaris Ranger will take me up to the site.

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Off to Jackson–The manufacturer of our HD Radio equipment had asked me to replace a component as a preventative measure.

After one failed attempt late yesterday I made it up the hill without issue in the daylight.  The snow up here is pretty deep but I’ve seen it deeper in years past.

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I had done a good amount of work on the cooling system at our transmitter site in Gillette–Last time I was there I noticed a relay that had failed.  I finally had the opportunity to get back to the site and install the replacement.

While I probably could have made it up to the site in the truck, the Polaris did a fine job getting up the muddy and snowy hill with tracks.

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We have a small translator in Worland.  It is fed from our digital signal on Copper Mountain and had unfortunately been off the air due to the failure of the digital signal.  We wanted to attempt to replace the receiver while we were in the area since the current receiver had been prone to occasional issues with “locking up” and taking the translator off the air.

Once again our new toy…errr…tool stands at the ready to take us up the hill.  Worland had apparently received a pretty considerable amount of snow the previous day.

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Next stop, Copper Mountain, located between Shoshoni and Thermopolis.  This site is home to our 91.3 KUWT transmitter and is one of our more difficult to access.  A “road” filled with sharp rocks is the access route–in the winter it drifts full of snow but there are still a number of exposed rocky patches.  This mountain has caused more damage to vehicles and tires than I care to think about.  Fortunately our new tracked vehicle should be up to the challenge.

Looks like we have company today!  WYDOT has a site up on this mountain, as do a variety of other providers.

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