![]() My main line of work is broadcast journalism, but I got called upon early in my career to be an "assistant" engineer at a low budget kilowatt daytime-only AM station. Ray, my hobby of playing with AM transmitters spawned time as a broadcast engineer, but only because the hardware at work was so similar to what I had at home. The installation at WBAA-AM is a 3 bay directional, reduced power at nite.Īt the time of my employment, our primary tx was a Harris box.is was about I am sure she is in a land-fill now, sigh. To see her on the air a couple of times in the 2 years I worked there, it The "back-up" tx was a Collin 21A though! I got the opportunity In the basement of ELLIOT HALL of MUSIC most of the time. The remote TX site a few times, as they kept me at the studios Still with the 2nd, I only got to work out at ![]() Having myĢnd Phone at the time, my "supervisor" with his 1st Phone was also a hamīy 1978 I was also working at WXUS-FM in the studio.mainly repairingĬables, the board, setting up processing, etc.thenĬame my "BIG" break, I started at WBAA-AM, a 5KW NPR Station at Title: Re: Broadcast Enginers on AM fone? Good thing the transmitter stuff is only a part time thing and I have a full time job at a university because we have not been running out of kids yet, matter of fact we have been getting more and more of them from China and they pay! If it weren’t for the fact that Direct TV and Dish pick up our signals off air sometimes think I can turn off the ATSC transmitters and no one would notice. May just be that I am still depressed about having to give up my analog 60 kW Comark that took some level of skill to use for a 5 kW digital where all you do is push the on button, then hear about the ideas of freeing up more bandwidth by consolidating all the television in a market to one channel it just don’t look good for terrestrial television broadcasters. Don’t get me wrong being that I work almost entirely with the RF side of the plant that’s job security but can imagine a day where terrestrial broadcasting as we know it will be gone. And on the same subject how many are under fifty? I am fifty three myself and have noticed that many of the newer CE in broadcasting are from the IT side then from the RF side and have little interest in transmitters beyond just wanting them to work and knowing the reliability of modern transmitters don’t blame them knowing that they spend the majority of there time resolving problems with the keyboard as opposed to a soldering iron. How many of us are broadcast engineers? Just curious wondering how many do this thing professionally and then want to go home and play around with AM transmitters in there spare time.
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