This 100-year-old tech splits my voice in five
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 14 พ.ค. 2024
- Geerling Engineering encounters a phasor at the 8-tower site of WSDZ-AM in Belleville, IL-formerly a Radio Disney station!
Special thanks to Aaron Cox and Relevant Radio for letting us see this tower site!
Resources mentioned in this video:
- Antenna Theory Directivity: • Antenna Theory Direct...
- How Does Starlink Satellite Internet Work? • How does Starlink Sate...
- We made a hot dog talk... with RF: • We made a hot dog talk...
- If I touch this tower, I die: • If I touch this tower,...
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Contents:
00:00 - It splits your voice?
00:59 - Set Phasor to 'stun'
05:26 - Day and night patterns
07:33 - A 'dummy' load?
10:38 - Signal routing and monitoring
11:44 - Power and a massive grounding system
13:59 - Strange parts
17:14 - Designing an 8-tower array - วิทยาศาสตร์และเทคโนโลยี
I was the ABC-Disney midwest regional engineer and this facility was one of the stations I was responsible for.
That's awesome! Any other fun nuggets from this site you know about? And was my Dad's guess that the Nautel was original correct, or was it brought in from elsewhere?
@@GeerlingEngineering this was one of the better sites that Disney acquired out of the six midwest stations I was responsible for. The Nautel was there when we bought the site.
love Nautel transmitters, had them at several of our sites……..And by the way,I enjoy your you tube videos……
Canadians make the best stuff
How do you think Max Headroom did what he did?
Warmed my heart knowing the engineer forgot to turn on the dummy load fans and owned it. I have had plenty of big mistakes at work. Much respect for businesses that accept human element in any financial machine. That radio station has got to be a great place to work.
Insane that the fans not running did not trigger an alarm of some sort.
I totally agree. That was one of the most heartwarming things I’ve seen all day.
Something special about seeing a son give dad a platform to discuss his life's work. Great content too !
The most important machine: The coffee machine.
It keeps the engineer going :D
@@GeerlingEngineering Or operator. I work in the chemical industry so i make the jokes that coffee machine breakdown's are a process hazard. Cannot have a groggy operator!
"You don't understand. If this machine stops, everything stops!"
@@BrunodeSouzaLino if that machine stops, we cannibalise the transmitter for parts
You also need to show a TX site with a "poor man's" phasor, different lengths of feedline coiled in the basement to feed the towers at different phase angles...
I've seen a couple of those at small stations.
Definitely! We will hopefully get around to some smaller AM sites soon, and many of those are a *lot* different in so many ways (even if the principles are the same).
I'd rather see them going around town doing proof of performance tests they have to do every year. :)
@@GeerlingEngineering I am at the other end of the state but for AM not much to see. A J1000 a coil designed by Mark P, built by me installed by Dave O mostly then out to an 80 year old shunt fed tower. All of it basically sitting on a rock so grounding and chasing RF is... fun. I still have our old MW1 and had it about 80% working after a strike before the owner decided to replace it. Everything else is FM
@@glynnetolar4423 There is a guy who drives around once a year or so with an analyzer then sends us the reports for all our stations. I have never met them just saw the reports dunno if it is a private company or the FCC. Pretty detailed and will tattle on you if his stuff doesn't match what my readings do.
This one was EXTREMELY interesting! :)
It's very rare to see the technology for transmitting at this kinds of power.
We were joking 30 years ago that some Italian HAM operators are using the heat of their power amplyfiers to heat whole towns, the contest beeing limited to 50W and they were bending our antennas a few hunred kilometers away :D
A friend still uses his boat anchors and a neighborhood cat joins him in his garage so it can lay on top for warmth. 😂
Today it's the Bitcoin miners and server farms heating towns though.
I have so little knowledge about radio, and electrical engineering, but I still just absolutely am fascinated by this channel and the stuff we get to see. Great work folks!
Looking at your radio propagation charts reminds me of when I tool Quantum Mechanics and my prof, a ham radio operator, told me that the same partial differential equations governing electron orbitals were used in antenna design.
Looks like the plots you do with control theory where one axis is the imaginary numbers and the other is real. Then you make jokes about too many Polish people in the left hand side of the airplane.... It's funny how much mathematical theory just pops up in random real world applications and how you start to see it everywhere you look.
When I was young, there was a misconception among adult electronics amateurs and even professionals (who didn't work in radio) claiming that the towers were safe unless a person climbed to a dish or an assumed "active" element near the top! Granted, the tower near my home did happen to be safe: it wasn't even fenced and had no warning signs that I can recall. We played on its concrete pad any time we were near it with adults. The thing had a couple large electrical enclosures near the base, but no transmitter building.
Jeff: "There's a DX50"
Me: •looks for a 486 desktop computer•
A 4004 based machine is more plausible.
@@MadScientist267 it certainly is, once I learned the era of the machinery we were looking at
What's funny is the x86 platform still boots up into 386 mode for backwards compatibility so you're probably on one that just has a lot of fancy additional stuff on it.
I howled when your Dad said “Measure twice and cut once”. My Dad used to repeat that to me all the time! Your Dad is the bestest!!❤
I'm a member of the measure five times, cut twice, and go get a new piece from the store club...
Measure Twi
Cut once
👏 Your joke almost whooshed over my head. Time for a little more caffeine.
It’s no joke, we don’t just have these pipes on hand, I’m currently running a line for a new transmitter, I had it all measured up and when I turned for my massive pipe cutter, it vanished, I’ve been looking for it for 3 days now 😣
And it exists in every language! I asked my Persian friend, how do you say this? And without even thinking he said, "dobor metrocon, yakbar bébor." Hahaha.
Fascinating! RF engineering is still black arts to me, let alone high power RF. The build quality obviously looks very good there, and all this copper bonding throughout the entire site... Most impressive.
5:35 SCE to AUX! Ha.
And proper respect to Jeff for the Debian tee. That's been my distro of choice for 12 years.
TLDR. It’s a phaser. Is splits signal into 5 identical signals and shifts the waveform ( time). So if you are between the path of 2 towers u actually receive both signals mixed are in phase and not shifted to sound hollow ( telephone voice). Reason for the extra towers is you send less power to a particular tower to shape its coverage area - you don’t want your signal interfere with another station to Ie sw on same frequency or costal city do not need to have 100 % coverage of the gulfs of mexico
'tis a very good, concise explanation!
(though should be tldw ;)
@@GeerlingEngineering Maybe they didn't watch and just read the closed captions.
Ah. Constructive and destructive interference
Identical as to modulated waveform, but not as to power levels. In some DA's, a tower resistance can be negative (IOW, it returns power), while in problem designs a tower may have low resistance at carrier and negative resistance within an audio sideband. Ouch. (also generally badly unstable then too)
There are two fixed elements of AM DA arrays, tower electrical spacing, and angular positions. There are two variable elements, the power and time delay of signals to each tower, as adjusted by the Phasor and other elements, like transmission line lengths, and Antenna Tuning Units. The earth electrical traits, and ideally very few other items like badly grounded utility lines or nearby structures, can also become undesired elements.
As to radiation efficiency, or skywave at night, tower height also matters. Generally 70 electrical degrees or more is expected for near quarter wave towers, commonly used. Half wave towers have the least vertical radiation and high horizontal efficiency, but higher costs and in some places, more land use regulation or aviation issues. 5/8 wave are more popular for Hams, as they have more complex vertical patterns for slightly higher horizontal gain that half wave.
I used to be a Broadcast engineer in the 80s and this bring me so many memories. Thanks for sharing. BTW my broadcast life was in South America, dealing with equipment from the 40s next to a Harris DX50. 😊
My first job out of college was with a company who (among other things) built and installed phasing&matching panels for AM stations.
It's a unique experience working with a circuit that you need to "bend from the knees" to manipulate.
A couple of months ago I commented on another channel praising Starlink as brand new technology, that phased arrays are nothing new and have been around for almost 100 years. I was remembering that post and just then you inserted a picture of a Starlink dish. 🙂
We're at a point where everything old is new. I guess you can only innovate so much that sometimes, taking the tried and tested old school method works best.
17:55 Did that sausage just talk?
You guys need to visit the AM site in St Cloud, MN where there are four stations (WBHR, WMIN, WVAL, WXYG) multiplexed to share a single (5 tower, IIRC) DA, each with a different pattern.
Would be a fun tour, although I am pretty sure that's in neighboring Sauk Rapids, MN! (Knew a few people who worked there.)
Bonus, the design also has to prevent each transmitter from "seeing" any of the other transmitters. You don't want the pwer of one transmitter flowing to any of the others. That would be BAD.
I would second that - in part because WXYG 540 (C-QUAM AM Stereo!!!) is my favorite station in the whole world, with an Album Rock playlist of 4,000+ songs and Al Neff (of Into The Music fame) as their DJ/station director.
@@mattpease536 Yes, I agree...reminds me of listening to AM radio in 1983, only thing missing is true live DJs 24/7, most of it is obviously voice tracked
@@mattpease536 WXYG - The GOAT!
What, no poking things with hot dogs?
Hot dogs are at the heart of this. They are used as delay-lines for phase correction. Their lengths have to be correct though, since they can be a little „piggy“ otherwise 😜
@@nusermane1076 I think it needs to become a running joke, put in a 3 second clip of trying to poke something with his dad yelling at him
Thank you, this was fascinating! Even little tidbits of information like your father's passing comment about PEP stations. I had to look that up. Cool stuff!
Be sure to watch our 'If I touch this tower, I die' video - it has a whole section in it about the PEP station stuff :)
Back in the 1980s, I was in some 100 kilowatt AM transmitter sites and the energy was so powerful you could hear the AM station through the random vibration of the building. The building was demodulating the signal through vibrations.
Thanks for your great presentation Your chanel is awsome! I was not really focussed on antenna and RF but the way you transmit your passion is catching our attention for sure!!
I love this video series! The way we transmit radio, in particular, is an amazing feat of physics and engineering. All the interplay of phases, directionality, wave forming, etc is intense. I used to know an old tower rigger that had been around since the AM deployment days (by contrast, my specialty is in WWAN and P2MP) and he used to show me all sorts of wild equipment at the towers we worked at.
Really appreciate videos like this, a rare glance of the inner workings of these systems.
Great to see. AM stations are dropping like flies in the UK, some stations paying out fines to the regulator rather than pay more in energy costs to keep running. Even the big 198KHz BBC Radio4 transmitter that reaches a huge area of western Europe is slated to end transmissions, oddly it is needed until domestic electricity meters have been updated to use mobile/cell networks as Radio4 LW broadcasts a signal which switches meters between day and night electricity tariffs.
More info here on the electric meter switching. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droitwich_Transmitting_Station
Actually, AM produces a better long-range signal. You may know that Russia sends out a coded AM signal which has some mysterious purpose.
But nobody has ever explained it.
Very cool, I never quite realized why I see clusters of multiple towers. Also cool to see the amount of equipment that goes into running a station like this. Thanks for sharing!
I could watch videos of Jeff and his dad for hours, they are so good together.
This is really cool, and it makes me appreciate how much engineering goes into radio.
Always love these videos with your dad.
Misleading title. It doesn't do anything with the voice, it does it with the RF signal. I already knew about this, but I only watched because I wanted to know what it's doing with the voice.
I also thought it would be about audio phasers (a vocoder-like sound effect, that was likely invented as early).
Informative
just fantastic, really enjoyed your video, keep up the good work!
Geerling Engineering deserves a TV Emmys! Thanks to both of you for the content.
Hope you keep em coming, Its very interesting for an RF enthusiast like me
Having listened to STL radio for most of my life, this channel is unbelievably cool
thank you my third year was RF engineering and I enjoyed this very much!!!!
I love phased arrays. I have two Wolf River 213" verticals I use in-phase 1/2 wavelength apart, mobile and at home. Makes a very high gain bi-directional pattern. They just need two identical non-resonant lengths of coax after a splitter (18' for 10 and 20 meters for 66% and 80% VF cables). I made 10 contacts with 10 different countries the first night, in the city, power lines near 3 sides of my yard, Amazon RG8X coax, and on 100 watts form a 90's radio. I eventually want to cut some coax (using an excel sheet calculator I made) to make a 90 degree phased array with the two 1/4 wavelength apart. Makes a cardioid pattern that's actually less gain, but more compact if I need to do 30 or 40 meters. Knowing how to use formulas in spreadsheets and MMANA are your best friends when it comes to antenna planning and design.
They had some of that in the 90°s while I was going through the military. Was nice to know they believed in backups. Also was a bit easier than the newer satcom stuff.. Poor hotdog..
This was fantastic! Jeff I love this kinda content! THANK YOU ! But I’m gonna need more! Great video but I could have watched an hour worth easily
This is so nice, we have only a few look of this kind of tech and it very interessting! Thanks
Very informative guys! Thank You!
Very cool stuff! Thanks for sharing
Prodlen made 51. Ohm coaxial cable, used by GE that made made radio and T.V. antennas and transmitters. GE actually supplied complete "turn key" studio and transmitter equipment for radio and TV stations in their hay day. (just like RCA and eventually Harris)
Ron W4BIN
When I first started in the biz I saw a large pile of 3 inch coax and the site's engineer said to never use it. It had the coiled looking bullets and he said it was a pile of 51 ohm coax, which I never knew existed. I was able to stick with Dielectric for large hard line and Andrew Heliax (now Commscope).
Thanks for the info!
Great watching you guys together. Not even my field, but it's just interesting.
Really good questions. Intentionally basic - you obviously more or less already knew the answers to most - and perfectly designed to make this tour interesting and educational for the layman
i really love these radio station tower videos!
I love this kind of content. Your dad is awesome.
Absolutely wild! Gotta love AM radio!
fantastic video! I now have a newfound fascination with radio towers :D
I love these videos. Thanks y'all!
Nice DX-50, I have the badges of a white le DX-10 whom met a demise due to a mouse bridging two components on the main board lol
Also 8towers is crazy, but we once upon a time had 15 towers on one of our sites here in the Toronto area when it was 790
Oh how fondly I remember Saturday nights during the 1980's with KMOX radio and their "green and red hot watts of KMOX radio." Saturday night jazz radio. It was fabulous!
Super interesting! What a completely different world!
My lovely horse... running through the em fields and dangerous voltages
7:07 - Amazing video! I couldn't stop watching it. But I think the real question we need answered is the Lil' Tree (Black Ice) hanging there. I just know it serves a very significant purpose.
"...just put power in me and I'm gonna heat up..."
Perfect for those long cold winter nights, a very useful apparatus if you ask me =)))
Wondeful report!
I would love to see or talk to one of the design engineers. This stuff is so coool!!
As long as it's a Geerling Engineered voice, then it's perfect!
I love this TH-cam channel! ❤
awesome video, love this stuff
EXCELLENT THANKS
I learned TACAN in the Navy. It was super interesting. Wave ducts are fun!
I wasn't expecting this video to be about AM tower arrays, but I sure am glad that it was! 😍
Awesome video! This is why people disagree about whether am stations come in better at night. All things being equal the signal travels farther per watt but the stations sometimes have to compensate to avoid interfering with each other. As a Ham it's always fun when the bands open up though and you find yourself talking to people from ridiculously far away. We often use pl tones to reduce unintentional interference between our repeaters.
Also too hot and sunny or fogged weather can cause poor radio reception. I wonder if any radio broadcast license was ever designed to compensate this by adjusting transmitter power by weather (e.g. through a closed loop control).
@@cyberyogicowindler2448 Each band definitely has its own properties. Some are better at night and some are better during the day. A really cool aspect is the ionic ducting. Now is a great time for that using 10, 11(US CB), and 12 meter because of high solar activity. Five watts can cross the United States and pop out the other side of you're lucky.
Cool! Please make a video explaining how it works. Would be great to see it modelled on NEC!
Superb!
A giant HF phased array beam steering system. That's amazing.
This explanation reminds me of having to tune my base antenna on the Coast Guard LoRAN-C station.
And to think I complained as a kid when I had to fiddle with the rabbit ears on our Sears TV. And, yes, I do know this is radio, but the transmitter towers for the radio station we listened to back then were less than a mile from our house and came in clear even on my little portable radio with the broken antenna.
This was great.
At KNAU we had 100,000 watts 30 miles away remote, at KBAQ in Phoenix/Mesa we had 150 watts up the pipe to a 20 element Yagi antenna, 3,000 watts erp. At KBAQ we were a whisper in a Room full of Shouts!
Those NITE pattern sections tended to go BOOM! if fed with DAY power!
I wish we had a series of towers adjacent to my old elementary school.
Imagine the fun and games!
73 Dad & Jeff
A secret I've kept to myself as a kid until now is i used to "ahhh" into pedestal fans when switched on and the same phenomenon happened too 🤯
Vern Jackson with the recap of the week!
1:36 beam forming?
I like Aaron's sense of humor. Could you explain how the antenna pattern and power level is verified to be compliant?
I'll have to ask my Dad how that works; and I know the FCC continues to evolve how compliance is measured / verified, but I know a while back, my Dad would drive around with some equipment and take readings!
I'm guessing there's still that sometimes, but he also has monitoring equipment set up at his office (and many engineers and ham operators do too) where he can notice when certain signals get weird (sometimes strange patterns, interference from reflections, etc.), and he'll actually email or call up other engineers.
Usually when someone goes out of their licensed range, it will cause issues for _other_ signals, and if those affected stations have engineers who care, they usually self-regulate. And much of the time, it's not when people are trying to cause problems, it's something simple like a piece of equipment that has a blown component, or an antenna that got bent in a wind storm, that kind of thing.
A field strength meter/ receiver is used at surveyed locations to verify that the signal received is at an appropriate level. Normally the main thing of interest is the signal in the low power (null) portion of the antenna pattern as this is critical for protection of stations on the same frequency.
The locations are chosen that they are in the "far field" where the signal from the individual antennas has combined to provide the radiation pattern desired. Locations are also chosen to be free of things such as overhead power lines and be usable over a long period (free of such things as possible housing development)
Probably best done during daylight hours when radio propagation is stable. Interesting to see field strength readings change at dusk when signals begin to fade.
Once the antenna array meets specification then the local antenna monitoring is usually adequate.
@@GeerlingEngineering I remember a TV report that "Radio Liberty" (an USA propaganda station in Bavaria (Germany), designed to inform the Soviet Union) had such strong transmitters that a family in a nearby house thought it was haunted, because distorted voices rattled out of kettles on the gas oven or the springs in bed mattress and sofa tonight, and finally radio sounded out of the speaker inside his homeorgan. Eventually they had to built a faraday cage of wire mesh around the entire house to shield it against that RF radiation.
Genius!
0:44 Oh boy. That would nuts job to do.
I listened to Radio Disney up til the end but I never could imagine how they had enough listeners of pop music on AM radio in the age of iPhones and Spotify to make the business worthwhile.
I wonder if the FCC licenses them for effective radiated power or just wattage? as this is a phased array it can obviously give you a lot of gain in any given direction. With Ham radio most bands are limited in wattage but some take gain into account For example on 60m (5250-5450 kHz), if your antenna offers 3 dB gain, your maximum legal output power can't be more than 50 W (50 W plus 3 dB gain equals 100 W Effective Radiated which is the legal limit there. Great video, interesting to see what the big boys get to play with.
I would never imagine such a professional/industrial setup were you need to remember to turn on the fan manually when using the dummy load. I would expect it to be automated or interlocked.
Day/Night: I had no idea, but I had wondered about multiple small towers at transmitter sites: At 5:55 I like the way the anodyne appearance of all those panels has been broken up by a cheapo plastic thermometer in an almost anarchic manner - which given that Disney put money in it almost blows my mind.
Wow. I am at kilowatt here (J1000) that I have to drop to 56 watts sunset to sunrise. Not dealt with phased antennas yet but cool to see how they work. Antenna design/theory is still voodoo to me. I have replaced power modules and had to mess with the ATU when we took some stuff off the tower. I can hook up a rigexpert now but still have the old way. Big baklite meter with huge alligator clips that go on either side of the coil. Don't quite know how it's used but seen it done and it belonged to one of my mentors that's silent key so it sits on my shelf as a memory. And yes every tower site I have has box fans.
I have a very similar station that uses same towers and patterns day and night so no need to have a day and night pattern shift. One is 1KW day and the other is 500w day. I still remember the moment in class when the instructor talked about resonance and what makes the electrical/magnetic energy blip out into the air. Still facinates me. And he would have loved to see what it can do with a hot dog as a load! Hope you saw the hot dog video!
@@radijoe I kinda picked this up as I went along and became the chief engineer because I am the last person in the area who has a basic understanding of it, can read a schematic and be quiet when someone smarter than me tells me how to fix something. I am tempted to try the hotdog trick but I don't know if a gallon would do it. I do the hold a speaker touch one wire and another to ground turn myself into a crystal radio and the hold a curly bulb in my hand near the tuning coil and blink with the modulation tricks when we have visitors.
So it's a phased array! Awesome! Never thought that was used back then, and in such big machines!
How does the phasor actually work? Delay lines?
Putting aside regulations, laws, and other forms of "momentum" that contribute to why we have AM radio today, if one were to design an entirely new radio system today, specifically without historical influences, would AM radio be a technology that we would want to deploy? Or is the continued use of AM more of a consequence of historical momentum?
I think it depends on where you do it. In Australia, AM is still very useful for covering a remote population with a low number of transmitters. Good way to give bad weather warnings etc when you have no mobile or FM coverage which is most of the country.
FM sounds so much better and our wealth and population density permit erection of numerous towers for shorter range broadcasts, so for that reason the frequencies that are used for what we in the US think of as 'AM Radio' would likely not be used for commercial radio broadcasts in a wealthy/high density place. However, the frequencies currently occupied by commercial radio broadcast absolutely would be used to do something valuable/useful but probably not very publicly visible.
To go a little deeper but without getting too deep in the weeds, AM and FM are how the signal is modulated, and for mostly technical (and some historical) reasons, AM is used on longer wavelengths (MF and HF), while FM is used on shorter (VHF/UHF and up) wavelengths.
In sparsely populated places where you want very wide coverage, AM using MF/HF is useful because transmissions can be sent over the horizon (especially after nightfall)
Heavily mountainous regions its useful because the right style antenna, and the ability to have a daytime and nighttime frequency can permit a station to have a 200-400 mile radius coverage area that does not require line of sight (also useful for impoverished areas because it doesn't really need a high power transmitter).
Ham radio operators are given permission in MF/HF spaces and are constantly using them.
Merchant ships and military(land and sea forces) maintain ability to utilize MF/HF even though satellite based communication is usually possible.
@@dorvinion excellent information, thank you, while I understand the fundamentals of AM and FM (hell, I could probably build an AM radio from what I know with some trial and error, if the signal didn't just show up as interference by accident), what I was hoping for (and received) is the specific benefits of AM over FM.
Like, FM is quite obvious in its benefits, as they are all very obvious to anyone listening to a quality FM signal, but from how you described the signal propagation, it is very clear that a signal with those characteristics is very useful to have, at least in some localities. Thanks!
@@OhhCrapGuy Ya, the propagation characteristics are what make those frequencies valuable. Back when I was in school I'd often leave work at 2AM and head to my folks house 300 miles away. Because it was night I could listen to WLS most of the drive (Art Bell and later George Noory at that time of night - entertaining even if it was mostly nonsense)
The other thing I didn't think about earlier. FM (at least broadcast FM in the US) is about 200kHz per channel. The entire MW band in the US for AM radio is just under 1.2MHz wide and so could then only support 6 WFM channels.
Of course in the modern world we have digital audio compression so you could narrow the bandwidth per channel and get a lot more stations in that 1.2MHz. Then you need only choose a modulation method that works best with digital transmissions at low frequencies.
I never would have guessed the danger of a radio tower. Wow
Did anyone notice those horseshoe/partial rings on the ground around the antennas??? I couldn't take my eyes off them trying to figure out what they were..... I THINK they are areas of growth of the grass... (at least that's what it looked like when the drone came down a little lower) - they reminded me of the 'fairy ring' phenomena that is seen in the scrub brush of the Australian outback and the in Namibia desert grass too... no one has figured out what causes them but they are circular areas of non-growth with the outer edge of the circular having MORE growth than the typical amount we see throughout the entire area.... so they are like bald patched in the grass, with a small ring of higher growth around the edge of the 'bald spot' .... the two main theories of what cause them are the plants self organizing to collect the little bit of rain that falls in these deserts (but that seems quite unlikely to most people) and the leading theory is termites underground eating the roots, or kills the grass because their 'home/hive' is directly under the rings... but that doesn't explain the higher amount of growth around the edges.....
-SOOOOOoooooo after seeing these partial rings around the towers, and ONLY around the towers (I don't see them anywhere else except in the plot of land with the towers on them) I started thinking that MAYBE it has to do with the electrical currents from the grounding of all the systems to make the towers go brrrrrrrr 🤣 ( sry I had to lol )
BUT then I realized that we don't see these horseshoes/rings in the fields around the towers plot of land because THEY ARE FARMED! duhhhh!!! Whatever causes the rings gets tilled over year after year when the farmers are doing their thing... so it all gets mixed up at least once a year, so it doesn't have time to form any noticeable pattern, plus there is no grass there either.....
- I just thought of them possible being because of the cables that come off of each tower to stabilize them and hold them up, but after looking at the footage again closely there seem to be quite a bit more of these "rings" than cables... with 3 cables on each of the four side, you might thing that there would be 12 anchor points in the ground, but I'm fairly certain there are only 4 anchor points for each tower because the 3 on each side appear to all go to the same anchor point (which I would think isn't redundant as it could be and only one failure takes out all three on one side, but I followed the 3 on one side they all seem to land at one point 🤷♂)
- - Okay... so WHAT ARE THEY???? I want to go with the 'termite/insect/creature' explanation but these things aren't the same as the tradition fairy rings, plus they aren't the same thing.... the tradition one remove EVERYTHING growing in a circular area with higher growth around the edge and are spaced out in a fairly ordered manner.... like each 'fairy ring' stays away from all the others, and they are all pretty much the same. These are semi-circular higher growth LINES that have to pattern to location and each one is different for the most part..... So I'm gonna say that they are each caused by different things.
- - IF I look in the shot @ 17:31 there is a house with a brown roof on the right half of the screen ... they have a yard of similar colored grass to the left of the house... I don't see ANYTHING that looks similar to what we see around the towers, and I REALLY don't think that area is regularly plowed like the rest of the fields we see.... so WHY aren't they over THERE????? What makes the TOWER PLOT SO DIFFERENT???
- - - - What do you all think??? Any ideas??? I'm at a loss... but I REALLY want to know if these two things are related..... they are BOTH VERY STRANGE! :)
That was a rollercoaster of a comment!
But from my (limited) experience working in groundskeeping at a public golf course, I remember the head of maintenance had us fighting similar 'grass rings' in the past. According to him, at least, it was a kind of fungi that would come up in that 'ring' like pattern, and sometimes it's related to moisture content, other times features of the landscape that may have been there in the past (like a cluster of tree roots where an old tree was a long time before).
Honestly I don't know that much more about it, but it certainly seems plausible!
@@GeerlingEngineering Likely the transmitted RF energy cooks the grass in a certain distance. With normal fairy rings, AFAIK it has been researched that the grass simply sucks so much water out of the soil that the grass in the middle dies of drought, so it grows into a self-organizing pattern.
That dummy load has a set of high power wire wound resistors and it dissipates a lot of heat.
Brilliant ... I love it ( Radio Astronomer)
"and its not like its near an elementary school". Imvho, whoever climbs a fence to get to a radio tower that is active and touches it, got that coming.
Historical, interesting stuff.
This stuff is so damn cool
So this is essentially beam steering the signal? Kind of like a phased array radar antenna. Altering the timing of the frequency to get the proper constructive and destructive wave interference?
An old analog phased array....cool!
Big Vern Jackson with the recap! Atta boy!
I saw that also is Vern Jackson a well known engineer or TV celebrity?
@@Xsiondu Nope, I just enjoyed the little label there. And Vern Jackson is a fine name.
I just can’t stop thinking of WKRP when watching these. Phone cops man!
I can’t remember if you covered this already, but I read recently that some car manufacturers are no longer including AM radios in new cars. Crazy!
AFAIK in Germany they don't broadcast analogue radio on AM anymore, so there are mostly digital noises and only a few foreign stations audible.
I see at 13:28 that they are using a remotely controllable PDU for those times when you need to reboot something that is not responding or is otherwise not rebootable 🙂
Very interesting. I've only ever maintained a dual tower 5kW AM site.
Any update about the missing tower at WJLX?