Brand new. Lasted about one minute on air before failing.
They used aluminum coax braid for the main output. Rest assured it gets worse. I’m posting this to watch a certain Canadian ham radio operator dump core in response. This is… a whole new tier of shitposting.
Read more “PTek. This post is not divisible by 2 for I can’t even”
Nothing left to do now but get a very strong adult beverage. The Carr fire hit the site—
Left cabinet was a CSI 3KW on KEWB-FM, center rack was exciters and STL and the aux for KNCQ-FM, rightmost rack was a BRAND NEW Nautel VS 2.5 that seems to have just… vaporized. All the aluminum parts of everything just disappeared, including a brand new 2-port Bext combiner that was going in along with the Nautel for a new project. A tech who came up found the propane line burning in the wreckage like a torch and shut it off at the tank.
There was also a VHF repeater for an air ambulance service and the gear for two wireless ISPs in the building, which dated back to the early 1990s.
Note the Fibrebond structures fully intact in the background.
The two towers up there experienced extreme heat, melting every plastic part about halfway up.
Please feel free to use this wherever it’s relevant, or even where it isn’t.
Personally I really like those times where it remains irrelevant for like two or three entire days in a row. This is not one of them.
Please be sure to inspect your steel belted radial mic clips every year or 5000 spots cut for safe operationWAIT WHAT
* Slams that SHITPOST button until it goes concave *
A former engineer (who was eventually banned from the facilities for various people problems including throwing a chair at a DJ) had made dozens of these splices where almost anything that’s an analog stereo pair goes into an electrical tape covered Y connection into some kind of 4-wire shielded cable.
Out of curiosity I unwrapped the tape from one of his splices to see what was inside.
Oh, no. No no no no no no my entire facility is wired like this no no no no NOPE FUCK AAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHNOPENOPENOPEARONIWITHCHEESENONONONO
The past inside the present…
A revisit to the sandy shitboi…
Page spam pause– click to continue.
Read more “I’d like to solve the puzzle, Pat…”
Upon arriving at the peak of what I’m lovingly referring to as the shitboi….
6000 feet of decomposed granite covered mush….
this was playing on the stereo.
The summit came into view as the sample of the name “Tampax” progressively got more distorted and vocoded into oblivion.
Perfect.
So, let’s just put fresh tubes in this beautifully well maintainedOH HELL.
Okay. Fine. Let’s just tune up and
What in the I don’t even
Is this loss?
Site needs a revisit because the exciter went haywire over the weekend. D’oh!!
Today’s massive nuclear facepalm count:
1. I was asked to see what would be needed to put my cluster’s MARTI UHF remote radios back in service.
2. I saw on Facebook that someone got a tattoo of a lineart interpretation of the fucking Loss meme.
Why. why would you do either one of those things to yourself? Using the MARTI for a remote broadcast sucks but having a shit meme tattooed on yourself is just amazingly dumb.
Tattoos are a piece of art, both ephemeral and long lasting, that one displays upon their body. The loss meme is just awful. It’ll be forgotten as all your base in a few years and yet. Well…. can you imagine trying to explain this shit in like ten years? Pictured, the original comic panel and a similar lineart interpretation of loss.
I dunno, loss.jpg will still probably be better than setting up that will-burt mast and antenna only to find you’re cockblocked by having no line of sight and a Fresnel zone situation… I doubt the plan is to use that dino-radio often.
I’m referring to a literal nightmare here, not a figurative one. I had a pretty frighteningly vivid one last night. I blame being a bit tired out after having subjected myself to transistor horror.
In this dream I had been invited to visit an engineer at a local TV station. In reality, up here in the northern Sacramento Valley, there’s pretty much just one TV station that produces the news for most of the cities north of Sac.. anyway…
I walked into the facility which was in some nondescript warehouse bay, past a row of dusty screaming servers, and into a dark, cold little control room that had unpainted drywall walls and a window looking out on the news set.
There was just one guy there. He sat in front of some kind of really REALLY dummied down console that had a few faders and buttons on it which apparently did next to nothing as they were covered in dust. A small cheap netbook computer with the power lead duct taped into the side sat in the middle of this console. The only button that did anything was an illuminated and quite worn TAKE button on the lower right corner. Above this console was some kind of weird rackmount unit with two 16:9 CRT monitors and a satellite receiver. One was on program out, one was showing the output of a waveform rasterizer somewhere which revealed the same thing that the program monitor did: the cameras which were on robotic pedestals out in the studio, which were set on auto white balance and auto iris, were shaded very very badly. No controls were present to correct this.
Nobody else was present.
The news show opened and the talent began reading from their teleprompters. The prompters were fed from who the hell knows where (the engineer didn’t even know!) and there were really messed up lower thirds and captions that appeared and disappeared pretty much whenever they felt like it – the guy was reading the show rundown on the netbook screen and calling the scenes, as he pressed the worn old take button to transition between them, but only the people on set actually ever seemed to listen. The cameras often didn’t move when they were supposed to, or pointed at the ceiling or something, and nobody was here to fix it— he’d just smash the take button again and skip the scene where they were supposed to be used.
Of course, the Sinclair group ‘must read’ propaganda piece on fake news was read by the talent. (In reality, this one local news station we have up here is a Shitclair property, but they have never read this that I’m aware of— instead they just have this weird pretentious sounding statement about accuracy.)
The weather was then run, supposedly from a local meterologist, but in reality it came from a satellite feed from who the hell knows where. A low Eb/N0 warning flashed on the receiver display and it glitched out. The engineer just hit TAKE again and the commercial break began.
I just felt this horrible sense of terror and started running. The shitty little warehouse bay suddenly became an endless maze of alternately insanely dense or empty racks of nonsense equipment and cabling. At some point I saw a display showing the transmitter readings, the VSWR was high as hell, the signal was (miraculously) in mask, but the 8VSB eye diagram showed two entire levels smashed flat and missing… I thought to myself “well, at least that means nobody is able to watch this shitty trainwreck over the air!”…
Then I was suddenly back home in my bedroom watching this shit on the television. There was a badly corrupted picture on screen as they started talking about a farmer’s market up in Shingletown. I saw one of my enormous Yaesu satellite base radios sitting on the nightstand, which was actually a useful detail later in convincing myself I dreamed all this shit.
Then I woke up, but I was stuck in that horrible state of having to convince myself that this incredibly vivid dream was NOT real.
WHAT THE FUCK WAS ANY OF THAT, BRAIN?! What’s scary is, depending on who you ask, this is the grim future of television news. It was truly horrifying at the time.
Here, enjoy these ridiculous-ass 90s game commercials.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDRtl8nMb30
THE SAME VOICE IS USED IN THE NEXT ONE— which made me loudly exclaim “ohhhh hell nope”.
As a palate cleanser, here’s a Gak ad. (GAK FARTS INTENSIFY.)
Damn thing twisted and bent like a mozzarella stick. This WAS a 1″ spade bit.