The Tale of the Tech Bros, or, Don’t Toast Your Brakes

Looking down from Shasta Bally
Looking down from Shasta Bally (click for fullsize)

Let me tell the tale of the Tech Bros and Shasta Bally.

Shasta Bally is a mountain in Whiskeytown National Recreation Area, between Redding and Weaverville, California. It’s not exactly a widely well known place, but it’s pretty neat, and Whiskeytown Lake (an artificial reservoir) has the distinction of having one of those weird fascinating bell-mouth spillways that descends into the void somewhere.

The peak of Shasta Bally houses a weird little complex of radio towers and buildings. It’s home to KRCR-TV, KNCQ-FM, and countless microwave and 2-way radio relay stations, as it’s the only peak that has unobstructed line of sight paths to the cities of Red Bluff, Chico, Redding, and Weaverville. Amazingly, one of the few things it does not have up there is an old Western Electric Long Lines site; they used a relay station out to the east instead on Hatchet Mountain.

Access to the peak is via a very… interesting… little unpaved road. It is maintained sporadically by the Forest Service or Bureau of Land Management, I forget which. It is closed to the public in the winter and a Sno-Cat or helicopter (!) are required to access the peak once snowfall has occurred. In the summer or fall, though, you can get up there via a 4WD vehicle with nice knobby tires.

It’s not exactly a fun drive though. Ever time I made it, if I was in my Subaru Forester, the road was just too much for it and would overheat the transmission (the rare case of an SUV actually being approprate for the conditions, yet, the conditions being too rough for the SUV? not your average grocery run). With all the frequent stops to let it cool down, it took a long time to get to the peak. Coming back down also required repeated stops to cool the brakes as the low gear wasn’t low enough to control descent speed.

If I went up in a 4WD F150, it’d deal with it better, and would manage the downhill just fine, but I pretty much had to put it in 4LOW 1st or 2nd gear.

One day I was up there working on the KNCQ-FM transmitter.
On the way up I found the road was unusually jammed. I was in the Forester, so I was at a snail’s pace with all the stops for cooling. I was behind a strange convoy of six brand new 4WD Ford and Toyota pickups going up, all of which had parking permits in the window from Oracle Corporation, which I’m guessing indicated they were all tech bros on a weekend trip up from the bay area. They were going up much more slowly than I normally would even WITH all the cooldown stops!

We could normally take this off the air for maintenance as needed as long as we had the aux over on Linguini Mountain running – the KNCQ transmitter would just overpower it on the air and your receiver would hear whichever signal is strongest thanks to capture effect. I was spoiled by this I guess, you can’t do that with 8VSB television! Oh well. Anyway, I had the aux up, and had just started looking into why the transmitter was having intermittent glitches on air when I found the harmonic filter, a very large and expensive assembly you sure as hell can’t buy a spare of at the corner ace hardware, was burned up. Oops.

Then the radio in the corner went from playing lousy pop country to static. The aux had died. There was no way to bring it back up by remote control because its transmitter was a piece of turd that didn’t reset from the remote – once it was out, it was out until you physically reset it.

The confused and increasingly angry phone calls began. I had to get over to the mountain on the other side of the lake to reset that aux as there was no way in hell I was going to be able to get the old Continental 816R running with the filter that crisped. It’d just arc out. I walked out of the little “camouflaged” green shack (which stood out like a sore thumb because the Forest Service required it be camouflaged by being painted forest green despite the fact it was above the tree line on a mountain made of gray granite!) and started back down the road.
After the first switchback I found myself behind the same convoy of six trucks.

Their brake lights were on solid.

Shasta Bally road. The grade here is about 25%.


uh-oh.

One thing you will learn if you drive heavy trucks cross-country or in mountainous terrain, or if you deal with super steep long roads like this, is that you CONSERVE your brakes. You do not ride them. In fact, you want to manage your descent speed with engine braking first, then use the brakes in very short bursts or for emergencies. This is something tech bros driving around San Jose do not know about I guess. All of them were riding their brakes.

About one mile down the road (elevation change = probably about 800′), the smoke started rolling out of the wheels of the TechBro convoy and they all came to a dead stop. Luckily, most of them did so into areas where the road was wide enough to pass.

Also lucky I guess that they COULD stop — if you were to suffer a complete brake failure on this mountain, your only way to avoid being yeeted off a cliff would be to jam your vehicle in the trees or scrape it against the mountain face on one side of the road until you get stuck in it. Neither would be particularly great and I can’t really entirely fathom how one would get a tow truck up there to recover a broken down vehicle.

I stopped too and got out and helpfully instructed all of them how to downshift and get themselves off the road…. and how to get to the Les Schwab Tire Center back in town to get their brakes replaced.


I had never seen so many ‘tribal’ tattoos on fake tanned skin before in my life.

Upon arriving on the other mountain I found the aux’s antenna was toast, but I could swap things around and put a Crown transmitter on it which would cheerfully broadcast into a wet piece of pasta, so we were back up again. Exactly how this was resolved afterwards is a blur in my mind, though the ultimate solution was “watch as the Carr Fire burned over the whole mess and we got to rebuild it all in a working state”.

Steamed.

I’m a little annoyed with having to deal with air conditioning nonsense right before a weekend I don’t get any time off from work because we’re so understaffed. We have an HVAC contractor who is supposed to deal with this but they’re completely clueless when it comes to large systems. They have one guy in the company who understands the Metasys controls and somehow I know more about them than he does.

🎵 Look at this graph 🎵

The last big issue I had was with this one air handler / fan coil unit on the roof that cools both control rooms and our newsroom via a Medusa head of VAV boxes. First it had been shutting down, it turned out the variable frequency drive was on an HVDC overvolt fault and didn’t automatically restart. I programmed it to do so. The service company looked at me like I was speaking Martian COBOL when I explained this to them.

I also asked them if the belts to that blower it runs were too loose. They don’t know. They couldn’t advise me on this and didn’t know how to check. I’m not touching this with a social distancing pole.

Today it was acting up in a different way and I found Metasys reporting the cold duct pressure was 0.1″ water column. When I opened the blower access door on this totally turdly air handler, it jumped up to 0.7″ and the VAV boxes actually started, you know…… working. Opening the door took an unreasonable amount of force and only after I opened the door, the system started calling for less than 100% blower speed. Hmmmm.

Gee I wonder why there’d be that much airflow restriction on the inlet? Let’s see, shall we?

Gaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhh

These coils were supposedly cleaned! Uh…. No.

On a side note, the fact that our chiller’s variable output capability is simply not used and instead it was just saddled with this foam rubber covered Chipotle burrito tank and set to on/off cycle makes me wonder

the spaghettinator

Here’s to hoping this hot weekend goes uneventfully.