Several times in my adventures working on broadcast transmitter sites, I’ve walked in on a facility absolutely roasting itself to death because the batteries died in a digital HVAC thermostat.
Today was another one of those and it was the strangest. I’m not even going to try to explain what the hell happened because I don’t even know, but I can tell you that apparently, the Maxiva XTE exciters react by just turning everything into a bad game of Numberwang.
In all seriousness though, one exciter developed massive phase noise which led to viewer complaints of not being able to watch the channel, and the other drifted off frequency and wouldn’t go back. I wonder if it’s got packing foam glued over the oscillator like the old Apex?
Another day in paradiseHooking up the GPS antenna along with the external 10 mhz reference… Look at this graph! But alasThis whole thing is uh, never mind, here’s some TCFW.Picture unrelated, but I just love how this looks with translucent circuit boards.
Oh, yes, Mr. Ramko, it occurs to be now that I did realize I’m transgender* that you hold a special distinction in my life:
You are the only person I have ever met who would have had a problem with this …
… and who would say it to me right to my face.
Sir, with all due respect, you suck entire boxes of that Nemal Electronics knockoff of 1855A. My preferred pronouns are they/them but I’m fine with any, except in your case in particular, you may refer to me with silence because I do not want to talk to you. 73’s and good night.
Picture related.
No need for that here. I’m just myself.
Don’t worry, this is being written from a state of bubbly euphoria. I just can’t help but look back on working in such a toxic environment and feeling so glad that I’m free of it. YEEEEET
* specifically somewhere under the nonbinary umbrella. I think maybe agender would describe my feelings, even though I tend towards a more femme style nowadays. I am still just beaming happy that someone just outright guessed this looking at me today. I must have the vibes and stuff 😀
Yeah, I’ve been stuck with this for quite some time now and I have no idea what I’m looking for, other than….
ARCANE MYSTERIOUS WISDOM
and maybe some dark magic
also FIVE TONS OF FLAX
Anyway—
We have a studio camera that’s got a Canon HJ17ex6.2B lens on it. This lens has servos for focus, zoom, and iris. There’s also a small OLED(?) display and menu navigation thing on the hand grip that lets you check and set some options on it.
The bottom of the servo grip has three sockets – one for the remote focus controller, and two for the remote zoom or serial remote controls. The two latter sockets are a 20 pin Hirose connector.
This is supposed to be connected to a Ross Video robotic head’s lens jack for remote operation from the Ross Cambot system.
Originally this was connected to an ancient Vinten robot with a cable that I still have, and connecting it to the lens doesn’t do anything interesting. Connecting Ross’s cable makes the lens go completely and immediately dead with no servo activity, and I have to power cycle the camera or unplug and reconnect the cable between the lens and the camera body to regain any function from it.
The only documentation I have found AT ALL on this 20 pin connector is a kinda weird manual page from Canon, and this diagram from Ross:
And from the Canon manual:
This is from the manual for a ZSD-300 “zoom servo demand” controller. Please note that pin 20 is not shown as to what its function may be. (?!)
And now, the Vinten robot cable… if I look inside the Hirose end of it, it appears to have wires landed only on 13, 15, 16, and 20. 20 and 15 are connected together at the far end of the cable. 19 and 20 are connected together on the Ross cable.
On the Vinten cable three of the four pins on the Lemo connector are used. This suggests to me that whatever pin 20 is— OH WAIT IT’S JUST GROUND, ha, the pins are listed out of order!
I had Ross send me another cable, it has the same pinout and same issue with making the lens power down. I tried another lens of the same model and the same thing happened.
What the heck do I need? I’m throwing this out here in case someone possesses the correct ARCANE KNOWLEDGE.
My best guess: I need to NOT ground pin 19, as it is open circuit on the Vinten cable. The mysterious runes in the Canon doc seem to suggest it might be used to determine whether you’re gonna use serial remote mode or an external control. Also they uh, helpfully, labelled these serial lines A/B X/Y, I dunno. My guess is the Vinten thing was using RS-232 style wiring since it only has three wires coming out (RS-422 and RS-232 can be kinda sorta bodged together with reasonable success).
Yes, anarchist catgirl presenting nonbinary seems like a good description for me.
Bizarre 20 bay FM antenna, I don’t know what they were thinking but it makes for a good meme
So it turns out in addition to bricking themselves, these exciters can also crap out their backup battery. Not sure if I’d call it an improvement over the system in the old Apex M2X as now it’s an unserviceable custom $300 battery pack!?
Anyway let me stop being vexed by stupid transmitters and point out this thing I discovered:
Pink and red eyeshadow do appear to be my absolute jam.
Harmonic Electra X making me mad in several ways nyaa
Hey, I got all the modules for the transmitter repaired, let’s go put them all back in there! First, I’m just gonna switch to the aux and……
*horns.aiff*
I do not know what came out of that transmitter, but it was not proper digital television. It had a carrier, and it had maybe some sort of data, but it wasn’t television. It was FIVE TONS OF FLAX or some shite I dunno.
The GatesAir Maxiva XTE exciters were violently unhappy.
I wish I’d saved a screenshot of the exciter user interface but it really didn’t tell me much other than that where you go in and it will tell you what service PIDs are present in your ASI stream, it just showed what looked like a bunch of line noise. Rebooting the exciter didn’t help. Ugh, software corruption again? Maybe— but I decided to go to GatesAir’s support site and look to see what the latest version of the exciter software was, if I was just gonna be reloading it anyway… and saw that the changelog mentioned a fix to a failure that occurs specifically when you’re feeding them from a Harmonic Electra X… which we are. One awkwardly long software load process later, I have two working exciters on the aux again, and I can continue! I wonder how much packing foam and glue this model contains?
Installing the missing PA modules, then removing, reinstalling them, wiggling them around until they fully make contact (why?!), then reinstalling the modules adjacent to them when they got loose and threw “PA not present” faults got all but two modules up and running— one down with bad power transistors (ANOTHER?!) and one with an “RF Off Warning”.
The one with the “RF Off Warning” was suffering only from a very familiar and ultimately harmless problem—
Let me once again state my eternal love for these MADDENINGLY CURSED D-SUB POWER CONNECTORS where the pins fall out and back into the module. Ye gods… STAGE PIN CONNECTORS would be an improvement over this, and I have a dislike for those things that’s just about palpable. (It helps in that case that I’ve had several of them explode into showers of sparks and smoke in my hands while working on studio lighting.)
Gee, I wonder why the transmitter says PA3 RF OFF WARNING? Yeah, you kinda need power to make RF…
Shoooooomp
Next time remind me to not skip going to get the powered screwdriver to do this, that’s like two bakers’ dozen screws and takes forever to get into.
I swear, there is just no end to the fun with this transmitter. Let this be a lesson to you all, do not defer maintenance for five years while your station is a Shitclair property and let your transmitter cook in 110 degree heat every summer of that because your air conditioners are slowly becoming piles of green rust. Also keep up with your software updates. Also HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH. Plenty of that.
Sony HSC-300 camera… presenting with loss of power and/or signal whenever the swivel spigot on the side is rotated. The part was ordered… $835 and it took two weeks to ship… Yowza. I’m clearly in the wrong business.
And there it is. $835.
At first I was really perplexed wondering how this not even coaxial set of wires carries HD-SDI, but… it’s not necessarily HD-SDI. I’m not really sure what it is. It’s 170vdc power, and some flavor of bidirectional RF something or other that goes to the CCU and also carries prompter and return video to the viewfinder and serial data. Ok then.
The old part was really munched.
All in all not a hard replacement, but damn that parts cost!!! Wow. Well, I don’t have to buy it myself (this isn’t South Florida!) so bite me. Ha.
Last week we had a horribly long engineering staff meeting that basically pointed out to me that we’re all destined to be burned out like our damn transmission line in the coming months. I’m quite done with this. We were promised there’d be big improvements and then saw them yanked away and replaced with the promise of enjoying what will eventually degrade into “Just In Time Scheduling“. Yeah, how about no.
Spunk Trumpet
That being said, I’m gonna be exploring other career opportunities with companies that don’t treat their mission critical staff like rodents.
Old UPN network lighting gobo
I had such high hopes for this company. It was great…. three mergers, four reductions in force, and one massive consolidation of HR and talent acquisition later. Now it’s just a slow burn of crushing cheapness and presumably, tax writeoffs of everything that doesn’t just get asset stripped.
Anyone interested in having a rather silly but talented engineer come work for them? I have 20 years experience in the field, including TV, FM and AM radio. I’d post a full resume here but I don’t exactly want everyone’s bots to come knocking yet. Also, I shitpost a lot. Maybe I need to write up a public resume in the form of a shitpost. That’d fool all the bots and give me the ability to sneak in cat pictures.
So finally all the pieces fell into place and we were able to discover that the issue we had with high VSWR was simply that we were visited by —-
Only consummate V’s will be used within this post as a result.
In all seriousness, this was an effect of climate change!
So, remember this, where the line was sweep tested and a big raunchy fault showed up at 1600 feet?
Here’s the fault:
Yeah, um, this got a little bit hot.
The remains of the inner sections of the line, an insulator that slumped and shrank all weird, and a mostly vaporized “bullet” connector. Here’s a figure of what one would look like if it was not… burninated….
Well, now that’s fixed, but the tower crew found a lot of debris in the line at multiple levels and issues with the hangers. One had a bad case of Spring Fever and some others had alignment problems that kept them from sliding their full range of motion.
NOOOOOOO SPRINGS
This never presented a problem in 25 years of the line being in service…. until climate change threw us a RECORD HIGH heat wave. 118 degrees for several days… the line had never experienced heat that severe, and between that and the hanger misalignment, it caused sections of it to get kinked and that eventually broke the bullet somehow and blew everything up. The failure actually occurred early in the morning after the record heat wave broke and everything began to shrink back into its normal sizes.
Well that was a wild ride.
Now let me explain why I embarassingly fell asleep on the job while getting the transmitter back in order:
This is the most annoying and frustrating interface, I swear. In each of the transmitter cabinets, there are two Power Blocks. Each Power Block (PB) has a Phase and Gain module which is the intermediate power amplifier to drive the other amps in the PB, but instead of it just having three amp pallets in it, it has one preamp module that lets you, well, adjust the Phase and Gain.
On the old Space Station Toilet it had software controlled adjustments in each of its Intermediate Power Amplifiers (IPA) but also a set of manual trombone-slide phase adjusters that worked by being a variable length line in the RF path to it. They were pretty quick and easy to adjust.
This is not. This is very very much not. The way it works is you vary the step size by entering a number in that box, check or uncheck which PBs you want the adjustment to affect, then click the + or – buttons.
The result of your adjustment is reflected by the amount of power dissipated in the combiner reject loads, RL1, RL3, and RL2. RL1 / 3 are the combiners inside each of the cabinets between the two power blocks. RL2 is the one external to the cabinet sitting on top that merges it together. Basically, you want to balance RL1 / RL3 as well as possible, then continue balancing to get the RL2 power to minimum. Finally, in the case of this transmitter since it’s basically two ULXT’s externally combined, you pull up the interface to the Dualtran controller, watch the final combiner reject load power in there, and balance the two sides.
It is a very very very very tedious and slow process, complicated further by the fact that the web interfaces all time out every five minutes and make you log back in, even if you were actively in the process of making an adjustment! Click, click, click, click, BARF. I got to a point where I remember looking at the reject load power and wondering, hey, is that number of millivolts on the meter channel going up or down? I forgot what it just was a second ago, uh…..
Next thing I knew I was looking at the towers from a houseboat on the Sacramento River. Cassie was curled up on my lap and I found myself wondering how we got there and hoping I didn’t have to drive down there because she hates the car. She seemed very content though. I had no idea how I’d gotten there but I figured since it was so nice I shouldn’t really question it. There was a nice cool breeze coming through the windows and birds chirping in the distance. Cassie was watching them intently with her little tail twitching and she was doing the adorable little feline ekekekekekekek back at them.
Then I was just rudely dumped back into the reality that I was still sitting in front of that dumb web interface at the transmitter site. HOW ABSOLUTE DARE? That was so nice! Oh well.
I forget if I’d mentioned just what fun it was to get this line separated and get the test adapter into place but uhhhhhh, it was a battle.
This thing is pretty cute. There’s a long wire that goes up its hoistway and the control panel in the cab, powered by a rechargeable battery (please don’t forget to plug in the charger!) inductively couples to it to send control tones to the box at the bottom and audio to the cab intercom. Somewhere in this system there’s a 2-way radio, I have no idea where, but the Morse code ID from the news department repeater sometimes blasts out of the intercom at the tower base and spooks the hell out of me because I never expect it.
Alas it doesn’t work because somewhere up the tower, a limit switch circuit broke. I’m not sure where but that’s finally supposed to be fixed this week, after which we can have a tower crew figure out what went arcy sparky 1600′ up. The fault is 1700′ from where the test equipment was connected, but that’s subtracting the 100′ or so horizontal run before it meets the tower and goes up.
What.Old weather radar, no longer used but still standing.
So speaking of things blowing up, I love it when people send me pictures of PTek gear, it cracks me up to see, uh….
Not a watt comes from that whole stack. Conversely:
That’s a nice amount of power from an amplifier that’s turned off! Oh hi. #fnord
Some dodgy looking smoothie robotTCFWSo that’s why ellipsoidal lights tend to generically get called Lekos…Demonia, I love your boots but can you please make them a little more durable so I don’t have to keep regluing that fake unstitched Goodyear welt and pinning it under the dummy load to cure?Really neat Japanese software magazine cover from around when I was born. Welcome to the future.
