I was at this site doing some RF work - ever wondered how FM radio actually happens? This is the equipment inside the hut at the base of the tower. The tower site I was at was 1000' and a giant lightning conductor.
That Ericsson gear... is that used for the STL? Any audio processing done at the transmitter site or all done at the studio and piped directly from STL to exciter?
Didn't appear to be any audio processing gear - although there was an enclosed cabinet I couldn't see inside.... I was on site dealing with a pesky OC3 link to some 6ghz microwave gear....
There's some two-way gear mixed in the 1st and 4th pics. (Combiners on 3rd as well) Looks like possibly paging. I see a Nucleus transmitter in there, but I'm unfamiliar with the newer ones with the flat fronts and small green status screens. (Probably newer variants of the Nucleus)
EDIT - Idiot me didn't zoom in and see Ericson on them. EDIT 2 - I think those are Quantars not Nucleus... Godammit I need my coffee. Ignore me now.
The gold-silver cans are the multicoupling/combiner chains for the repeaters to their respective antennas.
I have to admit, it's a nice clean site. Usually two-way sites are shitholes. I'm also impressed to see guard bars in front of the combiner plungers! Out of dozens and dozens of sites, I've only seen a handful with those in place.
What is the boxy cabinet with the cylindrical mesh cover top and large copper pipe-like thing protruding out the center of it?
Looks to me like an RF dummy load. The copper pipe is the RF transmission line to connect to the output from the transmitter. The mesh cover to allow air flow from a fan to cool the dummy load, which probably has to dissipate several kilowatts of RF energy.
It would be used when aligning/testing the transmitter in situations when on-the-air testing is undesirable.
Most likely 5" air dielectric. Andrew HJ9-50. For Comparison, the rigid copper line meeting it is 3". (The 5" looks bigger because of the outer jacket.)
Transmitter shown (Harris HT Series) is not currently active. (May be a standby site for the station?)
Alphapointe: In contrast, KBIA (on KOMU Tower south of town) has 3" rigid line in 20' sections all the way to the top of the tower. More connections, but if you have a problem halfway up, you don't have to replace all of it.
