Re: WMEX/WITS/WMRE

[Dan Strassberg <dan.strassberg@worldnet.att.net>]

At 11:34 PM 3/19/99 -0500, you wrote:
>
>Somebody really missed the boat on that lease in not negotiating a 
>clause by which the landlord was bound not to do other things on the 
>site which would have interfered with transmissions.  Things like that 
>can be written into a lease.
>
I'd be very surprised to find that the landlord didn't already have plans
for the large office building when the radio station was constructed. The
building appears to have been designed to fit around the antenna system,
although it was necessary to cut the ground systems for the west amd north
towers to accommodate it. I live only four miles by road from 411 Wavely
Oaks Rd (and just over two miles as the crow flies). I watched the
construction of the radio station with intense interest. I visited the site
at least once a week from the time construction began until after the
station was on the air. My guess is that the landlord made the radio station
accept construction of additional buildings on the site as a condition of
granting the lease for the land. I imagine that the nature of the
construction was spelled out in considerable detail, too.

However, there were obvious snafus. When the radio station construction took
place, part of the area covered by the ground system was already a parking
lot covered with hot topping. Obviously, this was not the first time
somebody had to cut into hot topping. The construction industry has a
machine designed for this purpose and one was brought in. It's a large,
motor-powered carbide grinding wheel on a horizontal axis. This gadget was
used to groove the hot top to accommodate the 120 quarter-wavelength radial
ground wires that surround the base of each tower. No problem there, but no
sooner had the towers been constructed than the landlord mounted lights on
them, perhaps 25' up, to illuminate the parking lot(!)

Most modern AM towers are series-fed and insulated at the base. These are no
exception. If you've ever seen the specially made toroidal transformers that
supply power to the beacons on AM towers without shorting out the base
insulator, you know that you can't mount ordinary lighting fixtures on
series-fed AM towers. Everything has to withstand quite high voltages
because the towers routinely take lightning strikes. Protection is afforded
by a ball-gap across each tower's base insulator. The gap is adjusted to
fire at a voltage just barely higher than that which appears across the base
insulator on modulation peaks. The landlord obviously didn't know all this.
The consulting engineers must have taught the landlord his first lesson
about AM towers.

So the landlord removed the lights from the towers, and after the office
building was up, he bit the bullet and put in lighting standards to
illuminate the parking lot. Back came the grooving machine. It was necessary
to groove the hot-top to install the conduit that carries ac to the lighting
standards. I watched as a workman cut roughly a quarter of the ground wires
for the west tower no more than 75' (about 1/8 wavelength) from the tower
base. A large guy in a large car sat there "supervising." I went over to him
and asked if he understood that his workman was systematically destroying
the radio station's ground system. The big fellow got out of his car, drew
himself up to his full height, and asked "What's it to you, buddy?"
"N-n-nothing...n-n-nothing at all," I replied and beat a very hasty retreat.

When this incident occurred, the office building had already been
constructed, though it was still unoccupied. I'm sure that at least some of
the cut ground wires were ones to which the building's steel framework had
been bonded. I've always wondered whether I watched the building being cut
free of the ground system, and if so, what the effect was on the stability
of the station's patterns and what bizarre effects the people who work in
that building have noticed. If they have coffee rooms and the coffee rooms
have toasters, I'm sure they pick up the radio station. One of the early
tenants was a company that made digital signal processing boards for
computers. I've often wondered whether the engineers could obtain any
reproducible results when they tested these complex analog/digital boards in
that location.

- -------------------------------
Dan Strassberg (Note: Address is CASE SENSITIVE!)
ALL _LOWER_ CASE!!!--> dan.strassberg@worldnet.att.net
(617) 558-4205; Fax (617) 928-4205

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