Transmitters & Temp

[Fitzpatrick, Mike]

In the cold weather, we've never opened the outside louvers, we can change
over our heat exchangers to take indoor air (from the heat exchanger room)
as the intake. The main reason is we run a 80kW water cooled UHF IOT
transmitter, and should something fail (oh like a water pump , power failure
with no Generator fire up or even the transmitter it self) and that outside
air is blowing in on the water elements, they will freeze rather quickly and
cause a really big mess. We have two heat exchangers in a building that used
to be studios, offices, and control, so the heat exchangers serve a dual
purpose in providing heat to the building as well. This means during Sunday
nights, in to Monday mornings when we normally would "sign off" (removing
the RF drive to the tubes, thus cooling them down significantly) we just run
a mostly black slide (A slide with a Legal ID on it). Since the studios are
now abandoned for the new facility, we do keep most of the temps down,
however we still need to keep a close eye on all the water flows, and after
last winter's water breaks, have basically capped off all water in the
building to all but a utility closet and Bathroom. The transmitter cooling,
which is a mix of Glycol and distilled water, has it's own reservoir which
is checked weekly.

We did have a problem (of poor design) where the AC in the transmitter room
just could not handle the heat load, and finally this summer after another
90+ degree day (IN the transmitter room, no less), where the unit just quit,
we had proper high velocity AC installed, and the room never rose above 70°
in the summer.

Now what does suffer even more than Transmitters are satellite dishes, which
have motors and gearing outside in the frigid cold temps. We had to replace
this year Motor Grease in the dishes to compensate for the lower temps. Not
to mention someone going outside (usually a production assistant) and
cleaning snow off of the old dishes using a home-brew dish cleaning
device...

Just a peak to the inside world of WWLP :-)

--Mike Fitzpatrick