Gouverneur Day5

I’m sure you’re wondering how we’ll be getting our fine NCPR programming to the new Gouverneur facility for it to be re-broadcast there, right? Most of our NCPR repeaters/translators simply receive their signal to be re-broadcast “over the air”, in other words at each of our facilities there is an FM tuner dialled in to a different NCPR facility.

But a better, more reliable way is to use a dedicated microwave “Studio Transmitter Link” (STL).  So today, we installed (on our Waterman Hill tower) the Canton end of the Canton-Gouverneur STL!

This wasn’t actually easy, because of the terrain between Canton and Gouverneur, we had to install today’s antenna 275 feet above ground….

Here’s a plot of the height of the terrain between Canton and Antwerp, plotted on an axis which represents the curvature of the earth. (Canton is on the left)

To install this antenna,  Jerry (the tower man) had to be close to our Canton FM transmitting antenna and because high power FM transmissions theoretically can cause bodily harm when you’re very near them, we had to turn off our Canton transmitter today for several hours. (sorry!)  Lucky listeners in Boonville and Saranac Lake (which feed our transmitters in Lake Placid, Peru,and  Bristol, VT)  still enjoyed NCPR because they have backup audio feeds over the internet.

Meanwhile, here”s how they actually installed the antenna.  Jerry climbed up to about 285 above ground, with a stout rope tied to his safety belt.  He then attached a pulley to the tower and sent one end back down.  The ground crew then attached a steel winch cable to the rope and by pulling the other end of the rope, snaked the winch cable back up the tower, through the pulley and then back to the ground.  Then the ground operated winch pulled first the antenna, then the coaxial cable up to the 275′ tower level where Jerry dealt with both these items.

Here’s Jerry and the STL antenna on our Canton tower:

Today, I finished refurbishing (where did THAT word come from?) the beacon light which will live at the top of the new tower.  From the ground these beacons look small, but here is the size of ours compared to an ordinary beer bottle (although in my opinion, there are no ordinary beer bottles!):

There are two 600 Watt bulbs in the beacon… Jerry says we’ll install everything on Friday.