If I touch this tower, I die

This is the Camx am Tower and it pumps out 50,000 watts of RF. Camx is a station that has existed for almost 100 years. It's one of the first news stations that did it 24/7, and my dad has a special history with it. Tower yes, I've been taking care of

this

guy for 20 years, one of my first duties here at KX we put up

this

tower

, took down the old one and put up this new one, so behind my tripod is the building with the transmitter and everything and then underground the pipe leads here to this building, what is the name of this building?

This building is called an ATU or antenna tuning unit, so inside there are enough components to match the antenna to the feed coming to the antenna. So the antenna is the

tower

, unlike FM where the antenna is a device hanging from a tower. This whole tower is the antenna, so you combine it with capacitors and inductors basically inside the building, under the base. Here's a big copper shield and uh inside on a copper strap ring and then from there the radials come out in all directions it's a single tower system even if it was a multi tower beam Each tower has the ground plane uh uh it's built to be circular around the base of the Tower and then if this Tower is an antenna and it has 50,000 watts, how do you make things like light bulbs right if you see the wire that carries the 50,000 watts, that wire with the loop who joins? the tower, so immediately the tower has all the RF, but that cable is a hollow tube, so inside the tube is where we pass the wiring to take care of the lighting.

There's an Austin ring transformer they call it, we'll look at it in there as well, so it isolates the power feed from the building to the power feed from the tower lights because ultimately the lights are also connected to land to the tower. I also noticed that there are a lot of strange gadgets, like a weird little thing with two balls and There's a little thing here with insulators and it looks like something out of a movie, like talking about Tesla or something. What are those things for? They help direct the beam energy away from the ATU components, so you have the ball spacing here. uh that can direct lightning into the ground, the Gap ball is also interesting because if you get it too close it could be more effective at transferring light energy on hits, but it could also change the impedance aspect of the tower if you get too close. separated, the tower becomes more stable and its measurement or whatever, but the effectiveness of the Gap disappears and then there is a loop there.

I know for some things you have like a water drip loop, but I guess. That may not be for water. Well water is number one. What you want is that you always want to have a drip circuit. You want the water to come down from the tower and not have a chance to enter the building, but it's like the last one. loop I was told that impedance, you know, a loop causes a little more impedance. Is there anything special you have to do with a fence like this around a tower like this? I would say you try to make it electrically disappear and not be dangerous at the same time we had the fence post buried and that came up and each post had to be joined together and they even took the joint up to the security wire at the top, it creates a condition in the one that is safe and then things like that gate post which is just your 50 kilowatt station, that post is grounded and I can still get an arc from a floating gate from the ground on one side, I grounded a pole here and I think you're just seeing a little energy every now and then.

At one point, the big brown thing in there is the porcelain insulator. You know, if you think it's a tower, it has power and you can't ground it. You would simply be cutting off all power to make the tower float above the Earth's floor. can actually transmit and there's a lot of weight pulling down on that there's a lot too. I mean, I've seen toilets that can hold a 300 pound person and I imagine it has to be even stronger than that. Yeah, same principle, whatever. making and baking those things in the thickness the science of that keeps that Tower off the ground and I notice that even the doghouse has these little grounding straps around it, yes the room is grounded inside, there's also a closed area, uh, it's like it's not safe on the other side of the door is safe, uh, being there, you know you don't want to live here, you wouldn't want to set up a shack, have a Coke and sit with your friends inside this room, but it's safe enough to work as long as you stay outside the internal doors.

I think I can hear the X camouflage here. Is there a tuner inside the building? No, but there's copper power energized, so there's just sound with so much power inside here that I can hear the signal and look at this, there's an old, uh, an old Crank telephone on the wall here, yeah, in a moment in a battery pack there, uh Mel, is it lunch time? However, you turn it down, you have the barbecue on here. I see an AM. meter here that looks like we're definitely in the zone of yeah don't sit here for too long well this is the meter uh am that tells us the current of the common point uh for the people that know I'm with turn signals and stuff like that, but there's only one point on a single tower, so that's the antenna current, which is an authorized level that you can't exceed by that percentage or you don't want to be below that percentage and it's measuring. from a device that is mounted inside, so all the energy going to the tower goes through there and if you wanted to start, you could start at the end and go backwards, but you could also start from here, where the energy comes in .

So you can see the wires coming from outside, it's actually outside. They have a concrete barrier. The cables come from underground and go to a switch there so we can choose which cable comes from the building we are going to. to use in the air and from there, each component here the task of all these coils and capacitors is to tune the signal to the tower so that all the energy is as much as possible for that direction and, with the correct current, what? It's these giant coils of wire, it's a coil, that's exactly what it is, it's a coil in electronics, you have them on your cell phones and everywhere, I've never seen one that big, I think I'd have to have a car to carry my cell phone if I had one of those that's big, you want them clean enough so that they work perfectly, you know you don't want them to have stains or how about nesting animals, things like That's right, here we have like snakes and spiders that are the biggest we've ever had and a snake is weird, spiders are less weird and we had one of those moments where you came out of the air that was like what was it and it started.

I looked around and finally got here and found the mouse right up against the area where the wire comes out, crawling and dead, that's why we have the gate here, the fence here, another part that really fascinates me is this big double. disk thing over here, so it's an open air transformer, so the energy comes from the building to the windings in this part of the transformer, they are attracted to the other part, you know the magnetic field and induction, etc., so you get the AC power and it goes into that box over there, so now you have AC going into that box and that copper tube coming out the top carries the 50 Kow because you can see it plugged in there, but it carries the 50 Kow out because the connection up there is high, but inside is the tube, the voltage comes from the Austin ring transformer and goes out to the Tower and arrives through the tube to an electrical box The uh and that's for the lights that They are for the tower lights, yes, okay, so there is an AC power signal here that floats inside the cavity with the RF, so the RF is 1.12 mahz and the electricity is 60 Herz .

You can also see that we have inserted some fiber optic cables. we bring that thing that makes us make signals that makes us make signals outside the tower Lighting equipment that tells us the failure conditions of the lights so that they go into the box here and then they go inside the tube and come out to the thing and they break there , the optics break down to closure, uh things, they send it back through the fiber before we had the idea of ​​fiber optics. I actually hung a Wi-Fi type box from around 2002 or three and it was talking to a Wi-Fi box up there and we put it up and tested it with the station off of course because it had to be there as soon as We turned on the station, it ran for about 5 minutes and came back out.

There's the antenna on that unit, that's the antenna, there's another huge coil here, yeah it's called a static drain coil and I don't know how many AMS I've seen with and without them, but it's a static drain. it's just tied directly to the RF cable, uh, and all it does is try to help you in a condition where the tower is static, you know the wind creates a lot of static, the back box with all the cables that go into it and a bit like a seesaw, yes it's a switch of some kind, yes it's an RF switch that looks like an amp, that's a newer one, it's actually mainly intended for grounding the tower when this is not the tower that is in the air, oh, so if it goes offline, you can change the ground connection of the tower, it can't accumulate charge, look, there are these, these big straps are for or if you need to do service , you have to do it, if you get service for security, you will literally hold it to it. off the tower, uh, coming off the transmitter, like wherever your safety point is, depending on what you're doing, and you'll connect it to the ground and there's a lot of ground points here, so you shouldn't have any problems finding one, uh. and again I've seen guys and the Tower too, you can take and go to the ark that falls into the tower and you can hold it, hold the attachment point and then squeeze and you're basically taking the tower to the ground. that way too, if you want, it's an AR, a spark detector, uh, so it's fun to have a spark detector, uh, you can carry them, uh, you know the guys that make ettline torches and stuff, you have those little things that you squeeze and yes. you could take one and hold it there and squeeze it as a kind of test to see if it detects and what it would do if it found a spark, it would send a latch towards that thing which again goes down to the remote control. control up there and tells us that a spark was detected, unlike some places, there is an auxiliary backup tower right there, you have a spare tower there, yeah right, if you turn that tower on and it goes out, could this tower receive the signal and so on? blowing everything out, you would actually receive a lot of the signal, in fact, when we were working on the tower a couple of different times, we have to go to the base of the Tower, hold some of these components and tune them. to lower energy or float and make the tower invisible to that Tower, so there is a tower here, but as we were walking back I noticed, dad, there is a garage door above your head that doesn't seem like the best place for a garage door. garage, can you explain why, yes, why does that door exist in this building?

Well, the original transmitter that came in here, the power supply was on the bottom level. The transmitter was on the upper level. It was brought in parts where they got a new transmitter. I couldn't get it into the stairwell and up the steps where it was going to be installed, so in thinking about options, they ended up cutting out the brick and installing a garage door unit here so I could branch that thing out. and put it in the building and since then it has been used a dozen times for air conditioners, new transmitters and other large items.

We also noticed there's a bit of junk around here, but you said it's more of a history lesson, yeah, well, some of it is. You can see things like the racks that we took out in the past, we took some things off, it's a lot of metal and then here you have these pieces that were built, they literally supported the tower during the period when we replaced the insulation at the base when it was cracked. We attached these things to the Tower and basically they made a moving section in the tower attached to the tower and then the base in the ground with a threaded rod between them and you move those threaded rods up and down and there's a huge concrete thing, yeah, so this is like the other one, since they added the subfloor at some point later in the original construction, there's another one right here that the cables come out of, they come out of the building.

Curved downwards they go underground and come out to the tower, so this is the protective shield, so to speak, for those cables and that is the tower that went up in 1947, which is the base of the Old Tower with the pin with The tower was on top of that and then the new one, this is the top where the tower is so you can see the generator exhaust and then you have an air intake so the generator can run and then I noticed this satellite. satellite dish over here you have a cover, is it not in use?

It is a snow cover. If a satellite dish accumulates too much snow or ice, it distorts its shape and you lose the signal. If you lose too much signal, you lose the satellite signal butyeah, I remember using one of those that you can see here, there's a ton of them there, thanks to camx and Odyssey, yeah, for allowing us to go out and see the tower site. Yes, one is wonderful, so we are back home. We forgot to mention a couple of interesting things. You have an image on your screen. Can you explain what is happening here?

Yes, this is the 10 kW frog, so it was in the studio. one day we kept going off air, we came back and I was picking it up, you hit about 10 Kow, we went off air again. I went out to the site, looked around the inside of the building looking for the problem and here's a frog that's in full swing and snap and it got electrified and fried pretty quickly, but it took several reboots of the transmitter to fix that problem and really dry them out, yeah , and then that wasn't the only frog story I heard. At this Tower site, yeah, there's a little buddy here, so when you go to sit down to leave, you don't want to see that there I threw it like any good engineer would and it came back out, the septic tank came out fine.

Guys like this guy retreat and find a way into the basement, not as big as it might seem but they grow quickly when they eat the frogs, when you find one of these things and you like to go out and fix something what's your reaction I try the snake snake thing that holds the frog in front no no usually most of them are dead the way they are when you get there they'll slither away uh so what you find is they found something to eat that They weren't supposed to and they died so this is kinda uh those little crabs we call them daddy crabs, crabs whatever, but occasionally the water is there for so long that they would just be there in areas around the Tower or outside the tower in the field and this I guess it was probably a dinner or something for one of the flying animals or animals that or somehow climbed up the tower and

touch

ed it.

He broke free and fell back to the gravel.