[Coco] serial ports and thingsRe: moving files on bootup

[Gene Heskett]

On Wednesday 06 February 2008, George Ramsower wrote:
>----- Original Message -----
>From: "Gene Heskett"
>
>> I was there from fall of 77 to the fall of 79.  And I can tell you a story
>> about walking up North Mountain in the middle of the night to put a new
>> klystron in the icr transmitter there.
>
>Gene,
>
>  What is a icr transmitter. I thought I knew a little bit about
>broadcasting and this is news to me.

Inter City Relay, similar to an STL, which is a Studio Transmitter Link.
Same exact radio in fact, but a slightly different frequency, still in the 
7GHZ band though in this case.  Nominally 1 watt of rf power out, big 10 and 
12 foot, one was even 16 feet, dishes facing each other at ranges up to 90 
miles if both are at high altitudes. Std stuff, but in this case Elmer Nelson 
designed and built them.  At the time he did it, there was not a commercially 
offered radio at any price that you could lock up in a mountain top shack in 
late August, knowing a failure would happen at any time, and not get back to 
until June the next year without a $300/hr (1970 prices) helicopter ride, if 
the chopper could get that high, North Mountains 11,800 was about the ceiling 
for a Huey.  Generally, with Elmer's stuff you could get away with a 9 month 
lockup.  That klystron failure was unusual as they tend to live 10+ years.  
All mill-spec tubes used, 10-100x more dependable than what was in your tv 
back then.  Nobody else used the good stuff.

Nowadays it would be transistorized, but our early experiences with solid 
state were a disaster, tubes can usually stand a lightning strike 10 feet of 
power line away on a mountaintop, where transistors were instant history.

We had generators in the shacks at the KOTA owned links from Denver to Rapid 
City & back south to KDUH, but the only way we knew they were being used was 
when they ran out of propane (or oil & locked up), the power had been out for 
a week then.  Little 2 cylinder Onan's, stick a crowbar in the flywheel after 
filling them up with oil and break them loose and they were as good as new 
usually.  We finally did design a tally that told us the generator was 
running and where but never got that kit in Farmington as we (KIVA-TV then) 
didn't have the generators either.

More than you wanted to know. :)

-- 
Cheers, Gene
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