Richard J DaltonThanks to everyone who stayed tuned to us through our on-air troubles on Friday the 22nd. In case you were in holiday mode and away from your radio, we were off the air for much of the broadcast day. Our engineer was able to borrow a central component from another broadcaster, and we’ve been back on air since 9PM on Friday.
Just a quick recap on the situation so far: in September, our transmitter started to die, and our listeners came through and helped us raise just over $50,000 to replace our transmitter.
When a public institution makes a large purchase, we’re required to go through a procurement process:
■ Competitive bidding process (Completed 21 Dec 2017)
□ Review and acceptance of bids
□ Order placement
□ Manufacturer builds equipment to broadcaster’s specifications
□ Delivery, at about 7-8 weeks after order placement.
□ Installation and testing
□ Go live!
We just finished #1, and are planning to accept a bid (#2) this week.
As for the temporary fix that our engineer has put in place, we’re going to try and keep it that way until the new transmitter is live. The component we borrowed is called an exciter, which modulates our signal within FCC specs on 89.5 MHz. We are feeding that into the high powered amplifier, which when combined with the gain of our antenna, results in an effective radiated power of 8,500 watts.
As we work our way down the above list, we’ll update you here. Also feel free to ask us! 🙂
Thank you for all the support,
Richard
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