[Milsurplus] Surplus carriers

[Ray Fantini]

Its not related to Carriers or military surplus but a surplus story just as well. I have worked as a transmitter supervisor for a couple TV stations for well over twenty years now, it's a fancy name for someone who has to go in and occasionally restart or do repairs at the transmitter site.  It's a part time deal that I do aside from my real job at the university.
In the last ten years or so I have watched the demise of analog television and the disappearance of high powered transmitters where almost every part involved in analog television was obsolete overnight to the latest fun that was the DTV Repack where all terrestrial digital broadcasters were forced below channel 40
One of the things about repack was being it was forced upon broadcasters by the FCC the FCC agreed to pay for everything, new transmitters, mask filters and antennas. They also included money for site and tower work or they offered some broadcasters money to go away and just consider operating there channel over cable.
Long story short is that at just about every TV Transmitter site you ended up with huge quantities of junk, analog transmitters, analog processing gear and often huge and now useless channel filters, mask filters and  combiners and often antennas.
At channel 28 we had two 30 kW IOT analog transmitters along with the magic T and channel filter and all the associated water cooling equipment including pumps, tanks and heat exchangers. There were also two huge 480 volt three phase beam transformers that provided the 30 kV for the IOT tubes that weighed about six thousand pounds each.
You would think that with the amount of scrap that this makes available people would be paying to remove this stuff. We did talk to a couple scrap yards but they will tell you that for what's involved in transport and labor that its hard to brake even. Also ran into issues being this is all public TV stuff its owned by the state and that created several issues about if we sell it we would have to remove from the site and do bids and all that sort of stuff so that did not work out.
At the end of the day we ended up paying a contractor to come in and remove all this stuff, and they in turn recycled it. Think they used the three hundred gallons of transformer oil as heating oil at there shop amongst other things but considering all that's involved in getting rid of big stuff these days would have to say that I am somewhat surprised that the Navy got a contractor to pay one cent for the aircraft carriers because yes there are thousands of tons of steel and copper and the like but there are also thousands of federal and state regulations along with all the EPA requirements.


Ray F/KA3EKH
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