[R-390] Re:Clock, panel meters

[Tisha Hayes]

Quote: "Most modern substations are doing away with the old panel meters,
knife switches and the asbestos laden panels in favor of all electronic
relay gear, fault recorders and using broad band communications for remote
access to everything.  When on site a touch screen 21" flat panel display
does all the stuff the old panel meters did...."

I have quite a wide selection of the old meters and protective relaying in
my personal collection. The idea that they would hit a dumpster makes my
left eye twitch. I think the same folks who designed a phase loss/ phase
imbalance relays or the distance to fault relays must have designed the
gear-train on the R-390A. They are electro-mechanical marvels with the
delicacy of a giant timepiece.

On more than a few instances I have stood in the building while some yahoo
with a Sawzall is chopping away at panel board material to hang the new
digital devices. The dust is incredible and gets into everything (including
your lungs), they don't seem to mind but I usually beat-feet out the door or
at least get a dust mask out of my car. What is a really creepy place is in
the cable rooms underneath the larger buildings. Asbestos everywhere, giant
loops of instrumentation cable, dark, like sets from a horror movie, I
expected to see the creature from the movie "Alien" behind every dark
corner. Sometimes a good imagination is a drawback.

I was doing some work at an unnamed national laboratory and stumbled across
a seemingly abandoned bomb shelter. I asked my escort if I could look inside
and he unlocked the door, there were racks of phone patch panels and a
solitary rack filled with R-390's and some unmemorable transmitters. Out in
the yard there were tubes embedded in the ground where pop-up antennas could
be deployed. It has been 20 years since I saw this site but I bet that to
this day, if those radios are still in place, those radios would fire right
up.
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