Richard Harrison wrote:

In 1949 I worked at the KPRC (950 KHz) / KXYZ (1320 KHz) plant at Deep
Water, TX.
They shared a main tower which was built for KTRH (740 KHz), which had
moved to Cedar Bayou. The tower was near 1/2-wavelength at 1320 KHz and
a high impedance for both stations.

One operator responsibility was periodic logging of tower currents. For
lightning protection, the RF ammeters were shunted with knife switches
which must be open during reading. Since the main tower was so hot at
its feedpoint, we had a wooden stick with a bent nail in one end to
operate the knife switches. RF burns are unpleasant. This stick would
burn a carbon trail to your hand in a couple of weeks and be replaced.
The sparks along the carbon trail were spectacular but benign if the
stick was replaced soon enough.

Best regards, Richard Harrison, KB5WZI


Thanks to all; these are nice stories when they show up. Almost a
thread of it's own, hint hint.

Too bad a lot of the current generation just coming online to do rf
systems engineering won't have such good ones to pass on - "Well we
fired up the 1W 5600Mhz biaamp and the female inverse TNC connector on
the antenna side was shorted! The amp got warm to the touch after 15
minutes! It was a close thing. Funny though, the users within 300m
could still get decent throughput."

tom
K0TAR