Anyone who has perused my photo gallery may have detected that I have an unhealthy obsession with antennae and other high-power, analogue equipment. In my defense, I fully qualify myself as a geek… and don’t you even start making reference to phalli. Sicko. 😉
A high-school friend (yeah, one of the… 4?) Jorge, works for a local radio station… Upon discovering this immediately I began begging him to give me a tour of, well, everything. It wasn’t pretty, but he was quite understanding of my geekage. On May 5th 2005, Jorge took me up to the Camp Fortune tramission facility. The Ryan Tower is probably the most visible landmark in the Ottawa area, much more so that the Parliament buildings.
That was a rough night; we’d gone up around 11PM ostensibly to shutdown and lockout the transmitters for an hour while there were tower-climbers repairing ice-damage to a wave-guide on the mast for Télé-Québec. (Apparently ice falling from these towers can be very destructive.) By 11:30 we had the xmitters turned down to 50% power, but we were told by the facilities co-ordinator that we had to go dark. Okay. Done. I started photographing things like mad… exploring the facility… we even made multiple trips outside to see what was going on. 1 AM rolled by… 2AM, 3AM, 4AM… okay, this is really cool stuff, but I’m getting bored and very tired. 5AM… finally 6AM brings the All-Clear.
High-Power time for the morning shows! Turns out the TV people don’t care about the early hours of the day because nobody’s watching… clearly not realizing that this is radio’s most profitable time of day, so they thought they could keep on working.
As a side note, the next day was even worse for me, getting home at 8AM to sleep and then having to work most of the afternoon, then needing to rush out my client’s production facility in Kemptville at 9PM, which went in the wee hours of the morning too. PLCs and industrial control equipment is cool too tho.
Jorge called me this afternoon, his IP link from the studios to Camp Fortune was fraught with problems. I got out my trusty old network tap –err… 4 port 10Mbit repeater/hub, and started dumping packets. Lots of extra crud flowing. Rather than try to configure the lame Dell switches or the radio’s super-yucky network stack, I setup a simple pfSense router and created a ‘Production’ subnet. (Terminology/namespace clash: ‘Production’ in media is to create and work on content. Whups.)
While I was setting up the studio end of things, I realized I was going to need to renumerate the IP equipment up at Fortune… which was going to be difficult over the bad link, and very risky… and one doesn’t want to take risks with a large-market stations’ primary transmitters’ primary control equipment! Another excuse to go up to Fortune! Yay!
So I Plazed it. Renumerated. Snapped some more photos. Played with a stupidly powerful green laser pointer and generally soaked up a few gigawatts of FM energy.
While driving back, I noted to Jorge that we must be geeks; who else would go up to the hills, away from everyone, to play with electronics equipment… on a Friday summer night?
Reality: Checked.
Result: Not good.
END TRANSMISSION