Sherlock Ohms: Antenna Tower 4 Has No Base Current

Sherlock Ohms is a regular feature of Design News that presents submissions from readers about troubleshooting challenges and how they were solved. This story titled "Antenna Tower 4 Has No Base Current" relates a broadcast station engineer's experience in troubleshooting a transmission cable problem between the radio station and its tower located ¼-mile away. Anyone not familiar with the type of lines run over those distances might be surprised at the culprit. Jim Flinn, friend from my USAF radar tech school days, spent many of his post-USAF years running his own commercial radio broadcast station maintenance company. The stories he has told and pictures he has shown me of some of those installations, which he says is more the rule than the exception, make you wonder how anyone stays on the air.

Posted March 2013

ConductRF Precision RF Test Cables MAESTRO - RF Cafe Website

RF Cafe began life in 1996 as "RF Tools" in an AOL screen name web space totaling 2 MB. Its primary purpose was to provide me with ready access to commonly needed formulas and reference material while performing my work as an RF system and circuit design engineer. The World Wide Web (Internet) was largely an unknown entity at the time and bandwidth was a scarce commodity. Dial-up modems blazed along at 14.4 kbps while tying up your telephone line, and a lady's voice announced "You've Got Mail" when a new message arrived...