tower

Some broadcast engineering tasks are a bit too daunting for me to consider. Climbing the massive towers that power radio and TV stations is one of them!

Recently, local engineer Aaron Cox had the perfect set of conditions for a drone flight to capture some of that risk, as the weather and timing of an antenna inspection lined up perfectly with his schedule.

Video

I'll summarize a bit of what we talked about in today's Geerling Engineering video, but if you want to watch that directly, it's embedded below:

...except it was a beef frank. Make your wurst jokes in the comments.

What you see above is the remains of a hot dog after it has been applied to an AM radio tower operating in its daytime pattern, at around 6 kW.

A couple months ago, soon after we posted our If I touch this tower, I die video, a few commenters mentioned you likely wouldn't die after touching a high-power AM tower—rather, you'd have serious RF burns.

I was trying to figure out a way to somewhat safely test the scenario: what would happen if someone walked up and touched the tower, while standing on the ground?

If reading's not your thing, check out the short video we posted on Geerling Engineering:

Nearing it's centennial, KMOX-AM (1120 kHz) is a 50,000-watt clear-channel AM radio station with studios located in downtown St. Louis, MO, USA.

But their broadcast tower is located about 10 miles northeast, in Pontoon Beach, IL. My Dad was the director of engineering overseeing the tower and studios for about 20 years, and though he's no longer there, he and I got permission from Audacy and the St. Louis engineers (thanks!) to tour the site, and learn a bit about how they broadcast their AM signal—which reaches all the way into Canada and Mexico at night!

In this blog post, I'll write a bit about KMOX's tower system (AM towers are a lot different than FM, like the FM Supertower we toured last year), the transmitter, and the some of the history found at that tower site.

KSDK-TV broadcasts to well over 1 million households in the St. Louis metro area. And my Dad and I went to their broadcast tower last month to explore how the digital TV signal is delivered through the air to so many people.

On our tour, we explored over 75 years of television broadcast history, seeing how things transitioned from thousands of volts down to hundreds, and from analog audio and video to all-digital.

And we even found strange artifacts of the past, like this random microwave dish that received a signal through the roof of the broadcast building for a time:

As the son of a radio engineer, I've seen my share of radio towers. From small, rural AM and FM towers to urban 'constellation' towers serving dozens or even hundreds of services, there's a lot more than meets the eye.

My Dad and I visited the so-called 'FM Supertower' in St. Louis, MO twice now, to explore the tower and the supporting infrastructure below. Both of these visits are documented on our Geerling Engineering YouTube channel:

My Dad and I just posted a new video on the Geerling Engineering YouTube channel where we explored the tallest radio tower in the St. Louis metro area, the so-called 'Supertower' that has a 10-station combined dual FM antenna system (dual 4-bay FMVee by Dielectric) at the top:

Note: Please note that the Tower Operator this post references is currently in early alpha status, and has no official support from Red Hat. If you are planning on using Tower for production and have a Red Hat Ansible Automation subscription, you should use one of the official Tower installation methods. Someday the operator may become a supported install method, but it is not right now.

I have been building a variety of Kubernetes Operators using the Operator SDK. Operators make managing applications in Kubernetes (and OpenShift/OCP) clusters very easy, because you can capture the entire application lifecycle in the Operator's logic.

Since yesterday's announcement that Ansible had released the code behind Ansible Tower, AWX, under an open source license, I've been working on an AWX Ansible role, a demo AWX Vagrant VM, and an AWX Ansible Container project.

As part of that last project, I have published two public Docker Hub images, awx_web and awx_task, which can be used with a docker-compose.yml file to build AWX locally in about as much time as it takes to download the Docker images:

I use Tower from time to time to do some git operations that require a little more attention or a better visual overview than what I can get via the CLI and built-in tools. However, I noticed that Tower likes to take over any folder with .git, and make Mac OS X's finder turn it into a 'Tower' package, so double-clicking the folder (which now behaves like a mini app or file) opens Tower.

I don't like that behavior, because I have some [example].git folders that I want to browse in the Finder or in other Mac apps without having to 'Show Package Contents'. Apparently GitX has the same issue, and I'm not the only one annoyed by this behavior.

The fix, for me, was simple: