Speaking of danger...

We were just finishing up the morning show at KYQQ in Wichita when the station went off the air.  You'll remember KYQQ as the station where the owner is still in prison and the General Manager had to be forcefully removed from his office by the sheriff.  Anyway, we couldn't really tell what was wrong as all the transmitter readings indicated we were still transmitting.

So, Dan Holiday and myself hopped in the station van and headed for Winfield Kansas where the state of the art transmitter and 1200 foot tower was situated.  As we drove through the field to the actual transmitter building, everything seemed to be as it should.  As we got closer we noticed huge blocks of ice laying on the ground around the building.  As we sat there in the overcast cold winter morning, a giant block of ice augered into the ground next to the van.  It was hailing blocks of ice the size of cattle!  We grabbed a big sheet of plywood that was laying on the ground by the van and ran to the building. 

Inside, everything seemed to be in order.  Just, no signal going out.  Then another angus sized hail stone hit the top of the building.  It seems that, even though it was above freezing on the ground, the moisture in the clouds about 600 feet up, combined with freezing temperatures higher up were causing ice to form on the tower.  Now most radio towers have de-icers that heat up the metal and cause the ice to fall off.  Our de-icers seemed to be working quite well.  Knocking off chunks of ice that were falling to the earth like meteors. 

We could find no other reason for the station to be off the air.  We returned to the station, still off the air the Friday before Christmas.  Had we been a successful station, we would have been losing money like crazy.

Later that evening, the engineer call me from the tower and said he looked up the tower with binoculars and saw that the coaxial cable hooking the transmitter to the STL antenna that receives the signal from our downtown studios was unplugged.  He said he was in a suit and wasn't going to climb the tower in good clothes.  So, off I went into the night.

I climbed the tower that night without regard for my own safety.  Maybe it was just my own stupidity.  Luckily, I only had to go up about halfway, 600 feet.  No safety gear, forgot to take tools, not even any duct tape.  It took about 45 minutes to reach the unplugged cable.  I screwed it back in and like magic, we were back on the air.  The station was saved!

I got fired two weeks later.  Not quite as good of a bonus as I got for getting stabbed twice to save the station.  But I now knew one thing about myself I didn't realize before.  I am truly stupid enough to climb 600 feet up a radio tower without safety gear in icy conditions and talk about it like it was a brave and noble thing to do when in reality it was on the same level as sticking your tongue to a flagpole in the middle of winter.

That is all...Peters out!