Milestone

     I did something today I have done only four times before in 38 years of my job: I put a new transmitter on the air.

     In this case, it's new only to my immediate employer, having already served for five years elsewhere in the corporation.  But it's new to us.

     Depending on how you look at to, they have only had four or five different transmitters since the station first went on the air, and I am the only person who has worked on all of them.  I was the last person to operate their first transmitter, an all-tube 1950s behemoth that took a little coaxing to get working again (and every second of tuning it up was an adrenaline-heavy thrill ride).  Now I'm the first person to put their newest transmitter on the air, a device so rich in surface-mount components that there's no troubleshooting most of it down to the level of individual parts: most problems, you trace back to whatever subassembly has gone wrong, and order a new one.

     The previous transmitter, in analog and digital configurations, served for over 29 years, and it's still a backup.  The 1950s giant lasted for 32 years, counting backup service and that record will probably be broken by the one I just shut down.  Except for a few hours here and there -- the day we overloaded the big generator during a power outage was the longest, five or six hours -- it was on 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for nearly three decades.

     The transmitter I put on the air today will probably still be on the air when I retire, and that's a strange feeling.