rock95seven

I just odered another SSTran amt 3000 to replace the first amt3000 that was damaged by lightning in London,Ky two years ago. I plan to have this transmitter run on 1610 khz and hopefully get some coverage and listeners.

This time the blue bucket with the antenna mounted to the bucket will be elevated but still on the ground,
Let me try to explain what I mean, behind my house we really don’t have much of a yard, in fact all of our land here is in front of the house and that extends further past our house to the side or the length of the yard is greater left to right than it is front to back, ehh the more i explain it the less it makes sense.

So there is 80 feet of yard behind the house running the length of the house and the from my back door to the edge of the property is 50 feet, most of which is a hill that climbs at a 45 degree angle more or less.
Not the easiest thing to climb but it can be done. My property backs up to the landlords property and is devided by a fence.

If I stand on the top of that hill I can see the roof of my house, at least the bottom floor, that is where I will be installing the SSTran. The bucket will still be on the ground but no longer surrounded by metal objects or very many tree’s. Power and audio will be brought in via an outlet in our out building, the audio will probably come into the transmitter either by a radio tuned to our fm signal at 89.7 fm or from a cable running from the studio.

This is something we haven’t tried yet on fm or am, but since the hill is there why not take advantage of it?
I will be using the built in processing on the SStran on a very light setting, as far as grounding the transmitter goes i haven’t made a decision on this yet.

The first SStran was not destoryed by a direct hit from lightning but the day we had a very close strike was the day the transmitter stopped working, inspection of the board there is scorch marks around the components right behind the left and right channel rca jacks. I tried to revive it with new parts but it wasn’t the same, there seems to be more damage than what I was seeing.

So to ground or not to ground? Seems several part 15 stations have great success without grounding, but from a safety stand point, grounding just makes sense.

I will probably have Stephanie help with the soldering, I have Essential Tramors that cause my hands to shake, my soldering skills aren’t the same as they were 3 years ago. Stephanie and I work on a lot of projects together, it brings us closer and we learn from each other that way.

We will keep you all posted on the stations progress.

Thanks