Gates Broadcast Transmitter BC1-T via KA4KOE
Channel: Electromagnetic Mischief
Date: 2015-12-21

The young man in the background is my son performing perimeter security with his AirSoft getup.

I acquired this transmitter April 2015. Transmitter was originally put in service ca. 1961, @ 1590 KC, WAWA, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The transmitter was later sold and put on the air @ 1450 KC, WNOS, New Bern, NC. The transmitter sat in storage for 15 years after being taken off the air in the year 2000. I started restoration after acquiring from K2DX. Additional photos are at my Flickr Page http://tinyurl.com/nutqds9

Video shot by my brother Eric KK4TVR.

A war story from my Gate's history sent to me from an engineer who used to keep it running......

I was working at WAWA one Sunday afternoon when we took a lightning hit. I had just layed my headphones down on the Gates yard console. And went to the head. Just then we took a hit. It burned up the headphones and did much damage to the console.  Seemed the console was the last device connected to the station ground strap. The hit took us off the air, damaging a mica fixed cap. in one of the four antenna tuning units. I  called the chief engineer and started trying to get us back on the air. I put the rig on the dummy load and it came up ok. A big relief on my part. One of the transmission lines in the phaser was shorted to ground due to the shorted cap in the tower tuning unit. I set up the phaser for None Directional operation with 250 watts. By then the chief arrived. Together we looked over the rest of the gear, and decided that the console was toast.  We hooked up a reel to reel recorder to the Gates Level Devel and got some music on air. We were luck in that we had just finished building WMAD 5kw 4tower DA 1550kc in Madison WI. and as a result had a few left over inductors and caps.   Checking the tuning houses it did not take long to find the still smoking cap. We changed out the bad cap. And soon  had the station back on the DA at full power.  The console was another matter. It took about a week operating with a Bogen mike mixer as our console for us to repair the Gates Yard console.

Guess it was my lucky day having to visit the head.