Quote:
Originally Posted by Omaroo
Theo - did anyone think to take photos of this event? It's a reasonably historic happenstance in our modern history, and I'd love to see what the machinery that consumed 100,000 watts of juice looked like.  |
Probably not all that Big. I worked on (re-built) 5 HF transmitters that consumed about 100 KW each to deliver 30 KW of RF and each was 7' by 3' by 8'. The noise comes from the gigantic blower motor that is used to cool the PA (3 x 4CX5000s in parallel) . It also had a 3 phase variac to keep the mains at 415 volts and the main HT transformer was about 4' x 4' x 5' to deliver 7KV at many amps to a solid state rectifier that I built out of salvaged parts. Incidently the transmitters were second hand when we got them and were to be a stop gap for 12 months. They were still in use 10 years later!
The only tv Transmitters I saw were many years ago. The combined Sydney 7 and 10. There were 4 transmiters running into the aerial system with a diplexer arrangement to couple all transmitters to the aerial and remove the lower side band (VSB). This meant that if one transmitter failed its partner delivered 1/2 its power to the aerial and the other 1/2 to a dummy load. They occupied a room about 30' long.
The biggest transmitter I saw was the old 20Khz 100KW at Belconnen. It occupied a room about 50' x 50'. Its electronics were awfully primative however.
I never got to see our biggest transmitters (USN) at Northwest Cape because I always sent my 2ic there while I went to Sunny Cairns to build patrol boats.
Barry