It
just so happened that a wayward field mouse crept stealthily into the
transmitter building of a medium wave station located in a country area adjacent
to the River Murray in the state of New South Wales. The radio station was the government-owned
ABC mediumwave outlet, 2CO, which was located a few miles north of the town of
Corowa and the mouse was a common field mouse.
During
his intrusive explorations, the mouse crawled unobserved into the 7½ kW
transmitter itself. Being unable to
read, and not knowing just how dangerous this excursion could be, he crept stealthily
over the high tension areas of the transmitter.
Unwittingly, he shorted the high tension to earth, there was a brilliant
flash, and the medium wave channel 670 kHz went silent for half an hour.
Likewise,
there was a similar event at the small AWR shortwave station located at Forli
in Italy. The 10 kW Collins shortwave
transmitter there had previously been on the air with the programming of Radio
Free Europe in Holzkirchen in Germany, though with AWR in Forli the power level
had been reduced to 2½ kW. Back in
October 1993, two mice entered that transmitter, they were electrically
roasted, and they successfully put the station off the air.
On
at least a couple of occasions the American radio journal, Radio World, has
drawn attention to the technical problems mice can cause in radio
transmitters. In 2002, they published a
story about a radio engineer who had found on one occasion a large mouse nest
inside a phasor housing unit. Five years
later, they also reported a suggestion from another radio engineer that copper
wool or stainless steel wool could be stuffed into small openings to prevent
them from otherwise being used by mice to gain entry into technical equipment.
The
larger rodent, the rat, can also cause its share of damage in the electronic
equipment of a radio station. The AWR
shortwave station KSDA on the island of Guam reports that a rat entered one of
their transmitters back in 1993; in so doing, the large rodent was roasted, and
the transmitter turned silent.
In
a very interesting incident, Popular Communications (now no longer in print)
reported that an American army Brigadier General was on service in South
Vietnam during what Americans call the Vietnam War, and the Vietnamese call the
American War. The army officer was
interested in Morse Code, and he would sometimes practice sending Morse Code on
his own little Morse key and oscillator in his underground bunker.
One
evening, he was awakened by the sound of very irregular Morse Code coming from
his little oscillator; and he was surprised to discover that a rat was playing
with the Morse Code key and enjoying the sound it made. The army officer stated that this unusual
event occurred on several subsequent occasions.
In
the same issue of that now defunct American radio magazine Popular
Communications, there is also a report that a swarm of flies put a radio
station off the air in southern Sweden.
The small FM station, Radio Active in the town of Ystad, maintained a
small transmitter building adjacent to their studio building.
Unbeknownst
to the staff, a swarm of flies had laid their eggs inside the transmitter
equipment and when the eggs hatched, the new flies swarmed and disabled the
transmitter. When the main door to the
small building was opened, many thousands of newly hatched flies swarmed out
into the open air. It took the staff
another three hours to install new equipment and thus restore the station to
its regular programming.
That
reminds me of another animal story that occurred here at WRMI in central
Florida. We have a very large C-band
satellite dish which we use to receive the signal of Radio Japan. We rebroadcast the Spanish service of Radio
Japan live at 0400-0430 UTC on 5985 kHz.
Well,
a year or so ago, we suddenly started having trouble getting the Radio Japan
signal via the large satellite dish. It
was sporadic; sometimes it came in, and sometimes it didn’t. We checked with the engineers at Radio Japan
to see if they had made any changes to the satellite parameters that might
account for the problem, but they said there had been no changes.
Our
engineers scratched their heads and tried all kinds of things to try to figure
out what was going on. Finally, they
went out to the dish, took the LNB receiving device off and looked down inside. Much
to their surprise, they found a wasp nest in there, and it was blocking the
signal. They very carefully removed that
wasp nest and its inhabitants, and our listeners in Central America were once
again able to hear NHK World from Tokyo.
(AWR Wavescan/NWS 478)