From their website, with interesting listener emails included:
Friday morning, July, 3rd at approximately 6:30am KPNW suffered a major failure of our main 50,000 watt transmitter. This failure was complicated by extreme heat at the transmitter site both Friday and Saturday.
By early Friday afternoon we had our 60 year old RCA 10,000 watt transmitter on the air, but a combination of heat and age only allowed us to be on the air sporadically an hour or two at a time, and then off for an hour or so. Saturday evening it appeared that the backup had stabilized. It ran fine for several hours after which our engineer left the premises to get some sleep after working almost non-stop since Friday.
Sometime early Sunday morning our backup transmitter went off the air. When the engineer arrived on site the room was full of acrid smoke and a quick check showed that the transformer had caught fire earlier and was still smoking. We have been off the air continuously since.
As to what originally happened to our 50,000 watt main transmitter, it appears to be some sort of system overload. Many of the components of the transmitter are shorted out and will require replacement. Currently, we are both ordering and borrowing parts to rebuild the transmitter.
At this time we believe that we may be back on the air by Tuesday afternoon at the earliest. We are also considering bringing another transmitter in from one of our Bicoastal Media sister stations. However, depending on the brand re-tuning a transmitter to run on 1120am can be time consuming.
As a side note, we have been overwhelmed by emails and phone calls from our listeners concerned about the welfare of the station, it's employees and our shows. We are okay...a little frazzled, but working hard to get back on the air. Many listeners have postulated that the events of the weekend were caused by President Obama, or ultra-left wing terrorists. This obviously was not the case. Like any piece of electronics equipment, transmitters will eventually fail, and occasionally the failure is massive as compared to minor.
All of us here at KPNW understand your frustration with the current situation, we are working hard to try and restore our signal and the programming that you rely on day in and day out. Thanks,
Bill Lundun
Program Director KPNW
1120kpnw@gmail.com
