If I touch this tower, I die

The fact that you can hear the radio station inside the building just based on how much energy is radiating off conductors is absolutely terrifying.

I'm a radio amateur (KA3KAS), and for me this was the equivalent of a Cessna private pilot getting a tour of a 747. All the principles are the same, but the scale is several orders of magnitude larger. I'd be interested in how they calculated for optimal standing wave ratio (SWR) before building it. Hearing echoes of the broadcast through all that metal is spooky indeed! Your father is a very clear presenter.

Please Jeff, never forget what these videos are about: you and your dad. My father was in charge of the technical part of electricity for the entire city of Amsterdam, and a complete nerd. He is the reason I "play" with Raspberry Pi these days. Unfortunately, he passed away at far too early an age, so I can no longer share my tinkering with him. So again, computers are fun, fathers are more important .

Your father is a rare breed, someone who has a wealth of information in his head and is able to explain it in a way that people can understand it. Thanks for sharing these videos, subscribed & hope to see more.

Please don't touch the tower. I actually like your content.

The single turn loop in the tower RF feedline is a lightning choke (not to be confused with a lighting choke). It's purpose is to prevent energy from a lightning strike from entering, and damaging, the antenna tuning unit. The loop presents a small amount of inductance that retards the initial current pulse of the lightning, diverting that energy to the ball gap, where it flows harmlessly into the ground. The added bit of inductive reactance presented to the RF by the lightning choke is nulled out during final ATU tuning.

As a retired design engineer who worked predominantly with digital circuits, I always looked on RF as a bit of a black-art. What this has shown me is that high-power RF is in a league of its own. I loved that modular high-efficiency AM transmitter cabinet - I had no idea it was done like that these days. All the shiny copper was nice too. The whole video was truly fascinating. Thank you. both, for taking the time and sharing this knowledge.

I worked at an HF transmitter site when I was in the Army. We had multiple 1kW to 70kW transmitters, about 17 Rhombic antennas, backup power generation, technical control facilities, workshops, etc. Your video brought back a lot of good memories! Thanks for all the work to put this together and share it.

More! More! More! I could watch these tours endlessly. They're beyond fascinating. Kudos to you and your Dad! And agreed about the Simpson 260. At Memphis in Navy Tradevman "A" School in the mid-60's, every bench position had a 260. They're still unbeatable.

I'm a BS Electrical Engineer and PE, and this video validates my opinion that RF power electronics is black magic and the guys that maintain it are wizards. Seriously though, very very cool stuff!

Your dad seems like a cool guy, you're so lucky you can still have that experience with your pops. Don't take it for granted. Great video too, love the transmitter sites. I once worked at place that had satellite transmitters and some things are similar.

At around 10 minutes, you can hear the broadcast coming from an electrical arc??? Mind blown!

I had no idea how complicated these transmitter towers are. What a great idea for a video. Your dad is a natural in front of the camera. He knows his stuff and explains it really well.

Love these episodes with your dad nerding away like crazy.. 😂 Please keep on making them. Awesome to listen to the incredible knowledge and how he breathes RF!

I always found interesting how as you increase frequency, the electricity goes from travelling in wires to travelling in pipes, and then as you increase even more into UHF and microwave it starts looking like HVAC ducts.

Almost 50 years ago, I worked for a 3 tower AM station. Periodically I had to go out to each tower to take base-current readings. I think I remember the hair on my arms standing straight up because of all the power in the dog house. We had to take the readings when there was no modulation, so we had a little transistor radio… but it didn’t have to be set to the station frequency. It was so powerful in there, you could set it to any frequency and you’d hear it. I was just a kid of 20 with almost no training. Lucky I didn’t touch anything that would have killed me.

When I was a kid (1950s) my neighbor was a transmitter engineer at WSB in Atlanta. He would take me to the transmitter sight sometimes. The transmitter was an old Western Electric 50 KW thing that took up the entire building. The final tubes were about 5 feet high. I was about 3 feet and a half. I was very impressed. He was Ed Perry and helped me build my first crystal radio. Thanks Ed. (Rob KM4OXf)

I am a contract broadcast engineer and know all this but somehow watch the whole video because it's really cool to see how other guys do the same things.

I am an Amateur Radio Op as well (W4KDN) and was privileged to experience a VIP tour of the Trans World Radio site on the island of Bonaire (about 50 miles off the coast of Venezuela). TWR runs 440 KW into a 4 tower directional and steerable array. I authored an article and submitted it to QST which was published. This video brought back some not too distant memories of that tour.

My brother knew a guy who died exactly that way! Pointing up as a joke while taking an electrical engineering student tour. Done!