KSL AM Radio Broadcast Towers (Salt Lake City, Utah)

Comments

• 
  ekconklin

  KSL AM has a non-directional pattern and uses only one tower (the tall one on the right). The short one on the left may hold antennas for other services.

  17 years ago | reply | hide comment
• 
  JayRobertson

  The large building in the lower left corner is the transmitter building and contains the 50,000 watt AM transmitter, operating on a frequency of 1160 KHz. The tower on the right, the tall tower, is the operative tower for the station and is 465 feet tall, supported by guy wires. The tower is "shunt fed" from the small building immediately to the left of the tower and the base of the tower is grounded -- it does not need to sit on an insulator as many tall towers do (for example, the KFI tower in the Los Angeles California area). The line between the tower and the transmitter building is a coaxial transmission line made of two concentric copper pipes, and is kept filled with dry nitrogen to prevent ingress of moisture. The tower to the left, the short tower, is one remaining of a pair of towers which supported the original vertical hanging-wire antenna. The building just to the right of the left tower is the old coupling house. The four concrete blocks located symmetrically to the right from the coupling house held a second tower. A cable between the two towers supported a vertical wire which hung down to the coupling house. Only the vertical wire was electrically active. The vertical wire antenna was later replaced by the 465 foot tower and the vertical wire became the backup antenna. When the KSL-TV station was built on Farnsworth Peak (we called it Coon Peak in the old days), the backup antenna was changed to a slant wire and was supported just by the left tower, freeing the right tower to be was moved to the peak to support the TV antenna. When the ConElRad emergency notification system was initiated, KSL added a low power transmitter on 640 KHz and the remaining small tower was used as the transmitting antenna for that system.

  17 years ago | reply | hide comment