WEZW-FM

Studio's were 6 blocks down the street from the tower. The station had a 6-pair shielded cable run from the studio to the transmitter, 2-pair for audio, 1-pair for remote control and 3 spare pairs. Some of the cable was buried but most of it ran down power poles. How on earth did they get to do that? had to take legal action but here's how. The power company and telephone company had an agreement that they could use each others poles for a one time charge of $1 per pole. So under law, they had to offer the same to anyone else if there was room on the poles.

Those extra pairs came in handy one day. I got a call in the middle of the night during a thunderstorm that the air monitor in the studio had died. I asked if they were sure they were on they air and the answer was yes because the station was coming in fine on a radio. So I went back to sleep figuring I could work on the monitor in the morning. In the morning, I got in my car but the station was not on. I ran back in and called asking why they didn't call that they were off the air. But the reply was they were on the air but the transmitter readings were off, high plate voltage and low plate current. I went back out to the car thinking this all over and then the horror hit me, it was off frequency. I tuned my car radio and there we were about 6 channels up the FM dial, landed right between two other stations.
Long story short, the thunderstorm took out the AFC module in the GATES TE-1 exciter. Since the AFC failsafe required a relay to pull in and the module was dead, the relay never pulled in and the transmitter stayed on. (many thanks to the idiot engineer that designed a failsafe relay that has to pull in instead of drop out)
What I did until I got a replacement module was to throw together a DC supply and a couple controls (course and fine adjust). I mounted the supply and controls at the studio, then ran the DC down one of those spare pairs to the transmitter. At the transmitter, I connected the DC to the DC controlled oscillator so the frequency could be adjusted at the studio. Without AFC the frequency had to be adjusted every 30 minutes to stay within 2KHZ. Thank goodness they still required working frequency meters at the studio so it could be monitored.