By Mikayla van Loon
In an uncommon but not unlikely incident, a Yarra Ranges community broadcaster had to act quickly after a lightning strike hit its antenna causing momentary interruption to the airwaves.
3MDR’s head technician David Miller said in the 40 years of operating, lightning has never struck the antenna “so it’s not something that we had ever planned for”.
While the bolt of electric current didn’t impact the antenna itself, the “specialised piece of equipment” known as radio frequency amplifier was a casualty of the strike.
“We went off air, and we thought the FM signal went off air, as opposed to the stream, because it’s both. I figured it was because the generator hadn’t started because there was a power cut at the same time up in Kallista,” Mr Miller said.
“So I went up to see if the generator was faulty but the generator was fine…but our main amplifier, the output transistors of it had been blown up, which is always a lightning strike. That’s the only way you can do that to one of the machines.
“The fact there’d been a storm through and caused the power to go off up there, clearly also had a lightning strike to the antenna.”
When broadcasting, 3MDR sends its signal from Upwey to Kallista, which is then turned into the FM signal to be sent across the airwaves. The amplifier amplifies that signal to ensure it can be heard everywhere.
As a short term fix, Mr Miller said an FM exciter was employed to keep the radio station going but just with a weaker transmitted signal until the amplifier could be repaired.
Because of the specialised nature of the equipment, Mr Miller said “there’s only a limited number of places you can take it to get it repaired”.
Luckily a local business in Ringwood was able to slot in the repair and get it back to the station in a fairly quick turnaround.
Looking ahead, however, the community broadcaster will be aiming to fund a new amplifier, which can total a few thousand dollars, to ensure there’s always a back up plan.
“The amplifier, now that it’s been repaired, we’re looking at maybe retiring that amplifier, because it’s fairly old anyway, it’s about 15 years old and getting towards the end of its life,”Mr Miller said.
“So we’re thinking that we might try and raise some funds to get a new, replacement one, and then we will keep that one as a spare just in case it ever happens again.”
