Monitor Speaker

When I walked into the KNOW Control Room to inform Joe Gracey I had arrived and he should wake me “crashed” in the Production Room when it was time to relieve him, I knew immediately that Joe was NOT happy!

For the third time in as many weekends the Control Room Monitor Speaker was not working. Since it was not an emergency, the problem was not going to get fixed until Monday. Yes! You could work your air shift without a functioning Monitor Speaker, but it just made things harder and frustrating and even irritating at times. I knew I was not looking forward to my air shift without a functioning Monitor Speaker.

Sleep would not come because the Monitor Speaker problem kept bugging me. On a whim, I walked down the hall and tried the Engineering Office door which had always been locked every time I had tried it in the past. Surprise! The door opened. I turned on the lights and started looking for a Control Board schematic. After a few minutes of searching I found the schematic and I started looking at it to find possible things that might cause the Monitor Speaker problem.

I traced through the Monitor Speaker portion of the schematic multiple times. I finally decided that a fuse might be causing the problem, because I thought it was located in a “strange” place in the schematic.

I returned to the Control Room and I started taking the back off the Control Board. Joe was uneasy. I had to assure him multiple times that what I was doing was not going to affect anything that was on the air.

After looking and verifying multiple times, I found the physical location of the fuse. I informed Joe that I was going to remove it during his next record. If I pulled the fuse and we lost audio, I would immediately put it back and there would only be a second or two of “dead air.”

Joe thought about it for a moment. Since he was so frustrated with the Monitor Speaker problem, he finally said “Try it and see what happens.”

I pulled the fuse. Nothing happened! I looked at the fuse and it was “blown.” I told Joe I would be back in a few minutes.

I went down the hall to look for a replacement fuse in the Engineering Office. Before I looked for a replacement fuse, I decided to look at the schematic to see the listed value of the fuse. I found no value for the fuse anywhere on the schematic or the parts list. I decided to look for an exact replacement fuse. After a long search, I couldn’t find an exact replacement. I did find a fuse that was rated for ampere more.

I looked at all the Monitor Speaker components in the schematic to see if there was any reason not to use the higher rated fuse. I found none, so I went down the hall with the new fuse to install it into the Control Room Board and see what happened.

I told Joe to assure the Monitor Speaker volume was at minimum before I did anything. I inserted the new fuse into the Control Board and then asked him to Slowly turn up the volume for the Monitor Speaker. It worked Great!

As I closed up the Control Board, Joe was very effusive with his thankfulness for fixing the problem.

I slept well. Joe let me know of his thankfulness again when he woke me up for my air shift.

For the rest of my time at KNOW, I never encountered a non-functional Monitor Speaker.

Paul Kirby

Paul Kirby Note: Some of you may be wondering why I thought that I was qualified to troubleshoot the Monitor Speaker problem. At the time my full-time job was as a broadcast engineer. I was working weekends at KNOW to get some extra money to pay off college loans.

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