The view from Beaver Mountain
My job nowadays is as “the boss.” So it’s not often anymore than I get to do the Engineer part of being a Broadcast Engineer. The vast majority of my day is usually spent in front of budget spreadsheets or planning documents or purchase orders or, if I’m really lucky, working on design concepts at my gritbiggo white board.
Even so, from time to time I get to leave the office and head out in to the world. For a couple of days this week, one of my engineers and I are making a swing through some of our remote transmitter / microwave sites in eastern Oregon. These are the kinds of sites that you may have seen from time to time – a lonely tower on a hill out in the middle of nowhere with big round microwave antennas on it. They’re remote, they’re hard to get to, for a lot of the year in this neck of the woods they’re buried under feet of snow and in the case of the broadcast stations using them, they bring local over-the-air television to rural areas all over the western USA. We charge up these hills in 4WD trucks so that our viewers can watch The Simpsons and football (both the American variety and real football … a.k.a. “soccer”) and Perry Mason and Glee and the News. We end up coming to these sites at various times all the year ’round, including the middle of winter on snow machines, in the rain and mud, in fog, in smoke and at other times when conditions are less than optimal and you’re not sure that even with a very capable 4WD that you’re going to make it up – or back home for that matter.
But on some days – like these couple of glorious days in eastern Oregon, it is entirely possible to arrive at the top of a mountain after bouncing your kidneys up 20 miles of very “off” off road terrain, fire roads, logging roads and such (in some cases, you wonder why the heck you didn’t make the trip on a horse) and find yourself on a piece of Real Estate with a view that’s, well, hard to describe. Especially when you’re out here in the wide open west, some of these sites are in very rural areas; far, far away from anything like a “city” and completely surrounded by open range and other mountains. You get to a point where you almost feel guilty for getting to be there ………… almost. So you admire the view for a while, take some pictures, stretch, and then get down to whatever work you’re there for in the first place. in our case this week, that means some maintenance, some documentation, some tests and some research.
Of course, the ironic bit is that after bouncing your kidney’s up 20 miles of very “off” off road terrain, your first view of the glorious scenery is usually from out behind the building near the tower while you’re, um, “watering the bushes.”
