People Always Ask Me "What Is It You Do At The Radio Station?"

As some of you might know, I've been working here for over thirty years. I came aboard as a plain old disc jockey, and have evolved into a content contributor for our website, in addition to playing some music and sharing information.

Just a disc jockey, you say.

Disc jockey is an antiquated term, as nobody has played actual discs - vinyl, compact, or any other kind, for a long time. But like many people, I'm not a one-trick pony. I have this side that loves to entertain, but I also have a geeky, nerdy side that loves to mess with electronics and machinery. And working around here, thanks to the generosity of certain individuals, I've been able to learn and absorb a lot of technical knowledge.

So, when the engineering position here became available earlier this year, I jumped at that. (Yes, I know; careful what you wish for, kid.) Much of the radio side now centers on computers, and about a decade ago I signed up over at Kellogg Community College for their Microsoft tech classes. But even high-tech has its real-world limitations. And that happened Monday. Two of our talk stations run some programming delivered via satellite. And around lunchtime, I was noticing we were getting some audio loss and funky electronic noise. And, as I said earlier, this isn't my first rodeo. I knew we had varmints in the dish. Not actual varmints, but a wasps nest in the receiving cone, or the LNB or Low-Noise Block downconverter.

Seen it before, cleaned it out before. But it's not like the hardware stores sell a cheap tool for this. And the angle for this is also awkward, and the LNB is about 10 feet off the ground.

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I'm proud to say, my son, who's as handy as anyone I know, popped by and he remembered we had short metal poles we used with antennas at remote broadcasts to send a microwave signal back to the station. (Now we use a smartphone. Heck of a lot easier.) Anyway, the young man finds a small chunk of unused coax and with some zip ties built a wasp poking stick. Sounds like something straight out of Green Acres. The coax was malleable enough to not damage any electronic contacts, but enough to honk off those wasps. A simultaneous shot of Black Flag kept us bite-free.