The Word Christian Radio in Rochester, NY

Home Sweet Home

Well, at last we have arrived at our new home in Syracuse. No worries, the frequency is still 103.5, but now we are situated on the southwest leg of a tower belonging to WTVH.  If you live in Syracuse you can look up on the hill southeast of the city, and there you will see a giant fork like tower.  We are to the north of that tower, 393 feet in the air.

We are so excited about what this new elevation will mean for our signal and for the people of Syracuse. As it stands right now, our signal is pretty dirty, however, it is really clear from obstructions. We could get the signal well out side of the normal range while we were driving around. What does that mean? Well, Lord willing, once we clean things up, we are thinking that we may fill that void on the thruway where we were hoping the Auburn translator would fill, but did not.

If you will notice our old location was not more than a couple hundred feet away. Believe it or not, we are a little higher with our receive antenna than we were at the other location. We have a sinking suspicion that that could be the problem with our reception. The engineer was playing a game with our signal and the Earth to try and cancel our other frequencies. Now that we are higher up that trick is no longer working. Pray that the Lord gives our engineer insight as to what can be done now to help.

Because of our new elevation, we needed new hardware to comply with our original application for the old location. Our power is not any greater on the transmit side but again, once we clean up the signal we will have a perceivable increase. Did I say Lord willing?

Here you see the riggers raising our broadcast antenna up to the 393 foot mark. If you look at the pic at the top of this post, we originally thought we were going to be in the second to the last white segment of the tower. We found out we were wrong, but a good wrong. We learned that we were actually going to the top of the last red section, even higher. Praise the Lord! You would not believe how heavy that equipment was but it went up pretty easy with the winch. Have you noticed how blue the sky is? It was a gorgeous day, the Lord is so faithful. To think we were upset about last week’s attempts. God know He had a greater day in store for us.

In this picture you can see just how high we went. Dave, one of the riggers, is waiting for the antenna. He actually has to climb higher than the location so that they can then lower it into position. It took the riggers about an hour to climb with the tag rope and coax cable and they were up there for about an hour before they began their 2 hour descent anchoring  the cable all the way down. They started their climb a little after 12 and were back on the ground around 4pm. They were cold due to the fact that they were sweating on the way up because the sun was so warm.

Here you see Grey, our Engineer, setting up the equipment and getting it ready for the connections. This building, believe it or not, is one of the nicest of all the buildings that our translators are in. We broadcast from buildings such as sheds in the middle of the woods and even tractor trailers, so believe me, this place is nice! See the blue paint around the perimeter of the room? We believe that this room use to contain water for which they cooled the old transmitters that had been housed in the adjacent room.

These men were outstanding workers. They did a great job and they worked non-stop until it was done. Not once did they take a break to do anything other than what they were there to do. Dave and Lee helped us on our Buffalo build. We owe a big thank you to Jem Star Construction for a wonderful experience and a great group of guys. You gotta love climbing to do what these guys do for a living. So, overall, we were blown away at what the Lord did in delaying our attempts to build last week and we could not have asked for a more beautiful day. Thank you again for all of your prayers and support and please continue to pray that we can clean up that signal and deliver a clear concise message from the Lord Jesus Christ.