KNYN-FM / Medicine Butte - Evanston, Wyoming

The following pictures were taken on Sunday November 20th, 2005.  The site is Medicine Butte - about 3 miles to the NorthEast of Evanston, Wyoming.  The tower is (was) owned by Uinta Communications - a 2-way/mobile/paging dealer...they also own the building that houses the transmitter for KNYN-FM 99.1.  This tower was put up in June of 2004 after the original tower was toppled by during the winter of 2003.  The station has only been on the air since 2001.  The tower (pieces) in the pictures fell down sometime on Monday night November 14th when the first winter storm of the season blew through Southwest Wyoming.  Not a lot of snow but a lot of wind, causing a lot of icing up there at 9000 feet.  (and here in town as well)
KNYN never went off the air during this event as the main transmitter hasn't been working for a while and the station was on the backup transmitter.  However on Saturday, November 12th, I had just made the trip up the mountain to put the station on the backup antenna instead of the main antenna.  We plug the backup transmitter into the main antenna for more ERP during the summer, but the icing in the winter causes the backup transmitter to dump, so in the winter we've had to switch back over to the backup antenna.  I had just done this on Saturday...two days before the tower fell.   Obviously no one was injured and no damage was done to any buildings, however, you'll see in the pictures the direction the tower fell and broke a chain-link fence and just how close it came to a huge propane tank.  From what I've been told, what you are seeing in the pictures is after some of the Uinta Communications personnel had been up there with a cutting torch cutting up the twisted mess.  Apparently it was worse than this. 
--Michael J. Richard - Americanbroadcastdx.com webmaster / KEVA-AM / KNYN-FM engineering.

As always, click on the images for a larger view

Before pic: this is a picture taken of the tower earlier this summer.  The smaller tower to the left is still standing	More tower parts	Another view	more	I took this shot to show the bolts that held the base of the tower in place.  The guy wires are what broke and took the tower down.
This is a shot inside the building looking at the KNYN Equipment rack and the former KNYN main transmitter.  It ran for the first 3 years then broke down and was never fixed.  We've been on the backup transmitter ever since.  The equipment in the rack from top to bottom:  Bird meters for output and reflected power, Gentner VRC2000 remote control, BEXT STL receiver, 2 Nicom exciters...one exciter for the main transmitter and one for the backup transmitter, and at the bottom is the Nicom 500W solid-state backup transmitter.			Closer frontal view of the KNYN main transmitter, made by CSI.  I think I was told it's about 15 or 20 yrs old.