NOAA Weather Radio Installation
and Maintenance
Lawrence County (my home county) is located in Southern Middle Tennessee on the Tennessee / Alabama State line. For years we had little to no weather radio coverage and did not receive weather alerts from the National Weather Service except via Nashville Television Stations. In conjunction with the Lawrence County Emergency Management Agency, the Lawrence County Skywarn Network (of which I am a very active member) started raising money for a local NOAA weather transmitter so that we could receive alerts directly from the National Weather Service Office in Nashville. The total cost of this project was estimated at $80,000. With the dedicated work of EMA Director Joe Baxter, and many man hours of planning by myself, Barry Roberts and various other dedicated individuals, the donations began to trickle in. A matching grant was applied for from the Tennessee Elk River Development Agency (TERDA) and after some political arm twisting, the grant was approved. This grant would pay for half of the total cost of building the NOAA site after the first half was paid. What we needed now was a private donation of about $40,000 to begin construction. A short while before our project was started, the Saturn Corporation located in Spring Hill, TN about 50 miles North of Lawrenceburg, had hosted an open house with outside exhibits and food. The outdoor reception was almost totally demolished by an unexpected thunderstorm. When Saturn learned of our project they graciously donated the needed money to start site work and order equipment.
At the time, the only manufacture of approved NOAA weather transmitting equipment was Energy Onix. In the past there have been other manufacturers of approved equipment but they have all moved on to other things or gone bankrupt. An Energy-Onix 1KW Weather transmitter and antenna was ordered for installation at a site owned by the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency in southern Maury County. Our antenna (an eight bay loop, similar to a Decibel Products, except built to handle 1KW, (with flange connectors) was installed on the 180 ft TWRA tower overlooking Southern Middle Tennessee. The proposed coverage area was 11 counties, most of which had no other access to NOAA radio. In April of 1996 the transmitter was placed in service "In a Test Mode" as the National Weather Service called it. It remained in this "Test Mode" until October 1997 when it was officially accepted for service by the NWS and all maintenance was transferred to NWS contractors. Up until this time KK Broadcast Engineering had maintained the site as a public service (for the first week or two making a trip a day to the site, 80 miles round trip to adjust this or reset that). I quickly found that a complete setup was required on the transmitter to "clean up" a lot of problems. Once I performed the total setup (basically meaning that if it could be adjusted I did), the maintenance requirements for the new transmitter dropped to almost nothing. I was gratified to find that Energy-Onix was very receptive to my suggestions and made every effort to correct any problem that arose. Bernie Wise, the owner of Energy-Onix, is a knowledgeable engineer and has a good understanding of what engineers "in the wild" are faced with. Even if Energy-Onix was not the only manufacture of these transmitters I would have to highly recommend them over any other NOAA transmitter that I have seen to date.
The Energy-Onix 1kw transmitter is totally solid state and is "Dual Redundant". We actually have two complete transmitters in one rack space. The transmitter is based upon an existing FM transmitter design and employs two of almost every piece of required equipment (two exciters, two complete Power Amplifiers, two controllers, two power supplies and even two completely separate power feeds. The design of the equipment makes is possible to have one transmitter operating into the station antenna and the other operating into an included dummy load for testing. After performing a compete setup (not mentioned in the manual) the transmitter has been quite stable and trouble free.
NOAA System design and installation
is available on a "per location" basis. Call or Email
for more information.
