Snowshoes!

I'll have to admit that I'd rather do repair work at my transmitter site on a sunny day in July...but when you live in Minnesota things don't always work out that way. The transmitter power was dropping, I knew there was no way I was going to nurse that final tube along for the entire winter...it had to be changed. Furthermore, a tuning problem which couldn't be corrected by remote control was resulting in some undesireable spurious radiation. The transmitter and tower sit in a flat farm field which is completely exposed to those strong northwest Minnesota winds.

It was January and we had recently had a couple of snowstorms, each resulting in another half foot of snow along with those strong winds. The drifts at the transmitter site were huge and there was no way one could walk across the field between the road the transmitter without sinking into crotch-deep snow which makes walking difficult. My partner, the outdoorsman, suggested we use some snowshoes which he happened to have in his possession. I had never tried 'em before but last winter I tried walking there without them and I thought I was going to perish about half way across the field. We put them on and away we went...it's actually fun when you get the hang of it...and some great exercise.

Upon arriving at the transmitter there was some shoveling to be done..not only outside the building but also inside the building where a small drift had formed in the interior northwest corner...fortunately away from anything electronic. Minnesota snow seems to sneak into buildings no matter how hard you try to seal up the structure!

The snow was removed, the tube was changed, a couple of blocking capacitors were replaced to be on the safe side, the transmitter was re-tuned and all was well with the world again. We put the snowshoes back on and went home...you might know my partner took a little video of my first snowshoe experience!

Incidentally, I had the good sense to leave a complete set of tools at the transmitter building at all times which turned out to be a great idea. Lugging a toolbox over deep snow is not much fun either...with or without snowshoes.

An excellent alternative form of transporation would be a snowmobile but we didn't happen to have one available. Maybe it would be a good investment.