At 10:20 Saturday, June 6, Dr. John Paisley, Station Manager for Christian Family Radio, turned on the massive disconnect switch that powered up KOLU’s new transmitter.  Then, Chief Engineer Martin Gibbs had Pastor Paisley start the transmitter to warm up the tubes before applying radio frequency power.

While the transmitter warmed up, Bro Gibbs disconnected the old transmitter from KOLU’s antenna, and installed the large jumper that would route nearly 20,000 watts of power to the antenna.

As soon as the antenna connection was ready, Pastor Paisley pressed the button to apply nearly 5,000 watts in “low power configuration” to start broadcasting from the antenna.  Then, after Bro Gibbs confirmed all was well, Pastor Paisley pressed the final button that engaged full power from the new transmitter and KOLU was on the air at 39,000* watts effective power!

Words cannot express our gratitude for all that you, our listeners have done to make this event possible.  We ask your continued prayers as we work to get the Gospel message of hope along with encouragement to Christians through the ministry of Christian Family Radio.

Although this is a tremendous milestone, we still have much work to do to really complete the upgrade.  We are planning to modify the transmitter in the next couple of months to eliminate one of the two tubes in it, saving over a thousand dollars per year.  We’d also like to get our old transmitter set up as a “live backup”, keeping KOLU and the translators on the air as much as possible.

*As we’ve mentioned before, FM power is rated by how much energy goes “sideways” from the antenna, which is the only power that counts.  Thus, an antenna gives “gain” to the transmitter output.  Depending on the configuration (and expense) of the antenna a wide variety of transmitter outputs can be used.