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Blog
 Nate HudsonNate Hudson was hired summer 2006. Nate graduated from Purdue in 2009 and is attending University of Illinois for graduate work. During the summer, he works as our graphical designer, and producer of printed publications (and any other time we can whine and get his help through the year). He is also responsible for our web design. Nate has been active in his local church.
You might notice a new link on the "Support Thy Word" menu. It says, "Shop CBD." This is one of the easiest and most effortless ways to support Christian Radio!
Whenever you follow any link on our website to CBD's website (ChristianBook.com), Thy Word Network will receive 10% of any and all items you purchase. You don't just have to buy products we recommend in our Quick Picks--you can buy anything at all and Thy Word Network will receive 10% of the value of your purchase.
But you've got to click a link to CBD on our website for us to receive 10% of your purchase. To make this easier than ever, you can now bookmark www.ThyWord.org/cbd/. That link will take you directly to CBD's homepage, AND Thy Word will automatically receive 10% of the value of any items you purchase. So go ahead--bookmark www.ThyWord.org/cbd/ today, and use it whenever you want to buy items from Christian Book Distributers. It's the easiest way to support the Tri-State's favorite Christian Radio Station.
It's that time of year again. School starts in a little over two weeks, so it's time for me (Nate) to say goodbye to Thy Word Network for the year and to start packing up all my belongings to cart away to Purdue. And this is also a good time to reflect over the summer. It's been a busy summer, and the time has flown by. Back in May, we at Thy Word Network began our campaign to raise funds to build a new WBHW Tower near Loogootee, Indiana. The fund raiser was a complete success, and we were able to begin construction. Over the past weeks, we've had several interesting moments as parts have begun arriving, mostly in functional states (although a few resembled giant metal pretzels), and as the tower crews have begun and finished construction on the actual tower structure. Even with the actual 500-foot tower standing, we still have much work to do. The site requires a building to house a transmitter, which we will be building. We've even had some humorous moments this summer, including the early Saturday morning several weeks ago when Rick and Billy had to rush out to the station--our alarms were going off warning us of system errors because we weren't receiving our satellite signals from our programmers. Had vandals cut the line? No. Rick and Billy just found a massive ant's nest inside the satellite dish. Personally, though, my summer has focused more on the online portion of our ministry. Going into the summer, we at Thy Word Network had great ambitions to refine our website to better minister to and serve you, our listeners / web viewers. We've wanted everything about our website to point to ministry and the Lord; to display His glory in every tag of every page. And we've wanted to serve you. Over the past three months, we've worked hard to make our website prettier, and to make pertinent information more accessible, and to make everything just a little easier to use. We've tried to keep you in-the-know, with the introduction of two new email lists, and two brand new RSS feeds. We've worked hard to up the quality of our Online Daily Devotionals, and to bring you more features in one place, including syndicated headlines on our front page, an Online Community, a vastly upgraded and searchable Community Calendar, and even brand new features like our In the Studio interview archives, which we'll be filling over the next few months. Within a few months, we'll even be increasing the quality of our online Radio Streaming, so you'll be able to listen to our broadcast online anywhere in the world with near-CD quality sound. But even though we're finished upgrading our website for the summer, we're never finished upgrading our web ministry. Ultimately, our website is meant to be an ever-improving tool for you, our listeners. So, as we forge forward, by all means, let us know how our website can be further improved in the future to make it easier for you to use, or what features would be more helpful to you and minister to you in a greater way. So it's a short goodbye from me for now, but I'll be back soon enough. Just be sure to let us know how our web ministries can serve you better, and we'll start making a list for future summers.
I feel a sense of deja vu. Seriously. Let me tell you about it. So the delivery guy shows up the other day with a huge, beaten-up, shady-looking box. I use the word "box" loosely, because this "box" didn't have single side still intact. Seriously, did all the delivery company employees just take turns hitting the thing with metal rods? Running it over with their trucks?
Sound familiar? It should if you've read our first blog: What $2100 Will Buy. Last time it turned out well. But this time ... well ... opening the box this time, we found an antenna.
Basically, our towers in Loogootee, Owensboro, and Albion all function similarly: they have a single building with a transmitter inside of it, and the tower and an antenna outside. Those three towers act like relay stations. Their giant antennae pick up the 101.5 FM signal that we broadcast out of Evansville, convert it to the new respective signal (106.5, 88.7, or 91.7) and then rebroadcast it.
And this antenna that we had just opened up was at some point in time the antenna for our new Loogootee tower. But I guess someone thought that we had ordered a giant metal pretzel, no cheese, please, because that's what was in the box. I'm reminded of a certain commercial that has chimpanzees testing luggage by throwing it against walls. I guess commercials don't always lie.
So we have to get a new antenna. Again. But that's not where our tower tribulation ends.
We also needed a building to house the transmitter - the actual equipment that transfers the signal from 101.5 to the other frequencies. So, Floyd bought two old AT&T cellphone/microwave transmitter buildings. Imagine two giant steel boxes with 10' ceilings, and a giant swinging door. Kind of like a reinforced shed. The buildings are mobile, so they can be put on trucks and transferred wherever they're needed. Apparently, though, AT&T sells their old microwave transmitter buildings with all their equipment still inside, so all of us guys at the station spent about four days stripping all the equipment out of the buildings, separating the metals into their respective types, and sending it all to be recycled. It was a great way to get away from the office for a few days, and to pick up some extra funding for Christian Radio on the side!
Anyway, we sold one of the buildings to a radio station in Ohio that is also building a new tower. The other station decided to transport their building to their location as soon as we finished clearing out all the equipment. And the very next day we received a phone call. Apparently, their transport company took the building under an underpass that just didn't have sufficient clearance. Suffice it to say, their building is no longer a building. It's more like a pile of scrap sitting on the side of Highway 41.
Since the other station is on a tighter deadline than we are, we decided to sell them our second building, too. Which, if you're counting, leaves us without a building. But not to worry - Floyd is amazing with tools, so we're going to build ourselves a reinforced concrete, metal-covered building on-site. It will take a little more time than expected, but ultimately, our building will be much better quality than what we originally bought.
So things are looking up. We should be receiving our new, hopefully non-contorted, antenna soon. The tower crews should start construction on Monday. And when they're finished building the tower, we'll start building our transmitter building. Let's just pray that nothing else goes wrong.
So the delivery guy shows up the other day with a huge, beaten-up, shady-looking box. I use the word "box" loosely, because this "box" didn't have single side still intact. Seriously, did all the delivery company employees just take turns hitting the thing with metal rods? Running it over with their trucks?
Normally the guy walks in with nice neat packages, but I'm just staring wide-eyed at this massive mess of a package that the UPS guy is absolutely struggling to put down. I mean he's seriously working. That box must've been at least 150 pounds. But what do you do with a delivery like that? I mean, honestly, do you even accept boxes when they look like that?
 Well, it turns out it's a good thing that I accepted the delivery of the package. When Floyd got back from lunch, we pry the cardboard wrapping from around the package, and find.... three huge... metal things. These three huge metal things are called turnbuckles. They cost about $100 a pop, so that shady looking box was worth about $300.
What most people don't realize is that a radio tower actually narrows at its base. The part of the tower that makes contact with the ground is a metal disc about the size of a medium pizza, which pivots on a 5 inch bolt.
This means that the ground basically doesn't hold the tower upright at all. So a radio tower needs dozens of guy wires - huge cables that pull the tower in every direction - to hold it upright. The turnbuckles are what bolt into the ground and hold the guy wires into the ground.
Fifteen turnbuckles and dozens of bolts, fasteners, cables, and wires later, we've spent about $2100 so far. So for everyone who's wondering how we spent the first $2100 of the money we raised during the Loogootee 500 Race Week, now you know. |
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