Quote Originally Posted by kb2vxa View Post
Electricity may have fried the Behemoth but it ignited Godzilla's atomic fire and made things worse. Now which monster is responsible for attacking the weakest link in the Northeast Power Grid? Smart beastie he is, every time a key link, the Niagara Feeder to the city always fails. Back in 1965 the phrase was "Where were you when the lights went out?" and someone even wrote a song about it. I was home in Jersey (engineers had sense enough to cut the Linden Feeder to Staten island to stop the dominoes) doing some AM and FM broadcast band DXing with the FM stations off the air and no modulation and no splatter from the AM transmitters in the Meadowlands. Couldn't TVDX since I didn't have a BMF antenna and rotor then, rats. In any case the old land line pre cell phone network stayed up, if all else fails there's still the 48V Baghdad battery bank.
I was on the air and running the transmitter link to the city at WPAT (AM/FM) on the night of the 77 blackout. It was a hoot. We had two transmitters in the city, both went down. Oddly enough, it was one of a few stations with a THIRD backup FM Transmitter. That one was built by Armstrong himself. It hadn't been used in decades, but with the help of the CE and a lot of DPPG, I got it to run 3 watts. About as much as the average CB radio. With the bands totally quiet, I was told you could hear it all over the city and that meant the sponsors couldn't complain.

I'm glad I'm not in the city this Aug. 14th. Ten years ago for my 50th birthday, the great northeast blackout happened on that day. I can't imagine what's in store for my 60th, but I sure don't want to be around there for it.