WERU’s new FM transmitter is on-the-air at full-power! It was a lot of slow and careful work, but thanks to our Chief Engineer, Gil Maxwell, and the great WERU team, we turned on the full-power transmitter on Tuesday, October 6, and it worked – of course! (We’d been running on our small back-up transmitter for several days.)

Last Friday, after great deliberation, we found a solution to safely deliver our new 500 pound transmitter to the top of Blue Hill Mountain.  It took a bit of legwork to find a way that was safe for our equipment, people, and the mountain trail, but thanks to the generous collaboration of Blue Hill Heritage Trust, Timberline Communications (a New England outfit coordinating the helicopter transport and labor for T-Mobile’s new cell phone equipment for the tower), and North American Helicopter, we were able to get the transmitter up there!

We are also proud to announce that thanks to generous anonymous donors, we were able to support our local economy by buying a unit made in Bangor at the Nautel US headquarters and factory.  How cool is that?  We feel grateful to have a local resource to go to if we have any issues with our infrastructure.  Hooray for WERU and the support of all those who have made this possible.  Thank you!

Here’s a look at this huge project:

During a recent tour of Nautel Maine, we got permission to take this picture inside of the Bangor based factory, but we were asked not to photograph our transmitter because it’s innards were showing 🙂 The machine photographed here helps form the steel housing that the transmitter parts live in.