The North Wing of the Musick Memorial Radio station is dominated by the Bay Room, with its curved wall of windows styled to represent the nose of an airplane.
This room houses MPRG’s collection of transmitters, most of them relocated by MPRG from Auckland Radio’s Oliver Road transmitter site shortly after Auckland Radio closed in 1993.
An unused cabinet was made into an antenna patch panel and change-over system, while another cabinet is used as a cable terminal block and line-testing unit. One was fitted with the appropriate change-over relays (ZC1 type), to protect the receivers in use.
All of the antennas terminate at this cabinet and extend to the operating desks upstairs.
The antennas can be manually switched to the respective desks and the operator has no need to go up and down stairs.
Only one of these transmitters in this area can operate at any one time due to the constraints of antenna switching and mains power.
Three transmitters are along side each other and make a good visual show for visitors. There is a story for each one and we enjoy enlightening visitors regarding their use and how we act in a professional way with reconstruction.
The battery room is kept clean and tidy and the cells are checked at regular intervals. There is little load on them at present. We have two banks, one of 320 Amps and one at 400 Amps. This latter set is to provide us with the 240 AV from the static rotary converters. These 12-volt feeds go to the workshop, the three operating positions for the 12v HF rigs, and the supervisors position for running the 2-metre set and any other equipment that is required.
With a 100-watt mobile transceiver on full power load, a drop of about 0.2 volts was measured at the supervisor’s desk on the first floor. Not bad, but the wiring is more than capable of twice the load.
The original push button equipment installations had reached the non usable state, the PC Boards having many heavy soldered tracks and burns and the system that it connected to down stairs was dysfunctional, much of the interlocking equipment having been removed prior to our arrival. The empty control cabinets that contained these are now being used for a switching service that would work for us.
Shortly after our occupation of the building, the water supply to the station was disconnected, so we modified the tower roof area for water collection into the tanks. these tanks were installed when the station was built in 1939, and are now getting serious osmosis. We collect enough water in these to provide us with an emergency supply.