In northern Nigeria,on the road from Sokoto to Kaduna. is the small town of Gusau.  Although my company had no equipment at Gusau TV station I was sent on a courtesy visit, to see what could be done with the two RCA transmitters that had been off air for several months.

The local politicians, being at odds with the central state government, had been spreading rumors that the state was deliberately keeping the station off air, and the situation in the town was becoming tense.

I arrived on site in the middle of the afternoon and chased a flock of poultry out of the control room.    These consisted of about a dozen Guinea fowl, a large Leghorn rooster, together with their half-breed offspring, which looked like small brown chickens with the little tuft of head feathers from the Guinea hens. 

The station Engineer was asleep on the floor behind the control console.  Both the ‘A’ and ‘B’ transmitters were totally derelict, and looked as if a group of small boys had dismantled them and then put them back together, missing out about 20% of the parts.

Station Engineer- Gusau- Awake

The transmitters on the site were RCA TT10 ten kilowatt, Tetrode output, with external diplexer to combine sound and vision.  The two transmitters were arranged in A/B configuration with a changeover coax switch between the antenna and a dummy load.

The visual exciter on this model was solid state, but the visual modulators were still high level valve units, using 6146B’s to modulate the 2 KW tetrode driver stage.  The age of the station and transmitter could not have been more than ten years. The protective panels had been removed and lost or stolen, leaving high voltage tie points exposed.  The video modulator had been removed from the ‘B’ transmitter and was laying on the floor in a corner of the room.

I spent a day trying to make one complete transmitter out of the two, but was not able to get either of the valve type, visual modulators to work.  To fix one of these I would require a working oscilloscope. There was an old Tektronics unit on site, which appeared to work, but there was no probe to be found anywhere.

I made the two hundred mile journey back to Sokoto and tried to borrow a probe from the TV studio.  They did not have a working probe, but managed to produce a box of broken pieces, from which I was able to assemble one complete unit.

Transmitter minus 20% parts

All this effort proved fruitless, because I was never able to restore service with the old transmitters- they were too far beyond help.  In addition to this, I discovered that there was a serious problem in the antenna, which would have to be fixed before anything else could be done.

On my final day, I had driven to the site to collect my tools, and noticed a small group of children had gathered at the side of the station.   They seemed to be watching an old man and a small boy who were poking around in a disused, sunken water tank made from concrete blocks.  The man was feeling around in a hole at the side of the tank, with his arm inserted up to the shoulder.   He withdrew his arm and started pulling out the crumbling blocks in another part of the pit, then grabbed what looked like a short length of electric cable, and called the small boy down into the pit.   The lad took hold of the ‘cable’ with both hands, while the old man continued to tear out the blocks until finally he pulled out a black spitting Cobra, about seven feet in length!

Tony AD1X & the kids

He was, it transpired, the local snake catcher, who had been called in by the guard at the site when he noticed that his Guinea hens were disappearing.   The old man showed off his skills with the snake to small group of onlookers for short time, before putting it into a canvas bag and taking it away with him along with his small son.   I remembered that I had been walking about the site after dark for several days, not realizing what may have been crawling around.  It was a discomforting thought.

Since my company would only sell a new transmitter in Sokoto for cash on the barrelhead, I did not have to make any return visits to the site, but driving past several weeks later, on my way to Kaduna, I noticed some activity, and called into the site to find a Marconi Engineer installing a shelterized transmitter, which had apparently been originally intended for a site near Abuja.   The Allen Dick organization had repaired the antenna, and the site was due to go back on air that week.

On my return trip to Sokoto, a few weeks later I found the same Marconi man trying to repair the new transmitter.  The station Engineer had bypassed the safety interlocks, and had somehow managed to bring the transmitter on line without the cooling fans running.  This had literally melted the final PA valve into its tuning cavity.