Ever Give A Mast A Bear Hug?

What am I doing in this picture?



I'm pressing the azimuth CCW button, for the dish on our satellite truck, in vain. Our truck operator, Gary, is up on the roof stomping his foot when he wants me to press the button. Why are we doing all of this? We're trying to save a live shot at the Kalahari Water Park that I mentioned in a post recently. Our dish has frozen. It will tilt, but it won't pan at all. It is so cold and windy outside with below zero temperatures for both air temp and wind chill that the dish is refusing to work. In all reality, I couldn't blame it.

We worked on the dish for a good two and a half hours and it wouldn't budge. Gary and I were constantly alternating between outside the truck and inside the truck, trying to thaw ourselves. I felt horrible for Gary who spent most of the time on the top of the truck because he's the shop geek and knows the truck backwards and forwards.

I had brought our tallest masted live truck and I thought while Gary was freezing his ears off, I'd try a desperate live truck shot back to Cleveland from Sandusky. So, as intrepid as I am, I went for it and set up my live truck.

The mast extended fully into the air and I talked to our signal acquisition or sig ack, as we call it, to bring the microwave signal in. I panned, tilted and prayed we could we could get a signal out of Sandusky. Sig ack saw me but we couldn't bring in a strong enough signal that was passable for on air quality.

So, I drop the mast and head to higher ground. By this time, I'm frozen so I set the mast in the up position (yes, I did look up and live), went inside the truck and set the air vents on melt. About three minutes later, I figure the mast should be up so I head outside and look up. The mast is only two sections up and not moving. I hear a psssssssshhhhtttt coming from the mast and I ran my hand over my eyes in frustration. This is air escaping because the seals have constricted because of the cold and the mast has frozen.

I was so fed up at this point, I muttered a few choice four and twelve letter words and climbed up on the top of the truck and grabbed the mast in a bear hug and tried to lift the mast out of it's frozen grip. I couldn't make it budge but I did succeed in covering myself in the grime of northeastern Ohio's finest road salt residue. I couldn't get the mast up to get a signal tuned in. I was left standing there dejected, looking like a human salt lick.