Local NBC affiliate WPSD-TV is apologizing Monday for outages that occurred during last night's Super Bowl. The station’s over-the-air signal was interrupted multiple times during the game’s third quarter due to a seemingly complicated power issue at the station’s transmission site. WPSD explained the details of an investigation into the outage in a press release:
1. Jackson Purchase Energy discovered a bad “stinger on a capacitor bank” in rural Ballard County. This bad “stinger” affected power to 260 customers, WPSD Local 6 was one of those.
2. WPSD Local 6 never suffered a power outage from JPEC, rather we experienced what our chief engineer describes as “dirty power.” These were power dips and spikes that were so quick and short in duration that they did not trip our automatic transfer to generator power, but were severe enough for the high voltage transmitter to shut itself down in safe mode. This is the way the transmitter is designed and it worked accordingly thus safeguarding against more severe equipment damage.
3. WPSD believes the bad “stinger” on the JPEC grid caused these dips and spikes in our electrical service.
4. WPSD has no knowledge as to what caused the “stinger” to go “bad.” Nor, do we know with certainty what a “stinger” is. JPEC has not returned phone calls for further explanation.
5. It wasn’t until the third bout with “dirty power” that a three-phase outage was recorded by equipment at the transmitter site. This gave us the clue that power supplied by JPEC was the cause for our trouble.
