Today, I again updated the ‘Security System Notes’. This draft is nearing completion, but I know of a couple more things that need to be added. One of these I researched this morning for checking out this afternoon at the site.

There was a ‘Comm Failure’ error on the security system keypad left from Friday when the men wanted to hear what ‘siren’ sounded like. Because the alarm was set off, it attempted to contact my cell phone eight times and a secondary phone eight times. These repetitive calls confirm to us that there is an alarm. Because the system is looking for a security company computer and did not get the response it expected, it recorded the above error. How to clear that error was my initial quest of the afternoon. I already knew the user code or the master code would not, therefore it was speculated that the installer code might do the trick. NOT so!! The only way found to clear it was by powering down the system, which requires resetting the clock. If necessary, we can live with this, but will investigate the possibility of also using the pager alert function of the system.

With the intent of providing additional monitoring by the Gentner controller, I began tracing wires from the old fire alarm system. I found two outputs. One goes to WEB, the electric company sharing the south end of our property, and turns on a fire alarm on their supervisory panel. The other goes somewhere in the building.

I found a label on a cable going out of the phone line distribution box that said fire alarm to Gentner, so decided to trace from there. After lifting ceiling panels, and following ducts through four rooms, I found that it ‘dead ended’ in the room that once housed the BBC 500kw transmitter. At one time, the Gentner must have been located there, but was later moved to its current location near the Nautel 100 kw transmitter.

I now began to more intently trace the second output from the old fire alarm system. Fortunately, among the hundreds of phone line wires, the wire colors for this pair remained the same. After passing through a couple of telephone punch blocks, the wires were traced to a punch block labeled ‘TX Hall’. To this was terminated a 33 pair cable with beige PVC jacket.

FOUND! The cable comes here

Now the challenge was to find the route the cable took to the transmitter hall, and where it ended. Again, lifting ceiling panels and tracing ducting (again in four rooms), I discovered it went into a conduit down the south wall of the transmitter room. Under a built-in desk were some doors concealing two more punch blocks. The PVC jacketed cable being traced terminated on one of the punch blocks. The fire alarm pair was jumper to the second punch block to which another cable was terminated, but this one had a braided shield over the outside.

I was fairly confident that this shielded cable terminated at a punch block in the ceiling just behind the audio rack for the transmitter. By now it was 5:30pm and time to head home. This search will continue tomorrow.

This evening we walked again, instead of swimming. The wind is out of the west, a very rare occurrence. It is almost always out of the east. This west wind results in large waves at our usual swimming beach and all along the west coast.