[mwesson]

Does anyone know how much it costs to broadcast a TV station in terms of electricity per 1.0 kW?


In other words, if a station was already broadcasting at 1.0kW, how much extra would it cost them to broadcast 2.0 kW?

 

[eric.krieg]

Well, looking at my electric bill, I pay electricity on a kilowatt per hour basis. It's about $0.08 per kilowatt per hour.


It isn't a heck of a lot of money. 1 kW, or even 2 kW, is very low power.

 

[kenglish]

It all depends on the equipment.


1 KW of signal can be made with a 1KW transmitter and an omni-directional antenna, or less signal and a more directional antenna.


A 1 KW transmitter may still require several KW of power to run it, though. As you get into much higher power output levels, though, you start paying lots more for cooling, maintenance, and other operational costs.


Our DTV transmitter costs $3500 a month for electricity.

 

[kenglish]

 http://www.broadcast.harris.com/prod...cd%20specs.pdf

http://www.broadcast.harris.com/prod.../HAR177643.pdf


[URL='http://www-db.thomcastcom.ex...w-db.thomcastcom.ext.imaginet.fr/db/thomcast/

 

[pmb1010]

One of the local PBS station engineers was taking his ham radio test with our group, and I started talking about HDTV. (at that time I didn't know he was the station engineer).


We started talking about output power, I was complaining about dropouts. He says their station is running 1/2 output capability, and is costing $18,000 / month.