Iowa State’s campus radio station, KURE (88.5 FM), went off the air Tuesday afternoon due to unspecified problems with its transmitter.

Mike Stroeh, programming director for KURE, said he made the decision to pull programming at approximately 12:45 p.m. Tuesday after the transmitter’s power levels continued to fall lower and lower.

“I did my show on Monday night, and the power levels were out of whack,” he said. “By Tuesday, we had hardly anything, and that’s when we shut down.”

On Tuesday night, Dave Boone, technical advisor for KURE, examined the transmitter, which is located on top of Physics Hall. He was unable to ascertain what exactly caused the transmitter to fail.

“I really haven’t found what the problem is,” he said. “There were no charred components, which was strange because I was kind of expecting to see some charring.”

Boone expected charring because he originally thought Sunday night’s severe weather had somehow damaged the transmitter. Although no charring was found on the apparatus, storm damage still is a possibility for the cause of the failure.

“It is definitely suspicious that this occurred shortly after storms,” Boone said.

The specific problem with the transmitter seems to be in the exciter, the part of the transmitter that generates a signal to send to the amplifier, Boone said.

“I know that the exciter is giving a negligible output, which leaves nothing to amplify,” he said.

Boone said this is the first problem in his memory that KURE has had with the exciter, which has been trouble-free for at least six years.

Stroeh said he wasn’t sure how long it would be until KURE could broadcast again.

“The earliest would be Monday,” he said, “depending on how severely the transmitter is damaged.”

Boone said the biggest delay would be his own time constraints in determining exactly what the problem with the exciter is. On Tuesday night, he didn’t have all the testing equipment he needed. He was planning to return to the top of Physics Hall Wednesday night to take another look at the transmitter.

When the problem finally is discovered, Boone said it might not take long for the transmitter to be fixed.

“We’ll find whatever the defective component is and replace it,” he said. “I’m really hopeful that we could have parts delivered overnight and get to fixing it the next day. Of course, if it turns out we have to be sending a component in to be fixed, it would take a lot longer.”

Stroeh said the timing of the transmitter problem was very unfortunate for the station’s disc jockeys.

“This was the first week of our summer schedule, and summer is a time to give prime time slots to DJs that don’t usually have good slots,” he said. “It really helps them develop their style. And as of right now, they can’t do that.”

Stroeh also said being off-air is hurting a project that KURE has been working on for a while — broadcasting over the Internet.

“We’ve been trying to get our Web radio up and running, and that was just getting to run smoother,” he said. “Now, we can’t do anything with it because we’re down.”

If KURE is unable to broadcast for a couple of weeks, Stroeh said he might look into letting DJs do their shows exclusively over the Internet.

“We can still do transmitting over the Web without our transmitter,” he said. “If we’re going to be down for an extended period of time, I’m going to get in touch with some of the DJs to see if they’d be interested in Web-only shows because that medium is still open.”