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EBENSBURG - WPIX-TV in New York, knocked off the air Tuesday morning when two terrorist-commanded planes crashed into the World Trade Center, returned to the air late Wednesday with emergency help from an Ebensburg company.
SWR Inc. is an Ebensburg manufacturer of FM and television antennas, and does business around the world. It got the station back on the air.
The WB Network station, whose signal is available to Cambria and Somerset County customers through Charter Communications, was one of the stations whose transmitting equipment was atop World Trade buildings.
"We built them a temporary standby antenna," David Edmiston, corporate secretary, said Thursday from SWR. "They needed an antenna to make it all work."
Edmiston said he was the only one in the plant when the frantic call came just after 4 p.m. Tuesday from Andrew Bater, manager of radio frequency project engineering fro Tribune Broadcasting, owner of the station.
Could SWR put together a makeshift antenna that the station could mount on the Empire State Building? The antenna had to be made so it could be taken up by elevator to the 80th floor.
"A bunch of people worked their butts off to get this done," Edmiston said in a telephone interview from SWR, 619 Industrial Park Road just outside of Ebensburg.
SWR employees who had been dismissed earlier in the day because of the terrorist attacks were called in and the work began.
Eight workers, ranging from design engineers to welders to assemblers, were called in to the SWR facility.
"They were dynamite," Bater said Thursday by cellular telephone from New York.
Earlier in the day, he called Edmiston to thank him.
Edmiston said it normally would take three days for just such a project, but by 10 p.m. Tuesday the piece of equipment was ready to be shipped.
Personnel from a Tribune Broadcasting station in York picked up the panels and mounting devices late Tuesday and drove them to Bater's home in Madison, N.J., about 20 miles west of New York City.
Federal Emergency Management Agency people then escorted the truck into the city. It was taken up to the 80th. floor, where it was assembled and mounted on the side of the building.
The antenna consisted of two stainless steel, 60-inch-square panels, weighing about 130 pounds each. The panels, equipped with dipoles, disseminate the station's signal.
SWR, a family-run, privately held business, has 32 employees and annual sales of about $5 million. Nigeria, Russia and Chile are among countries it has done business in.
"We're just a small company, but we reach around the world," Edmiston said.
A depressed economy is one of the reasons growth has slowed to 9 percent a year from 20 percent, the growth rate at the time the company moved here from New Hampshire in 1990.
"They are talking to us about making a replacement antenna," Edmiston said.
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