Bryan D. Brown

So last weekend, we had some weather. Some serious weather. Hail in Isla Vista. Thunder and lightning. Snow in the Santa Ynez Mountains - less than 10 miles away as the crow flies, and at a mere 4028 feet above sea level. The works. Despite my SoCal upbringing, I usually enjoy weather like this on occasion. What I didn’t want, however, was our receiver’s antenna to be struck be lightning, which is EXACTLY what happened.

This shredded piece of… whatever… is a part of the antenna. It’s the piping that runs through the center of one of the segments. As you can see, it no longer resembles piping. In fact, I initially thought this was some insulating fiber that was unrelated to the lightning strike. I’m assuming that it attaches to this:

But that’s just an assumption. So there it is. A nice long weekend, which rolled into a “Hey, we got struck by lightning” week. Was it all of those Pat Robertson jokes? Well, at least I didn’t get struck by lightning…

Update: As it turns out, the lightning strike also fried the right channel of our brand new STL transmitter and our even newer digital mixing console. I’ll have some additional photos that demonstrate just how hard we were hit. As much as all of this does, in fact, suck, it could have turned out infinitely worse.

The UCSB campus newspaper covered our argument with Zeus in their February 22nd edition.