Andrea Yates Arraignment

Houston, Texas              August 8, 2001

Today I am back in Houston Texas for the continuing story of Andrea Yates. This is her first arraignment hearing to plead guilty or not guilty to the charges of capitol murder of her children.  She plead the latter.  The entire NBC network hired the truck today.  At the crime scene I was doing dual path, today I transmitted triple path all digital.  Path one was MSNBC, path 2 was CNBC and NBC news channel, path 3 was a pool feed from the court room and other tape feeds.  We were going to do the story live with Brokaw that night but some other bigger news came up.  For this job I towed in an extra generator to supply extra power.  I was servicing 2 maybe 3 live locations plus the truck plus added equipment and it was over 100 degrees that day.  A I have a small generator inside the truck but it would have been overwhelemed with such large demands.  Fortunatly the cable runs to the live locations were fairly short but there were still 3 of them.  The truck was crammed full of equipment to get all 3 transmission paths up and going.  There are 3 white boxes (2 stacked in the rack and one behind the seat) these are the digital encoders for transmission one for each path.  Sitting on the driver seat is backup gear.  This was a long day too but it was very rewarding to pull off 3 paths with very few problems.