• Get involved.
    We want your input!
    Apply for Membership and join the conversations about everything related to broadcasting.

    After we receive your registration, a moderator will review it. After your registration is approved, you will be permitted to post.
    If you use a disposable or false email address, your registration will be rejected.

    After your membership is approved, please take a minute to tell us a little bit about yourself.
    https://www.radiodiscussions.com/forums/introduce-yourself.1088/

    Thanks in advance and have fun!
    RadioDiscussions Administrators

104.7 Crashing on Autopilot

F

FreddyE1977

Guest
Another wonderful example of engineering "quality" in the age of cluster automation....

Flipped on 104.7 last night shortly before 8 and noticed they were running a replay of
Monday's Rush Limbaugh show (I suppose because the Pirate game had pre-empted it).
They went to news at the top of the hour, and when they came back they fired-up the
2nd. hour of Rush....plus the automation kicked in with the regularly scheduled feed of
Michael Savage. One talking over the other, blended together for the better part of an
hour (guess it took awhile to wake somebody up in Cleveland). For the better part of an
hour a highly rated talk station in a decent sized market sounded like a Soviet Jamming
Station in it's heyday. I'm sure the advertisers are gonna love that.

It did get me to thinking though.....since the average talk listener probably does not really
care whether he is listning to a talk show in stereo or not, how about an FM talk station that
transmits two shows simultaneously....a liberal one to the left speaker and a conservative one
to the right? Then the listener could choose depending on his or her point of view simply by
cranking over the balance knob? That way you could please everyone, and sell double the
number of spots.
 
Funny joke, but I heard the same thing.

On Rush Limbaugh's show they play these funny bits underneath the ads for fictious companies. I heard all of them underneath the ads- Spatula City, Barnicle Brothers- all of them.

Then the ads would play under the show.

Then Michael Savage's show began to air. Then Glenn Beck's replay. Then back to Savage's show.

Unbelievable.
 
They've been doing crap like this for years now. I've heard two programs air at once, programs air at the wrong time, and hours of dead air. It's a complete disgrace.
 
It's not just 104.7, I've heard it all of them at one time or another, long periods of dead air, two-three commercials running at once, out of date voice tracking, all kinds of nasty stuff. As an on the air person, things that would have gotten me fired several times over just a few years ago. It's ok if a computer does it, but let a jock make a similar mistake, look out. The music stations seem to be particularly guilty on the weekends and at night.
Welcome to the brave new world and the age of corporate radio.
 
I have heard similar things happen on Salem's WPIT, running at half-lightbulb power after sundown.
But they never went on for more than 2 or 3 minutes before someone fixed them. For a station the
size of PGB to have it go on for an hour is truly pathetic.
 
FreddyE1977 said:
It did get me to thinking though.....since the average talk listener probably does not really
care whether he is listning to a talk show in stereo or not, how about an FM talk station that
transmits two shows simultaneously....a liberal one to the left speaker and a conservative one
to the right?
Click to expand...
Except that FM stereo doesn't transmit a left speaker signal and a right speaker signal.

So that those with monaural receivers would be able to continue to receive broadcasts from stereo stations, a stereo FM transmission is made up of a L+R signal and a L-R signal. A mono receiver simply demodulates the L+R (combined) signal. A stereo receiver has to do a little more work... the two signals are added together to produce the Left channel (L+R) + (L-R) = 2L; the difference of the two signals is taken to produce the Right channel: (L+R) - (L-R) = 2R.
 
You sound surprised by this. It happens at least once a week. The odd thing is sometimes its not even scheduled talk programming that interrupts or overlaps what should be playing. Once I heard a jock cutting voicetracks for a generic KISS station in the midwest overtop Savage, a Bruins NHL game once played for nearly 30 minutes, and that's just a few examples. Question is does anybody locally monitor 104.7? Say, could someone from DVE run over and reset the automation or is it all done in Cleveland?
 
Just this past weekend, I heard an area station running a terribly outdated weather forecast saying it was 7 degrees
and no further snow accumulation was expected. Computer glitch, I guess.

It aired all afternoon. The real temperature that afternoon was 84 degrees.

Took me three or four passes to realize it wasn't a late April Fool's Day joke.

C.
 
dB said:
FreddyE1977 said:
It did get me to thinking though.....since the average talk listener probably does not really
care whether he is listning to a talk show in stereo or not, how about an FM talk station that
transmits two shows simultaneously....a liberal one to the left speaker and a conservative one
to the right?
Click to expand...
Except that FM stereo doesn't transmit a left speaker signal and a right speaker signal.

So that those with monaural receivers would be able to continue to receive broadcasts from stereo stations, a stereo FM transmission is made up of a L+R signal and a L-R signal. A mono receiver simply demodulates the L+R (combined) signal. A stereo receiver has to do a little more work... the two signals are added together to produce the Left channel (L+R) + (L-R) = 2L; the difference of the two signals is taken to produce the Right channel: (L+R) - (L-R) = 2R.
Click to expand...

Yes I know. Came as a real bummer to me when I realized there was after all
a practical use for Algebra! :D
 
cingram said:
Just this past weekend, I heard an area station running a terribly outdated weather forecast saying it was 7 degrees
and no further snow accumulation was expected. Computer glitch, I guess.

It aired all afternoon. The real temperature that afternoon was 84 degrees.

Took me three or four passes to realize it wasn't a late April Fool's Day joke.

C.
Click to expand...

The old automation system at Rocky 103 used to do that all the time.
You'd flip it on around 2AM and hear "Good Afternoon. It's 87 degrees in
Steubenville, and here is the news"
 
My personal favorite was a station in WV that used to, maybe still does, sign off at midnight. Problem with the automation was the AM - PM was mixed up. For several days in a row, the stupid thing kept playing the national anthem at noon and "concluding its broadcast day" before some one from the sales staff would run in and reset it.
 
Don't know about now days with the newer automation equipment, but at least with those back in the 80s, SOMEONE, usually a board op/babysitter, had to program the spot clusters, weather, liners, etc into the computer. I know I did for fully local automated stations as well as the ones that were on the bird. The person who programmed it was responsible for what aired, so obviously, whoever is programming these is not paying attention, yakking on the phone too much, or friends with the boss and have no worries! ;)
 
clangham said:
Don't know about now days with the newer automation equipment, but at least with those back in the 80s, SOMEONE, usually a board op/babysitter, had to program the spot clusters, weather, liners, etc into the computer. I know I did for fully local automated stations as well as the ones that were on the bird. The person who programmed it was responsible for what aired, so obviously, whoever is programming these is not paying attention, yakking on the phone too much, or friends with the boss and have no worries! ;)
Click to expand...

I'll bet the person who programs the station has a job that was consolidated from 5 or 6 other jobs, so they're probably busier than they should be. I've heard errors like this on WINZ in Miami, WDAE and WHNZ in Tampa, WFLF in Orlando, and KTLK in Los Angeles, but in all cases they were low rated second and third banana AM stations. This is a highly rated FM news talk station. I can hardly forgive KTLK simply because it's IN LOS ANGELES. However, CC's higher rated WIOD in Miami failed to switch satellites once for a few days in afternoons and played Dr. Laura for a good 20-30 minutes in PM drive. Thankfully XDS receivers have fixed a lot of problems in regards to satellite switching and tape delaying.

I think sometimes WPGB forgets that they syndicate their morning show Quinn and Rose, because they've made numerous errors in sending out the show. Missing hard cues, making breaks too long by accident, and my favorite one: feeding out WDVE instead. And if the affiliates wind up airing WPGB during the breaks they'll get Pittsburgh traffic and spots for "Pittsburgh's FM NewsTalk 104.7" because breaks don't get covered. I'd normally say "you get what you pay for," but I believe that IS a show stations have to pay cash for, so they should be getting better than that.
 
Yep, when Quinn was on 1230 in Columbus I would often hear the show run with all of the 104.7 news and traffic breaks.
Being a "Burgh guy in town on business I sort of appreciated it. Not sure the locals did though. (obviously not since
he is gone from that station)

It was bad enough back in the day being a board op and having to manage 2 separate feeds to an
AM-FM combo. I can just imagine what it must be like if you are the lone man on duty for a six
station cluster.
 
Very bad last night. Started listening on Pa turnpike near somerset around 1am while driving back to Beaver Falls, around two hours of
listening and there were NO local breaks just DEAD AIR. NO legal id's at the top of each hour. Just the network programming. The network
overnight show was interesting but the three or four minutes of dead air at each local insert point sounded bad.
 
I was driving back from Steubenville heading to Moundsville on a Sunday afternoon about a year ago listening to Penguins hockey on 1290-WOMP/1340-WSTV.

When 105.9 The X went to the final break out of post game and it was suppose to fire tones to all affiliates to switch back to local content, instead I ended up listening to 102.5 WDVE for almost 50 minutes on 1290/1340 & 1490.

I thought i was back in the 70's hearing the likes of Boston, Hendrix, etc. on AM radio.
 
KHJ-WTAE said:
Very bad last night. Started listening on Pa turnpike near somerset around 1am while driving back to Beaver Falls, around two hours of
listening and there were NO local breaks just DEAD AIR. NO legal id's at the top of each hour. Just the network programming. The network
overnight show was interesting but the three or four minutes of dead air at each local insert point sounded bad.
Click to expand...

And if I'm not mistaken, what was airing was Michael Savage, instead of Coast to Coast AM. I checked again around 3am, and C2CAM was back on.
 
A few years ago I was listening to Kiss-FM during the afternoon rush hour and for about a solid hour the only thing playing was the theme music they play in the background when they do the live traffic report. A station like that during the afternoon time slot playing cheezy theme music with sound effects of cars honking for a solid hour.....pathetic!

Oh, question for you all. 104.7...besides Jim Quinn, is anything broadcasting from that is station live and local? Is even the local news for Pittsburgh even read from Pittsburgh?
 
Status
This thread has been closed due to inactivity. You can create a new thread to discuss this topic.


Back
Top Bottom