CBS Chicago stations silent for a shot time.

[davideduardo]

From Media Confidential

In the 11 o'clock hour morning this past Friday, an technical outage in the newsroom led to WBBM's signal coming off the air and news gathering systems going down.
Other than news WBBM 780 AM / 105.9FM, all other Audacy station were impacted, including 93.1 WXRT, WSCR 670 AM, WBMX 104.3 FM, WBBM-FM 96.3 and WUSN 99.5.

Most stations experienced about 10 minutes of silence.

 

[xmtrland]

How long does it take to re boot a Core switch...... About 10 minutes.

 

[Mark Roberts]

You can hear how WBBM anchor Rob Hart handled it: https://www.audacy.com/podcast/wbbm...chor-rob-hart-overcomes-radio-nightmare-4f131

Now that's a real pro!

 

[xmtrland]

Sounds like a power issue and the UPS system did not kick in when it should have, dumping a major portion of the technology they use. Sounds like everything rebooted and came on line eventually. Not a way you want to find out you may have a faulty UPS.

 

[SomeRadioGuy]

Sounds like a power issue and the UPS system did not kick in when it should have, dumping a major portion of the technology they use. Sounds like everything rebooted and came on line eventually. Not a way you want to find out you may have a faulty UPS.

When i was at KLMI locally, full time.. we'd kill the main breaker once every few months or so to see that the UPS that held our mission critical gear and that the auto start generator would do its job.

The generator would auto test itself every week and owner would get a text when it did or didnt happen and what the results were. our further testing made sure all the systems worked together as they should

 

[Koolmotor]

I heard this live on WBBM while in the car, starting a little before 11:30 a.m. CDT. I missed the actual switch, but they continued on the air with a CBS news feed. It took a few minutes to tell that something wasn't right.

 

[Loverofradio]

Are we sure it wasn’t a moment of silence for the Cubs and White Sox seasons?

 

[pattywells]

They should probably do a test run of their emergency continuity plans! Goes to show how automated everything is these days.

 

[SomeRadioGuy]

They should probably do a test run of their emergency continuity plans! Goes to show how automated everything is these days.

Wheres the proof they were automated on some of the stations? This can happen to a live station just as easily and take just as long to recover.

I worked at a cluster with Axia.. and we were live on air..and we caught it right after it happened... and to reboot everything took 5-10 minutes.

 

[davideduardo]

They should probably do a test run of their emergency continuity plans! Goes to show how automated everything is these days.

There can be many reasons for a cluster to go off the air if they share common facilities.

I was at one group where there was a power failure and the UPS did not kick in while the generator got started. But as it failed to kick in, it did something to the transfer switching and the generator was not connected to the facility. It took some manual intervention by one of the engineers to get on the genny set, and about 12 minutes were lost.

The UPS had been tested the week before. So had the generator. All were fine. But in any operation there are some points in the system that can take the "whole thing down". Most have nothing to do with "automation".

 

[SomeRadioGuy]

They should probably do a test run of their emergency continuity plans! Goes to show how automated everything is these days.

i work for a station that has an auto start generator. theres a ups to hold critical gear more than long enough for the generator to start.. or if we lose mains power, the owner gets a text..... and if the generator fails to start, he gets a text... and the UPS will hold us long enough tioll he can get there.

The generator self tests every week and texts a report with how it went.

We would manually shut off the break and do a test every 2 months or so

We have a main transmitter and on channel fill in booster, either can easily lose power or audio for a number of reasons and become inaccessible... with the press of a few buttons on the automation that we can even do from our phones.. one button can shut off the booster and turn on the SHTF Transmitter in one fell swoop. Another button can turn off the main transmitter and turn on the exciter feeding a yagi to maintain city of license coverage

And here was the owner about 5-6 years ago investigating why one of our manual shut the breaker tests didnt go quite as wed hoped.

And when the town had a freak June snowstorm that caused trees to down power liens and knock out power to nearly half of the cities 30,000 residents.. who was on the air in their jammies on generator power? THe owner.

but dear god, were automated and voicetracked outside of AM Drive weekdays and even the saturday morning am drive show is voicetracked.

 

[Yabadabado1]

CBS Chicago stations silent for a shot time​

Wow! Wish I had a job I could shut down to take a shot or two.

In actuality, not only happens to radio stations. Worked for a PD, brand new building. Generator installed, tested weekly. Couple of months later, power loss, generator didn't kick in. Emergency lights were the only thing that came on. Entire department dead in the water. Nobody had thought to install UPS to provide back up power to run critical items, like radios, monitors, computers, phone system, etc. just in case, they relied on you know what to never fail. Generator people/company caught holy hell. They still never bought UPS to back up anything, generator people promised it would never happen again but they probably gave the mayor and city council the finger as soon as they turned around to walk away. Cell phones were just beginning to catch on so a few guys had them and one of the dispatchers got the brilliant idea to run down the hall to where the portable radios for officers were plugged in and managed to figure out how to work it and everybody ran to the station to figure out what to do besides scratch their heads.