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Dead Air on KLIF-AM

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dakareedog

Guest
Listened to a dead carrier from home to work this morning. 4:30a til after 5am. Sleepy board op?
 
It might have been a myriad of things that kept them quiet ranging from STL problems to power issues at the studio. With that being said, one of the keys to success as a talk-formatted station is keeping the needles moving. Redundancy isn't all that expensive anymore. If it takes one computer, how about getting two of them and a silence switch to fail-over to the backup? How about getting two sat recievers and having a switch to quickly fix a problem? How about getting DSL at the tower and putting a switch out there where it either automatically switches to the station's stream or even manually switches with intervention via the remote control? Self-healing and bypasses aren't that expensive or hard anymore. Why not plan ahead?
 
OKCRadioGuy said:
It might have been a myriad of things that kept them quiet ranging from STL problems to power issues at the studio. With that being said, one of the keys to success as a talk-formatted station is keeping the needles moving. Redundancy isn't all that expensive anymore. If it takes one computer, how about getting two of them and a silence switch to fail-over to the backup? How about getting two sat recievers and having a switch to quickly fix a problem? How about getting DSL at the tower and putting a switch out there where it either automatically switches to the station's stream or even manually switches with intervention via the remote control? Self-healing and bypasses aren't that expensive or hard anymore. Why not plan ahead?
Click to expand...

Why not have a board op 24/7 to make sure this doesn't happen?
 
This just in - 4 people in DFW missed Ghost to Ghost AM. Or maybe it was the colon cleansing infomercial hour.
 
"Why not have a board op 24/7 to make sure this doesn't happen?" I'm sure cost is a factor, but to be honest people you pay $7 dollars an hour to watch the board or run it may not be right on top of getting things straightened out either. Where the big boys are missing the boat IMHO is not having a guy or a pair of them that are an Ops guy (not the boss version) that are in charge of making sure the automation is programmed right and can quickly and remotely respond to issues that come up. Many times it's dumped on engineering. Engineering isn't programming people so after a while those overworked guys can get callus to smaller failures because they simply can't fix everthing. The PD types watching over humans and many signals don't sweat it either. So you end up with what you hear. Crap happens and no one does much about it. Corporate broadcasters use automation as just cost-savings. To make it run right it needs "a daddy" to watch over it. Few are willing to pay for getting things right even in a huge market.
 
Good automation properly tweeked can make a station sound actually better than live, especially on syndicated talk. The trick is not to use it just to be cheap. Use it to be better and put in equipment and humans to that goal. Nothing is more important than the product because without it there is nothing of value to sell.
 
For the record, KLIF has board-ops 24/7 (because it's cheaper than fixing the automation software).

This was related to the move from the old studios to our temporary home in Arlington. One of those board-ops changed some settings (because he's an idiot) and inadvertently took the station off the air. The broadcast monitoring equipment wasn't working in the new studio and so no one knew there was an issue until calls started coming in about the signal being down.
 
I had a jock like that he was just curious so he pushed the off button
 
Sounds like the perfect storm indeed. It just proves that no matter how hard a guy can try to not have failures, at times it's going to happen, especially when things are in flux during a move. Best of luck to you guys on the move-over. No one other than other engineering and some of the programming people will ever know how many hours and trouble is involved in moving studios. It's quite the experience.
 
On a side-note one of our new guys who just started was typing on the computer in the control room and appearently hit the fader when he did it, potting the program on-air down to almost off. I luckily have a receiver here in my office and heard the drop in audio (although the compellor at least kept it up enough to be heard over the air :) ). I went in and noticed the audio was low and why the pot was almost off. He said, "Oh? So that affects what we hear on the air??" I can see he's going to likely be a challenge...
 
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