KC 102.1 dead air since several hours ago

[AnyHuman]

True Oldies 107.7

Dead air on both KCKC and online. I imagine technical problems or nobody there.

 

[AnyHuman]

Fixed on Friday Sep 9th by 06:30 or 07:00 AM. It was off for at least 12 hours or so. Probably nobody there and no alarm going off to notify anyone.
The transmitter should turn off when it detects dead air if you ask me, would save energy.


Heck they could have been transmitting audio for the deaf overnight.

 

[b-turner]

You have no clue. KCKC is a major station in the market. Have you ever been inside a radio station? I'll bet all 4 of this company's stations are at the same place and like many other majors, has a warm body there in one of those stations. They have alarms akin to a smoke detector going off and sometimes a transmitter kicking off calls the engineer. Obviously they had some real issues. I would suspect they'd have an alternate transmitter site but likely something prevented that. When a station can lose more than you make in a year in a few hours, you can bet they have redundancy like crazy and they know if the station drops out even a second.

 

[davideduardo]

The transmitter should turn off when it detects dead air if you ask me, would save energy.

Outside of the fact that having a carrier on with no legal IDs is a violation...

... what is the obsession by a number of posters with the "high cost" of station electric bills?

For most stations... and and particularly those in metro areas... electricity is a relatively minor expense item.

 

[CTListener]

Outside of the fact that having a carrier on with no legal IDs is a violation...

... what is the obsession by a number of posters with the "high cost" of station electric bills?

For most stations... and and particularly those in metro areas... electricity is a relatively minor expense item.

I think a lot of people look at their own electric bills -- for lights, appliances, electronics, etc. -- and think "Imagine how much WXXX is paying for 50 kilowatts of power 24/7!" Putting themselves in ownership's shoes, they can see themselves fretting over that huge bill and looking for ways to reduce it. It's hard to imagine such a big number basically being baked into the routinely accepted cost-to-profit ratio of a media company that owns radio stations, and that the power bill could go up by half and still not be cause for ownership to lose sleep over, much less to consider going dark and turning in the license, a course of action I've seen posters here suggest with, apparently, a completely straight face.

 

[davideduardo]

I think a lot of people look at their own electric bills -- for lights, appliances, electronics, etc. -- and think "Imagine how much WXXX is paying for 50 kilowatts of power 24/7!" Putting themselves in ownership's shoes, they can see themselves fretting over that huge bill and looking for ways to reduce it. It's hard to imagine such a big number basically being baked into the routinely accepted cost-to-profit ratio of a media company that owns radio stations, and that the power bill could go up by half and still not be cause for ownership to lose sleep over, much less to consider going dark and turning in the license, a course of action I've seen posters here suggest with, apparently, a completely straight face.

Let's look at a hypothetical case of a station in NYC or Chicago on one of the tall buildings. They have an ERP around 5 kw, and lets say they have no antenna "gain" so they have to output 10 kw of RF. The transmitter and gear may use 15 kw an hour, at maybe $ 0.20 per kWh. So that is $3 and hour, about $75 a day and under $2250 a month.

NYC FMs average around $20 million in billing. In Chicago it is around $15 million a year. They are not worrying about $25 thousand in expense.

 

[SomeRadioGuy]

Fixed on Friday Sep 9th by 06:30 or 07:00 AM. It was off for at least 12 hours or so. Probably nobody there and no alarm going off to notify anyone.
The transmitter should turn off when it detects dead air if you ask me, would save energy.


Heck they could have been transmitting audio for the deaf overnight.

I'm sorry but this is one of the dumbest most uneducated things ive read on this board in awhile and says alot.

Lots of incredibly incorrect assumptions.. no alarms? nobody there? "technical problems or nobody there".. thats not even a sensible sentence.

I've worked for numerous stations even small ma and pa ones that had off air/dead air alarms and ways for stations staff to be notified at any hour when a station is operating at an incredible variance from whats normal

At a ma and pa station I still do work for, if theres dead air for more then 5 seconds, it sends an alarm text and email to the owner and the automation system auto advances to the next thing in the playlist. If the dead air continues, such as the automation system has crashed, the owner keeps getting alarms via text and email till its fixed.

When the generator does an auto self test on Wednesdays, he gets a text if it ran or failed.

when the studio or main transmitter loses power, he gets notified by email and text and the generator auto starts.
when the on channel booster transmitter loses mains power and goes to UPS back up, he gets notified.

He's been at the studio at 1030 at night in his PJ's doing storm coverage when a freak spring snow storm causes over 10,000 power outages in a town of 30,000 people.

So to say no ones there, no one knows or theres no alarms going off is an incredibly amatuerish load of frozen moose dung thing to say.

 

[AnyHuman]

What do you think was happening overnight then?

 

[davideduardo]

What do you think was happening overnight then?

Off for maintenance, such as work on a section of coax or the antenna switch. Can't be done when on the air.

Or failure of a "critical path" element... again things that have no backup.

Or replacement of a the coax dehydrator or gas pressure gear... depressurizing the line means potential arcing while not pressurized. Arced line, unless you have an aux antenna, can mean days off the air.

Or a lightning strike that damaged something like the antenna switch or a key part of the transmitter, and repairs had to be made using spares before it would go back on.

Or, what insurance companies call "acts of God" meaning something like heavy snowfall crushing the roof over the transmitter.

Or a (insert large animal name here) charged the power panel and shorted stuff out.

Or a small animal climbed into the transmitter and shorted out a key component, causing the transmitter to turn off and not be able to go on until the shorted component was fixed.

There are more. These are just examples.

"Back in the day" before gear was so reliable, nearly every station in America was off at Midnight Monday through 5 AM or 6 AM Monday morning so the engineer or engineers could do transmitter cleaning, fan and vent lubrication, filter cleaning, tube rotation, balancing of the modulator tubes, monthly outsourced frequency check, etc., etc.