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KPLU off the air!!

C

crainbebo

Right now, 88.5 is off the air, no carrier or anything. Just static. Tried to DX but a lot of IBOC blocked everything. 91.1 is also off the air. 88.1 is dead air. Please update. Is it technical problems, or is the heat knocking off the transmitter? KPLU's website was no help.

-crainbebo
 
I understand there are 10,000 without power in the Tacoma area at this hour.
 
There was some electricity problem in Tacoma (may have been the cause), but the station just *cycled* off for a moment while I'm listening right now as well. So perhaps their tower is also a little overheated in the 100+ temps we're having. I'm surprised no one's exploded off air. Surely one of these sites foolishly doesn't have a proper cooling system?
 
OOOoo the scandal and intrigue of it all! ::)

KPLU also has a backup transmission site on Cougar Mt., so I doubt any problems they were having were directly related to a failed transmitter.

Once the problem is discovered and corrected, life goes on. Nobody dies when some radio station goes off the air. Get over it.
 
HowardMBurgers said:
OOOoo the scandal and intrigue of it all! ::)

KPLU also has a backup transmission site on Cougar Mt., so I doubt any problems they were having were directly related to a failed transmitter.

Once the problem is discovered and corrected, life goes on. Nobody dies when some radio station goes off the air. Get over it.
Click to expand...

If something is happening right now, why not, I don't know, call the station to find out what's going on? They're going to have more information than any speculation on this board.
 
As of 9PM Wednesday, it is back on.

-crainbebo
 
AQH said:
HowardMBurgers said:
OOOoo the scandal and intrigue of it all! ::)

KPLU also has a backup transmission site on Cougar Mt., so I doubt any problems they were having were directly related to a failed transmitter.

Once the problem is discovered and corrected, life goes on. Nobody dies when some radio station goes off the air. Get over it.
Click to expand...

If something is happening right now, why not, I don't know, call the station to find out what's going on? They're going to have more information than any speculation on this board.
Click to expand...

No, AQH, let 'em post on this board - if those kinds of posts stop the Seattle board will cease to be the laughingstock of Radio-Info!
 
What happens with the PPM when a station goes off or doesn't encode. We saw the big drops at Fisher when they fire took them off the air and kept their stations from encoding for a couple of days. What happens to KPLU? Does arbitron average the rest of the week or average the weeks of the month. Interesting problem that we never had with the diary.
 
You are correct. Arbitron will not adjust numbers because an encoder is off or not working or a station is off the air. In my humble opinion KPLU will not care if they are off because they are a non-comm I believe. In the case of the Fisher stations it is more problematic. As I understand it they were off the air for some time and then on the air but not encoding due to a fire in their building. This will result in zero listenership in the PPM, while they actually were on the air with listeners. In the PPM parameter, it isn't whether you are on the air, it is whether you are encoding. This happened in another market where an engineer actually turned off the encoder key and it took a couple of days for the station to correct it and I have it on good authority the station was stuck with the zero share and got a lousy week and month of ratings as a result. In this case it was out of control of the station. I have not heard of a fire or natural disaster leaving a station unable to encode. Quite perplexing, in my humble view.
 
My real job has equipment in many of the datacenters around here so I happened to be prety close to the fisher fire (was there for the majority of the outage) and can speak to the situation at the studios a bit.

It is hard to encode when you don't have a studio or rack room available (which fisher lost due to the fire and the subsequent lack of power and/or air conditioning) since the PPM encoders have to be placed in front of the processors which are also usually at the studio. Most stations I know of really don't have much of an ability to insert anything other than test audio at the transmitter. (Remember that KPLZ and KOMO were transmitting from portable mixers at the KOMO-TV tower where their STLs relay through.) The mixers were simply plugged directly into the STL links.

The outage lasted about 27 hours meaning that for that entire duration the staff was just keeping the stations on-air and servicing the listener base. For the first five hours or so there was only limited access to the building so even if they wanted to pull a PPM encoder it would have been difficult as access was restricted (due to the fire department) and there was a complete lack of lighting in the building, making it hard to pull gear from the racks.
 
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