not all statons have engineers anymore, the last place I worked I saw the engineer ONCE, a really brilliant guy, just really hard to get to show up.. he's popular and stretched really thin.
I had a board op call me while I was at my day gig, saying he called the transmitter site and got no readings from the computer, now granted this is 1 PM, he's been at the station since 7. I try to go thru the process of what to check, what to plug into, etc, all while doing my day gig and hoping I won't get caught on my cell phone on the states time. After about 20 minutes I tell him to call the engineer of record for that station who was the CE for the company we rented tower space from, and tell him to call me. I didn't have my laptop with me so I had no phone numbers, access codes to get into the system, etc.
The engineer calls me and tells me we have been off the air since 2 AM and he was on top of it.
What's my point? We had a board op, who didn't bother to check the transmitter to see if the station was even on the air till he was 6 hours into his shift!
One of the first things I was shown when I got hired was where the Public File was, where the F.A.A. contact number was, along with the phone number for every client, vendor, the hotline to NYC where we got most of our programming, etc etc etc.
I spent 4 years training college students in the finer points of keeping a station on the air. Try explaining to a 19 year old that if the EBS system goes off, and it is the real thing, they have to stay at the board. This is a LEGAL ID " WJUL Lowell" nothing more, nothing less, and I expect it at sign on, sign off, within 5 minutes +/- of the top of the hour, the closer to the top the better, at the end of a show, I want signed program logs with accurate logging of PSA's, promo's legal ID's, accidental airing of indecent materials logged and signed for, Transmitter readings every 2 hours, signed logs, power within tolerance, sign off if we are browned out to less than 95% power, EBS tests off the receiver logged, EBS rests of the teletype logged with the paper copy attached..... NO DEAD AIR, no dead carriers at sign off for longer than 2 minutes, leave the fans on to cool the tubes! Pre Heat the plates! IF you learned that you could get a air shift. Forgive me if I left anything out it has been 28 years since I had to do it, and I know times have changed, some things for the better ,equipment is much more stable and mean time between failures are measured in years not weeks. But the basics are still the same and you need to know them
