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Reduced tx power or dead air announcements?

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While waiting for BBC World Service on KSTX around 9:57PM, I noticed that I could not receive the station on my listening apparatus. I am located in the vicinity of I-10 and De Zavala and usually never have any trouble receiving them, even inside the metal/concrete barn that I am in. A recheck at 11:00PM reveals still weak signal. Was this planned for maintennace or indication that NPR is short of $$$ for CPS bill? Did I miss the announcement about reducing power? Also last night around 3:00AM KTSA went dead with no notice or warning. I gave up on KTSA around 3:30AM, so don't know what time they came back on air. I thought FCC rules required a station to announce going off air for maintenance, like they used to in 70s on Sunday nights and fill dead air with promo loop or something?
 
Since consolidation really got started back in 1996. Stations have really changed the way that they work.

In the 70's.... Stations would go down for maintenance at all hours. But you had on-air operators that would make the announcement and run the ID, when it returned another ID an apology and off we go.

Nowdays, nobody is at the station overnights or weekends and consequently no ID's and no explaination. If the station goes off the air for other reasons, the silence sensors aren't always in working condition and the number for the current engineer isn't always on the alarm dialers. You can go on and on about the technical side of things.

What you didn't say in your comment was whether or not the carrier was actually on. It could have been a programming issue. If it was, who knows how long that the station could have been off the air.

Gotta run, just got a text message... the station is off the air. Hope the GM is asleep. :D
 
KSTX was doing some planned maintenance and switched to low power. After that was done a problem popped up and was unable to go back to full power.
That should be fixed soon - might be fixed already.
 
Sorry about the omission, the carrier was present, but no network feed, which at that time was the All Night Trucking Show. Since they are beaming out of the Dallas/Ft Worth area, maybe one of those Al Gore Global Warming snowstorms melted the uplink dish?
 
The strange thing was KLBJ 93.7 was off the air at 11 last night. Don't know what happened there.
 
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