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Talk 1200, is anybody home?

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DavidEduardo said:
And this is the kind of equipment stations have, generally, no backup for. There are a few steps in the creation of an on-air signal that have no backup or workaround.

Another is an antenna switch. If one antenna fails, is compromised by ice or off due to tower work, and the antenna switch to an AUX antenna fails, you are off and an engineer has to get to the site and switch manually.

There are other non-redundant things in a station's operation that can put them off the air. Most fail seldom or never.
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Unless you're Talk1200, that is.
 
TheBigA said:
No, he also said WZLX HD3. He was speaking from the POV of the listeners. If you're listening to 1200 and the audio drops, you have two alternatives as a listener. The other two platforms were unaffected by the outage.

What you should really say is how amazing it was that they were able to ascertain the problem, dispatch an engineer to the transmitter, and fix the problem, all within 75 minutes during rush hour. Contrary to the subject line: Somebody WAS home, they were on the clock, and they did their job.
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I should not be telling you this: whatever the demographic is for Talk1200 - guessing it's "55 to dead", as you "insiders" blithely refer to them - they are the least likely to be embracing either HD or streaming. In fact, if these two modes of delivery are so important, then why should we bother lobbying Congress to preserve AM in cars?
 
nowradioguy said:
I should not be telling you this: whatever the demographic is for Talk1200 - guessing it's "55 to dead", as you "insiders" blithely refer to them - they are the least likely to be embracing either HD or streaming.
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All I'm saying is alternatives exist. We can lead a horse to water, but we can't make him drink.

When I see a post that a station is off the air, the first thing I check is the stream. Because it's so easy. I can do it sitting down.
 
nowradioguy said:
I should not be telling you this: whatever the demographic is for Talk1200 - guessing it's "55 to dead", as you "insiders" blithely refer to them - they are the least likely to be embracing either HD or streaming. In fact, if these two modes of delivery are so important, then why should we bother lobbying Congress to preserve AM in cars?
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My parents are in their 70s, my grandpa is in his 90s and they all love streaming radio and TV. In fact, my grandpa was teaching his friends how to use different streaming services.
 
nowradioguy said:
I should not be telling you this: whatever the demographic is for Talk1200 - guessing it's "55 to dead", as you "insiders" blithely refer to them - they are the least likely to be embracing either HD or streaming. In fact, if these two modes of delivery are so important, then why should we bother lobbying Congress to preserve AM in cars?
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I understand “55+” is a radio term we all use, but in the case of talk radio, in reality it’s probably more 65+ as far as the average listener age. It was a 55+ format 10-15 years ago.
 
DavidEduardo said:
Another is an antenna switch. If one antenna fails, is compromised by ice or off due to tower work, and the antenna switch to an AUX antenna fails, you are off and an engineer has to get to the site and switch manually.
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1200 is on a five-tower directional array.

There are two other directional AM’s on the site so I don’t know how many towers 1200 uses, but I’m sure at least two at any given time.
 
DavidEduardo said:
And this is the kind of equipment stations have, generally, no backup for. There are a few steps in the creation of an on-air signal that have no backup or workaround.

Another is an antenna switch. If one antenna fails, is compromised by ice or off due to tower work, and the antenna switch to an AUX antenna fails, you are off and an engineer has to get to the site and switch manually.

There are other non-redundant things in a station's operation that can put them off the air. Most fail seldom or never.
Click to expand...
I actually witnessed this once when I did some part-time work at a radio station during the high school football season.

The station at the time had a manual switch between patterns; this was 2011 but the station had an engineer on site to do the switching or to supervise it. The switch had to be made during the game, only when it happened, the carrier cut entirely. A whole host of troubleshooting that I witnessed saw them having to revert back to day pattern after about 20 markets or so.

Turns out that when the large field in front of the station and where the towers sit on was being mowed earlier in the day, the wiring for the night pattern was exposed and somehow accidentally mowed over (thankfully, it was not electrified!). And shortly after this incident, an automated switch was installed for the array.
 
xmtrland said:
They do make an automatic transfer switch you can put between the UPS and loads your protecting in the event of a failure it automatically bypasses the UPS and connects to a alternate power source. I have seen these used at a few stations and use a similar unit where I work. CyberPower PDU44001 Switched ATS PDU, is one unit I have seen, APC also makes a ATS unit for UPS application. Both can email if there is an issue. There is also a manual bypass unit that works great for bypassing a UPC for replacement and servicing.
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The problem with those Cyperpunk PDU's and UPS's, is the delay between switching. Utility power bumps, but the UPS takes several milliseconds to pick up the load. The PDU senses the UPS switching and switches to utility. Of course, there isn't any utility there, so it switches back to the UPS. In the meantime, everything connected to the setup needs to reboot.
The only way to do it properly is dual full, or fast-switching UPS's and everything in the rack 'dual corded' (two power supplies).
 
If the UPS rack mounted unit failed it was most likely a power bump/brownout causing an internal relay to "weld" the contacts and not be able to switch power back to the outlets, especially if it's a Middle Atlantic UPS 2200 with an error of "E021". Such a failure took a rack of equipment at our tower site down and put us in black for over an our one winter.
It's a pretty easy fix, I have it detailed over at badcaps.net if anybody wants to have a look. UPS's- you live and die by them!

Val
 
MassMusicMan said:
Wait, are you attacking people for having jobs in radio? Weird flex if you are.
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No, I'm "attacking" people who DON'T do their jobs in radio. E.g., allowing dead air, double airings, outdated ads/promos on Talk1200 and WRKO.

But a lot of those who DO work in radio seem to think - and have come close to saying so - that those of us who do not work in radio should stay off these Forums, as what we say can't possibly matter, since we don't seem to understand "that radio is a business and we don't know how it works". The fact that we may love radio and actually listen to it regularly and know how to discern good radio from bad seems to grate on some of the posters here.
 
nowradioguy said:
The fact that we may love radio and actually listen to it regularly and know how to discern good radio from bad seems to grate on some of the posters here.
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That's not the part that ''grates on some posters."

Consider the subject line of this thread. We discovered that in fact someone was home, and addressed the situation quickly.

That poster used to be a regular here until he was bashed repeatedly and chased away by the ''radio lovers.''
 
TheBigA said:
That's not the part that ''grates on some posters."

Consider the subject line of this thread. We discovered that in fact someone was home, and addressed the situation quickly.

That poster used to be a regular here until he was bashed repeatedly and chased away by the ''radio lovers.''
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Why did that grate on you?
 
TheBigA said:
That's not the part that ''grates on some posters."

Consider the subject line of this thread. We discovered that in fact someone was home, and addressed the situation quickly.
Click to expand...
Plus the initial reaction was “oh, it’s an iHeartRadio station”, like it was a rote Howie Carr “Entercom happens” gag or something. No want or desire to actually find out what happened.
 
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