TICKET POWER DOWN GLITCH

[Steve Eberhart]

It seems every day at 5:25 p.m. when they change patterns or power down, they go off the air for a few seconds, back on, back off, and then back again...most stations do this seamlessly...what's up with that??

 

[Robert Bass]

It seems every day at 5:25 p.m. when they change patterns or power down, they go off the air for a few seconds, back on, back off, and then back again...most stations do this seamlessly...what's up with that??

I don't know if this helps, but at KEOM there's a PC controlling the transmitters. Under certain alarm conditions, it can get stuck changing back and forth between the main and backup transmitter. It results in a similar on off on off situation.

R

 

[RADIO TRUTH]

Those few seconds, when KTCK goes off the air at 5:25 P. M., are the most entertaining part of their broadcast day.

 

[radi0chik]

It seems every day at 5:25 p.m. when they change patterns or power down, they go off the air for a few seconds, back on, back off, and then back again...most stations do this seamlessly...what's up with that??

I don't know what kind of program they're running to change patterns. Does it do this EVERY night? And do you know if it does it with the morning pattern change too? or just night? Sounds like their AutoPilot or whatever program they use isn't programmed properly.

 

[Slambang]

As of 7:30 this morning, the station isnt up and running...I live in Deep Ellum, which is not too far from the station and have never had any dropout...Does anyone know if the Cedar Hill sitck is having problems??

 

[charles123]

It's on now.

 

[radi0chik]

The ticket isn't at Cedar Hill. Most AM's are not. It's up in N. Irving not too far from the Fry's up there.

 

[Lancer]

Looks like they added towers to their array not too long ago. There are now 2 gray ones in addition to the 2 red/white ones. You can see them off the PGBT at Beltline.

 

[OKCRadioGuy]

I bet the hit pattern change and there was something wrong that the transmitter didn't like. It could be a stuck contactor or something wrong with something in the system for the other pattern they switched to. The bad news with AM is it can take a bit of time to figure out what happened if monitoring equipment is all that's being relied on to know you have an issue and not off-air monitoring, etc. Sometimes a guy can just switch back to the previous pattern and get things stable and drive to the site to see what's happening, and then again sometimes it's just fubar until he gets there... Gotta love AM.

 

[salemjedi54]

Those few seconds, when KTCK goes off the air at 5:25 P. M., are the most entertaining part of their broadcast day.

Man go take a long walk of a short pier!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

[OKCRadioGuy]

In this case if it sorta straightens out after a while I would bet their engineer might not even know it's happening yet... Who knows..

 

[Robert Bass]

A good auto-pilot program such as Burke's, will log everything that happens in such an instance. Usually scanning the log will give you a good idea of what is happening, and possibly why. Burke's program will log anything you want it to, from normal operations to alarm status reports. You should be able to rig up the connection from the studio to the transmitter, via the Internet.

R

 

[radi0chik]

Robert it depends on what kind of a connection you have between the studio and the transmitter for the burke control stuff to go on. I know the way CC's 1190 works, the phone line (thanks to AT&T or whoever they are today) gets so bad sometimes it false alarms on all sorts of things when there's really nothing wrong. Also it has to send the commands several times sometimes to make the sites switch. So it's not always that easy

 

[Robert Bass]

I'd get that connection off the phone line pronto, and onto something faster and more reliable.

R

 

[radi0chik]

I'd get that connection off the phone line pronto, and onto something faster and more reliable.

R

I think last they checked that was the best they could get... but if (insert-whoever's LMAing it today) isn't wanting to pay for anything more, why should they?

 

[Robert Bass]

I'd get that connection off the phone line pronto, and onto something faster and more reliable.

R

I think last they checked that was the best they could get... but if (insert-whoever's LMAing it today) isn't wanting to pay for anything more, why should they?

Then we'll just continue to enjoy the technical difficulties every afternoon. ;D

Seriously though, that can't be good for the transmitters?

R

 

[radi0chik]

The ticket is the one having problems, not 1190, and yeah it sounds like it has issues - possibly affecting the transmitter. 1190 just shows false alarms at the studio and everyone ignores them.

 

[Robert Bass]

The ticket is the one having problems, not 1190, and yeah it sounds like it has issues - possibly affecting the transmitter. 1190 just shows false alarms at the studio and everyone ignores them.

Heh, I can relate to that. Everytime we have an alarm, falso or real, the damn thing calls out. First it calls the studio, then my cell, then my home phone and then Dr. G., followed with whoever else is on the list. It'll continuously cycle until someone answers and clears the alarm.

The worst false alarm I can remember, was "D Channel 1". Well we don't have a site D, much less a B and C. After like a year and a half of this, it was eventually traced to a faulty ARC-16 box.

Sometimes I'd just leave the phone off the hook at night

R

 

[OKCRadioGuy]

Keep in mind that if they alarmed the power out of current channel on an older Burke it would throw an alarm every pattern change. There's ways around this, but those ways also create the inability sometimes to see smaller glitches..

Fun, fun fun..

 

[ropertex]

It seems every day at 5:25 p.m. when they change patterns or power down, they go off the air for a few seconds, back on, back off, and then back again...most stations do this seamlessly...what's up with that??

with remote control systems having a lot more latency these days (often IP based rather than dedicated line connections) these are set up BY DESIGN to favor a couple of seconds off the air rather than risk both transmitters being ON for a few seconds at switchover.