Goo question. Since that would be a separate STL feed, it likely was not.
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Why Did KLAC "fail" During World Series' Final Game?
- Thread starter davideduardo
- Start date
The truth is out there...
And as has been stated earlier, station management is under no obligation to reveal the cause of the problem to anyone outside the company. This isn't a Freedom of Information situation, as there is no pressing need to know by anyone in the general public.
I have heard conflicting stories. Since I am not in Los Angeles, I could have not checked. I had heard from one source, it was a vandalized STL (take it for what it is worth).. Did 570 actually lose carrier or did it just go to dead air? Was anyone actually listening to 570? Does anyone listen to 570?
570 is one of the three best AM signals in LA, and it does show up with a reasonable audience size in Nielsen 25-54 men. And it is among the major billing stations in the market.
KLAC has a 2.0 6+ share, and you can multiply that by more than double in 25-54 men. It cumes over 400,000.
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
I will not make the politically incorrect joke here, but mi amigo David undoubtedly knows what I am thinking of.
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
I would think that iHeart has backup and redundancy for that, but according to the information at that FCCdata.org site
KLAC has only two auxiliary licenses in the 900MHz band, and neither of those have the other end at iHeart program origination facilities (one is in Corona, the other in La Mirada) so even if those went out, it wouldn't have fail-safed the 570 transmitter off.
KLAC does not have a backup transmitter *site.*
Unless you know something I don't, there's more than one transmitter in the building. There certainly was the last time I was there, though it's been a few years.
I can't think of any iHeart station I've seen that doesn't have a backup transmitter, even their lowliest and most forgotten little outlying FMs. The company believes strongly in backups and planning.
So what happened? They are indeed under no obligation to tell us. Since co-located KFWB (same towers, separate transmitter building) apparently was not affected, we can say with certainty it wasn't the towers, and we can reasonably speculate it had something to do with the STL, but it could also have been anything else specific to KLAC's side of the site - a failure to switch over to a backup transmitter, a problem with the power handling in their specific building, an issue somewhere along the transmission line out to where the 570 and 980 signals are combined. Could be anything.
There are lots of STL paths these days that don't use 950 MHz. There's no line of sight from Burbank to the 570 site, hence the path from the KFI site in La Mirada.I would think that iHeart has backup and redundancy for that, but according to the information at that FCCdata.org site
There's also heavy use of fiber paths these days.
All iHeart sites have satellite receivers that can be brought up quickly with a feed from the company's NOC. Did that system fail? Again, we simply don't know.
You bring up a separate and interesting point: while many FMs have auxiliary sites, I can't off the top of my head think of any AM station with an auxiliary site.
In LA, following the fires on Mt Wilson over a decade ago, those FMs that did not have AUX sites off the mountain rather rapidly built them. But, on the other hand, few of the FMs that are not on Wilson have auxiliary sites.
I remember back in 1980 when I was with WHYI in the Miami MSA, the FM had an auxiliary on a taller building in Ft Lauderdale. But if activated, it did not cover Miami. Eventually it was eliminated as it "missed" two-thirds or more of the market! .
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
I should have used more precise language, Scott. Thanks for catching that.
What I meant is that they have no auxiliary license to operate from that site with other than the licensed parameters.
I knew there was something familiar in my fuzzy memory about that La Mirada STL license. Thanks again. (I'm getting too old for this.)
I have to ask this, then.
What are the odds that the STL link from La Mirada fails (vandalism or other reasons), and both the fiber and satellite backups could not be brought on line?
(I will discount the idea of it being the transmission line to the diplex with 980 since there were no reports of the latter also having trouble.)
The timing of it, happening right before the first pitch, would support some kind of vandalism. The fact that there has been no comment from the station seems to indicate an investigation is going on. The fact that it was corrected before the end of the game tells me it wasn't something major. It likely took someone to drive from Burbank to the transmitter in rush hour traffic. That's about an hour in itself.
There are a handful of big AMs with aux sites. WBZ had one for decades at its studio, though that went away when the studio moved.
Off the top of my head, there are off-site aux facilities these days for WCCO, WHAM here in Rochester, KOA (at the KDFD 760 site), and I'm sure I'm forgetting a few.
What's more common, especially at class A facilities that are also FEMA PEP stations, is to have a backup tower. That's what saved KFI when its tower came down, for instance.
This is when we think it is something inside the building, such as a failure of power switching controls or even something like I suggested in the area of a fire alarm triggering a shut-down or some other kind of power issue in the building.
At one time, KLVE in LA had two separate transmitter buildings on Mt Wilson with feeds to two separate towers with three separate antennas. With AM it is much harder, as the sites have to be so immense to accommodate ground systems and directional systems
That reminds me of my experience when I was named general manager of Mooney Broadcasting's WUNO in San Juan. A lawn mower had caused the tower to fall, and they strung up a longwire at about 30 feet. It covered less than a third of the market.... poorly. By the time I got there, the station was dead last in ratings and had just gotten a tower up a few weeks before.
As we see with the tower accident in Houston, towers are one of the things few stations have redundancy on.
Same goes for transmitter buildings. At WHTT in Miami, we had our site firebombed, apparently by Cuban terrorists who thought our site was that of anti-Cuban station WQBA. The fire was so intense, our Power Rock melted to about two inches of metal on the concrete floor. The transmitter could be replaced in a few days, but the directional phasor took months to rebuild and tune. In the meantime, we ran 200 watts from a communications tower near downtown Miami..
When KMJ went from 5000w ND to 50,000 25 years ago they built a new site for their 4 tower array 25 or 30 miles from 5kw ND site. That site is still operational. Any time the 50kw is off air the 5kw comes up.
But now the million dollar question is who's going to be made the scapegoat? Or is it just going to be a case of "Crap happens" with a shoulder shrug and they go merrily on their way.
The fact is that "crap does happen" and no matter how much redundancy you have in a station you will eventually have a failure. In this case, the issue was timing, not technology.
I'd argue that while, yes, people unable to watch the game would be listening to it somehow, but how many were actually tuned to analog 570? How many were streaming through the iHeart app? or TuneIn? or listening via SiriusXM? or via the MLB.tv service? I'd be curious to know how many people were actually affected. Ironically enough- I was. I was jumping on the bus to meet my partner in Westwood and grabbed my dinky little pocket radio and noticed 570 sounded like absolute garbage. I clicked over and realized it was being simulcast on 640 and just thought it was because it was a potential clincher of a game- I was none the wiser about what happed at 570. Also, I don't know if 830 had the ESPN calls, but 710 was airing Lakers basketball.
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