It takes a lot of pieces parts in multiple locations for a radio station to be on the air; studios, transmitters and the stuff that links them together. There are a lot of ways that one of these parts can fail and when that happens you are off the air. That doesn’t happen very often but when it does, strange things happen in radio.
One of the requisites for being on the air is that there is power at both the studio and the transmitter. Back in the day, backup generators were few and far between, so if power was lost in either location, it was crickets time.
Left: Typical Studio to transmitter link antenna used today. Courtesy Nicom. One hot summer’s day we were treated to the usual afternoon thunderstorm. Lightning flickered all over the city and you could hear the boom of thunder through the walls of the control room. Static roared in the headphones amongst the backbeat of rock and roll. We did ok at the studio downtown but suddenly, the music was gone. My buddy, who was on the air at the time, jumped up and dialed up the filament circuit on the transmitter; nada, goose egg, zero, there was no power out at the transmitter site. A quick call to the power company got us a high priority on a repair crew being sent to the site. At that point all we could do was wait.
We sat back in our chairs to catch a break until power was restored. Suddenly the station owner burst into the control room. Let me stipulate that he was a very smart man who know all about radio and how it worked. But that day he was worked up. “We’re off the air!” He exclaimed. We told him that there was no power at the transmitter and that we were waiting for the power company to get the juice flowing again. He then told my buddy to make an announcement that we would be back on once power was restored. When we looked at him in astonishment, he leaned across my friend, flipped on the microphone switch and made the announcement himself, right into – well – nothing really. Because there was no power at the transmitter the announcement never made it out of the telephone line that connected it with the studios. It was all we could do to keep straight faces as he left the studio muttering something about “disk jockeys.” Just before he reached the door, it dawned on him what he had just done. He stopped, turned and sheepishly admonished us that this never happened.
Another time at that same station, we had a failure in that telephone line that connected the studio and the transmitter. It seems that a lineman was working on one of the cables that carried the AM station’s audio. He broke our circuit and inserted his test signal generator. All of a sudden a very loud beep beep crashed through my headphones. I realized immediately what happened and turned the transmitter off and called the local “toll test” room at the phone company to report the problem. Every 5 minutes or so, I would turn the transmitter back on via the remote control system and see if the signal from the station had been restored. I kept playing the same song over and over to help the lineman identify our signal. After about 20 minutes the problem was fixed and it was time to rock and roll again.
In the late 70s, I had recently assumed the position of “Chief Engineer” at WIS-Radio. My desk and workbench were right in front of the 5,000 watt AM transmitter. The week before, I read in the transmitter manual that there was a 30 second delay after the filaments were turned on before you could turn on the plate circuit and put the transmitter on the air. Normally we would wait at least 5 minutes from a cold start but the delay was to protect the big final tubes just in case the operator got impatient.
One cool fall day, we had a momentary power failure that tripped the transmitter off the air. Since the filaments were already warm, I thought it was a good time to test that 30 second delay. Even if it didn’t work right, it would be ok since the tubes were already warm. So I pushed the plate switch on. As I stood in front of the transmitter counting down the time in my head I could hear the clamor of feet coming down the hall and everyone telling me that we were off the air. I raised my hands for silence as I reached 25 seconds. Silently I counted “5… 4… 3… 2… 1” and then in as powerful voice as I could muster I said one word; “HEAL!” To my great satisfaction, the delay circuit did its magic stuff and the transmitter came up with all its warmth and glory and we were back on the air. The on duty DJ and the Station Manager knew immediately what I had done and broke up in laughter, but I noticed that the office staff gave me a little more room when passing me in the hall for a while.
Left: Typical Internet Radio connection diagram with Automation Server. When I started my first Internet Radio station back in 2008, I thought those “off the air” times were behind me. But I soon learned that being off the air is a thing there too. The pieces parts are different; instead of a studio we have an automation server and live DJs from their own studios around the world. The Internet is the connection between the DJ and the transmitter which is called a relay server. When the DJ logs into the relay server it switches the automation server off and broadcasts the live DJ. It also collects the song artist and title information and pays the performance rights fees. The same company provides the “listen live” application that you use to tune in. Yesterday, when I logged onto the server to do my show, I received a notice that the company had gone out of business. So just like a lightning strike, we were off the air. There is no power or phone company to call, or an engineer to fix the transmitter. So for now, it’s “crickets” until I can engage a new company to supply those services. I’d open up my microphone to tell you that we will be back on the air as soon as possible but that doesn’t work any better now than it did back then. Oh MY!
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