It’s always THAT one!

This morning, when I woke up, I rushed into my home studio full of expectation, just like Christmas morning. You see, last night was the night that we “fell back” into Standard Time from Daylight Saving Time and I was checking to see if the one radio controlled analog clock in the house turned back the hands of time. Because WWV is in Colorado Springs, the “radio” part of “radio controlled,” is so far away. Automatic time change is sometimes iffy.

Left: The clock for whom time stood still! Alas, it failed! Now, I need to do it by hand or wait and see if it will yet do it during one of the saving time reset periods that occur later in the day. I can tell you, that manual resets are a pain with an analog clock. And they are worse in the fall because the hands move only clockwise so you have to go forward 11 hours instead of 1 hour in the spring. If I wait for the clock to finally reset I run the risk of it not being ready when I need it for my live show tomorrow night.

Personally, I think the clock has it in for me. It almost always makes the easy correction in the spring and fails to make the hard one in the fall. Either that or it is trying to remind me to change its battery. So I guess I’ll give it a few more hours and then do it myself if I have to.

You may be wondering why I bother with an analog clock in the studio when digital clocks are much easier to set and maintain. Well, the answer is that I was trained in radio when there were no digital clocks so it is much easier for my fossilized brain to interpret the short hand and the long hand while pulling songs and talking about the top of the pops and the cream of the crop. This is especially true between the half hour and the beginning of the next hour. Math is my friend except when there is too much of it in too little time. Yes, I’m a calculating kind of guy; back timing to the end of the song, calculating the time until the next scheduled event and arranging songs by their length so that the Station ID comes as close to the top of the hour as I can get it. Somehow that reading the clock skill we learned in the second grade doesn’t crowd my brain as much as subtracting digital minutes from 60 to get to the “chime time” of “x” minutes before the hour.

I must admit that I’m so old school that saying something like “10:45” or “52 minutes past the hour” just “grates on my sensibilities” as we say down here in the south. When I hear it on the radio I mentally say “Well, bless your heart!” By the way, it is not a good thing when a southerner blesses your heart!

It’s not quite as important these days that the clock is accurate to the second as it used to be when we had live network news once or twice an hour. Especially when we were playing vocals, we had to choose the songs carefully so that the song ended just in time to announce or play a station id before that top of the hour time tone came down the network. The only thing more satisfying to an old school radio DJ than back-timing to the news was “walking up a record and hitting the post”, but that is a different story.

Back in the day, we had Western Union clocks in every radio control room. These clocks were hooked up to a phone line that received a pulse exactly on the top of the hour that reset them. The station engineer was responsible for the daylight saving time changes. During the fall back change that occurred during my time on the overnight shift, at 3 AM I was standing on the desk of the audio console in my stocking feet, opening the face of the clock and moving the hour hand back to the 2AM. That was no fun in the fall because I would have to do an extra 2AM - 3AM hour (fall back). Just for the record, I never got paid for that hour because they paid according to the times that I signed onto and off of the program log. I was told that I would get it back in the spring. But by time that spring rolled by, I had been promoted to the evening shift from the booth out at the drive in restaurant. That was the best hour’s salary I was never paid. I loved doing the evening show in the middle of the folks who were listening and requesting their favorite tunes.

When I was doing the overnight show, the spring forward time shift meant that more of my show was transmitted at the higher daytime power because the sun rose an hour earlier. The same was true for the evening shift because I had an extra hour at high power before sunset. After the fall back time change, all of my evening show was broadcast at the lower nighttime power. It all sort of washed out because I always thought that the nighttime RCA transmitter sounded a tad warmer and richer than the daytime Gates transmitter.

All of this means nothing to the modern FM transmitters of today. There is no diurnal power change; these puppies crank out the hits 7/24/365. Also, the announcer no longer listens to the transmitter when working. We can’t; there is a delay between what we do and what you hear as the audience. Actually there are two of them, the first is on purpose, a digital ten second delay circuit that can be “dumped” if someone says or plays one of the words that comedian George Carlen first listed in 1972 in his monologue "Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television". The second delay is one that occurs within most FM transmitters as they process the digital signal that they receive to an analog signal they transmit. If the transmitter is also transmitting in High Definition (HD) the delay is required for the HD signal. Some stations like WUSC-FM simulcast the FM signal on their higher quality HD-1 signal. We also have a different programming stream on the HD-2 signal. You must have an HD enabled receiver in order to hear the up to four HD channels. Because of these delays, the on air personality monitor’s the output of the audio board instead. It’s ok but not as cool as listening to the transmitter the same way as the audience.

For today’s broadcaster doing live shows in other countries, things get even weirder, almost to the point of “Twilight Zone” weird. For example, my “Haunted Studio” show that plays at 8 PM British time was heard in the US at 4 PM Eastern time last week. This week it will be heard at 3 PM, even though the time it plays in London remains the same. The reason for that is that the UK and most of Europe switched back to standard time last week and we didn’t until today. All of this makes my head hurt – a lot!!!

But I digress…. We were talking about changing clocks.

OK, I’ve been writing about an hour and that stupid clock on the wall still has not caught up with the time. So I will go grab a DD battery (it’s always a DD battery) and spend an hour getting the clock set to standard time. The issue is the second hand. It has to be right too. Hope someday someone figures out an easier way to do that. But I doubt that. By time somebody does, they won’t be making analog clocks anymore, radio controlled or not. Just my luck, another thing I learned in school fades into antiquity. Oh MY!