For the past couple of days, sometimes it’s sounded like a lot of CDs have been mistracking—“skipping”—as have, strangely, our spoken announcements. The problem, as it turns out, has nothing to do with bad CDs, stuttering announcers or anything else originating in the control room. It’s about a malfunction along the path the signal takes from the studio to the transmitter.
Our studio is on the University of Arizona campus. Our transmitter is several miles away, atop Mt. Bigelow in the Catalinas. In olden times, to get the audio out of the control room and up to a transmitter some distance away, radio stations had to use telephone lines—the frequency range was slightly better than the lines that fed into your home phone, but not much, and that’s why the audio quality on CD reissues of some old radio broadcasts (like those of Pierre Monteux with the San Francisco Symphony) is so poor, even by the standards of the 1940s and ’50s. In the 1970s, most of those phone lines were replaced by satellite transmission for national and international coverage, and microwave transmitters/receivers at the local level. Yes, microwaves, the same technology that helps you reheat your coffee in the morning. Now, these are signals that are beamed from one specific point to another (the studio to the transmitter site), and you cannot pick them up on your radio. Once the signal gets out of our signal and is delivered by microwave to the transmitter, then it’s transformed into a different kind of radio wave that’s beamed out in a wide pattern from an antenna atop the transmitter tower, and that’s something you can pick up on your home or car radio.
It’s nice to have a transmitter on a mountaintop, because that means broad coverage in the valley below. But it’s not so nice in the summer, when lightning strikes frequently knock the signal out, and it’s especially troublesome in the winter, when ice builds up on the antenna. If the ice gets too thick, the transmitter will automatically lower its output power to compensate for reflected power under the ice. That means a weaker signal to you.
And there’s another problem: When ice builds up, our microwave studio-transmitter link is, in the official phrase, “susceptible to interruptions.” In other words, it cuts out or sounds like hell—as you’ve heard over the past couple of days. The engineers seem to have things under control at the moment, but Mt. Bigelow is a lot colder and wetter than down here where we live. Expect more trouble over the next three months.
Of course, you can avoid all this by listening to us online.
In 1959, KUAT Channel 6 signed on the air as the first public station in the state of Arizona. What started out 50 years ago as an instructional television “experiment” today provides six public television services, three public radio services and a robust and growing online experience.
Fast-forward to 1973, KUAT broadcast 51 days of unprecedented live, gavel-to-gavel public television coverage of the Watergate hearings in the U.S. Senate, anchored by journalists Jim Lehrer and Robin MacNeil. Thereafter, public television played an increasingly crucial role as a trusted source of news reporting and analysis on behalf of the American public. The success of those broadcasts led to the development of The MacNeil/Lehrer Report and then, in the mid-1980s, expanded into the nation’s first one-hour nightly evening newscast which you know most recently as The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.
This month you will note some changes to the broadcast. Jim Lehrer remains executive editor and principal anchor and rest assured The NewsHour’s commitment to top-quality journalism remains unchanged. Starting December 7, the program will feature a new look and a new name - PBS NewsHour - reflecting an enhanced, expanded mission as the nucleus of news programming on PBS-HD Channel 6.
As the year draws to a close I invite you to join the Arizona Public Media family of stations for some great holiday programming, all made possible through the support of viewers and listeners like you.
On behalf of all of us at Arizona Public Media, please accept our very best wishes for the holiday season and in 2010. We have an exciting schedule of programs and original productions in store for 2010: all designed to serve you, our audiences. Thank you for your continued support!
Jack Gibson
P.S. Arizona Public Media’s offices will be closed Dec. 24 & 25 and again on Friday Jan. 1. If you would like to make your year-end contribution to AZPM, please call 520-621-5828 and we will assist you with your donation, or you may also give online here.
Not too long ago, KUAZ began daily In-Depth Arizona reports as part of the morning programming and now some are available online.
These reports run just shy of five minutes, which is an eternity in radio news reporting. Not to nag you with all the details, but producing these things takes huge chunks of time, in terms of gathering audio, writing, editing and timing to the second. It seems a shame to air them once at 6:30 a.m. (with a repeat at 8:30 a.m.), so we're now starting to trickle them online, much like we do every week with Arizona Spotlight.
I've been doing the Web site stuff for quite some time now, but my fellow producers are now being trained how to do it themselves and they are putting up some of their own content. Seeing your story online is a different type of "nice" feeling than it is hearing on the radio and it's instantly shareable and offers more opportunities for engagement. I've been "tweeting" these stories as we put them up, but you may want to check our home page every now and then and see what's new. We have stuff up in the center column that may have aired as a feature or news story, or it could be something just for our Web audience that wouldn't fit into our normal broadcasts.
Changes are ahead (I'm told) near the beginning of the year to allow easier and more-frequent posting of these segments, but just check out what we have available now.
Pianist Jeremy Denk has been an even more negligent blogger than I have recently, but he’s back now with a very nice appreciation of Chopin as a composer of much more than pretty background music for people uninterested in close listening. Read it here.
