ONE STEP FORWARD...
posted by James Reel
A couple of weeks ago, the KUAT engineers installed some new digital transmitter equipment. Very nice, except that now, for technical reasons I won’t go into here, we’re operating on a delay. In other words, what you hear through your speakers is something I did a full eight seconds ago. That shouldn’t make any difference to you, but it can sure foul things up here at the radio-station end.
This morning, at 06:15:00, I gave the cue to our station manager in one of the studios downstairs to begin the first break in our fall membership campaign. This has always worked in the past, but not this time. The people down in Membership Central are listening to the air signal, not a direct audio feed from my control room. That means John didn’t hear my cue until eight seconds after I actually gave it. Which means we had eight seconds of dead air. Then John started talking, but didn’t hear himself, and figured, perhaps, that I hadn’t brought up his microphone on my control board, or that there was some other problem. So he paused. And then when he heard himself eight seconds after he'd first opened his mouth, he figured out what the problem was and got the break started.
David Close, the local Morning Edition host next door at KUAZ, was monitoring the snafu, made a couple of phone calls and got a couple of engineers out of bed. We’d be running through several more breaks before anybody could get to our studios, so we needed a quick if temporary fix.
First idea: I’d use the intercom and tell John when I’d be throwing to him, down to the second. Well, I guess that’s the professional way to do it, adhere to a schedule. But the music doesn’t always precisely fit its confines, so the next idea was for John to use one of the phones in Membership Central, call me here in the studio, and have me put the receiver down on the counter in front of me so he could hear over the phone what I was doing live. Which would’ve been a swell idea had he not kept getting a busy signal when he tried to call me. (I wasn’t using the phone, honest!)
During the third break, I got a call from an engineer who, without leaving the comfort of his Poet’s Corner home, had by remote control switched some gizmo at the transmitter high atop Mt. Bigelow and eliminated the eight-second delay. Now things are back to normal. Who says classical radio is boring? (Of course, you may think that if this passes for excitement around here, classical radio really is boring.)
