[BC] Silence sense? -

[Gary Peterson]

" Years ago the program director of our station even ran a radio all night
by
his bedside.  He could tell if the transmitter was off or if the jack had
fallen asleep.  The jocks used to claim he listened 24 hours a day.  I
could
always trust his judgement on technical complaints.
Dave Hultsman "

I notice that you started with "years ago."  I remember those days, too. Got
my butt chewed at ~10 AM on a Sunday morning for breaking format.  Nowadays,
you could probably run a 400 Hz tone all weekend and the PD wouldn't know.

" TODAY many program directors,  like engineers,  are taking care  of
programming on more than one radio station.  With some programming  local,
other from
satellite, and other voice tracked, they can't really keep up  with
everything
on the air. "

I am not aware of ANY program directors anywhere in this market that are
responsible for anything other than their own station.  Now that some PDs &
DJs have to punch  time clocks, I know of one who practices electric guitar
in his office for a couple of hours per day instead of going home after
pulling a board shift.  None of these people are in any danger of dying from
a stress-related illness.

" Possibly a solution would be for all the stations in a market to forward
their main office number to common answering service that would answer with
"Radio Station" and when a problem is reported the service call the PD or CE
of
that station.  At lease a person would be available. "

A good idea as long as the answering service can contact a live human being.
That's the rub.  A few weeks ago, the satellite feed of "Lia" went dead.  I
knew almost immediately, via pager, that there was silence.  (The R/C calls
the station PD, too.)  I went to the studios and found no audio coming out
of what appeared to be an otherwise working receiver.  A call to the network
TOC revealed that "A massive uplink failure had occurred" and "that they
were working on it."  I tried to call the PD and every DJ for that station
in the hopes that someone could come in and voice track or spin CDs until
night satellite service was restored.  I couldn't get hold of one person.  I
did a legal ID and turned the plates off on the transmitter.  After some
half-dozen hours, my pager told me satellite audio was back and I dialed up
the transmitter and turned it back on. (My home is a designated off-premises
remote control point.)

On the bright side, if I wanted to change a PA tube at 2 PM on a Saturday
afternoon, I could just shut the station off and the PD would probably never
know.  I could just notify traffic on Monday morning to reschedule the make
goods.  The only reason I change tubes after midnight, is that I give a
darn.

Gary Peterson, K?CX
Rapid City/Sturgis, SD