[BC] Radio Silence

[Rich Wood]

------ At 09:37 AM 4/21/2007, RichardBJohnson at comcast.net wrote: -------

>In New England many stations don't even know if they are on-the-air. 
>Last Sunday morning I hit WCRB  (99.5 MHz on my truck radio. There 
>was no audio from 9:00 AM through 12:15 PM. The audio probably 
>failed before that. The radio station didn't answer their telephone 
>either. Now, I may be naive. I thought that if a STL failed, the 
>transmitter was required to be off-the-air. I guess it's okay to 
>have three hours of dead air nowadays. Nobody is watching.

I believe the requirement for a fail-safe system has been dropped.

Remember that this isn't the old Charles River WCRB. You'd remember 
it as WLLH-FM, then WSSH, then WOAZ, then WKLB before adopting the 
WCRB call and programming last year. It's licensed to Lowell, MA. 
about 25 miles Northwest of the city. The transmitter site appears to 
be near the junction of RT 93 and 495. Unless things have changed 
since I programmed WJIB, Boston, and had WSSH as a competitor, their 
signal was weak in most of the city.

Silence happens all the time with digital. I think WCRB is now the 
only full-time Classical station in greater Boston. Under Charles 
River, WCRB was locally programmed and fed sister station WFCC on 
Cape Cod. I believe the new WCRB is automated and satellite fed. It 
would be a shame if the "I don't have time to deal with it" attitude 
people have with digital spreads to major market analog.

I'll bet Alex Tanger's Beethoven.com got a lot of hits during that 
silent period.

Rich