[BC] Night time jock at a studio located at the transmitter

[Larry Wood]

Speaking of knob twisting...

I took a part time CE job about 20 years at an AM station. All of the equipment racks were in the on-air control room. Experience taught me to mark where all of the level setting knobs were pointing. I marked them with a barely perceptible pencil dot. Some engineers hate to mark equipment, but I have learned it is often useful to know where you started from when making adjustments. One morning at 6AM I get a call, transmitter on, but no audio. The overnight DJ had been fired and on his way out the door he turned every knob in the racks to zero. I was able to tell the guy coming on to look for the little marks on the equipment and set the knobs accordingly. The station was quickly back on the air and I was able to come in later in the day to make sure everything was set correctly. Making sure patch bays were labeled has also proved helpful. When the console PGM amp dies and you can explain how to patch AUD to the processing in its place. (Patch bay? What's that?)

Cheers,

Larry Wood, CPBE
KQED-FM

-----Original Message-----
  From: Tim Sawyer

I'll share a bit of a funny story - (funny now - not so funny at the time).
Maybe you've all heard something like this before:

The station was a 5-kW, 5-tower directional night - with studios located at
the transmitter site. They had a new Midnight to 6 AM jock that seems to be
an ok guy - showed up on time, etc. Filled out the operation and program
logs, etc. - in those days he was a keeper just with those two
accomplishments.

One night the chief was headed home from being out, he drove by one of the
deep pattern nulls that just wasn't there anymore. Well that was odd - so he
went to the transmitter/studios to investigate.  

According to the story, the look on the Jock's face show some level of oh-oh
- something was up - but exactly what wasn't clear until he took a look at
the antenna parameters - they were out on a couple of towers - odd - back to
the phasor to look around.  Well, well, well - seems somebody had done a bit
of knob twisting - bottom line the Jock would adjust the pattern each night
so that his girlfriend that lived in a null could hear him better, and then
he'd reset it at the end of his shift.  

No he wasn't fired - remember? He showed up on time! - he never touched the
phasor again - The work around was that his girlfriend was given the phone
number of the station "listen to"  line - remember those? - dialup coupler
to the audio.

TZS