After the iHeartRadio festival night one ended last night at 3:00 AM this morning, WIOQ had dead air with the exception of a Spreaker commercial airing a couple of times. Was dead for about 20 minutes. I checked WAEB-FM and they weren't dead air thinking that they were most likeley the carrier of the festibal in the Allentown markit.Any ideas why?
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WIOQ "Q102" dead air e early this morning
- Thread starter JH_Radio
- Start date
Logical "guess" would be a lack of willingness to "pay" a board operator minimum wage to be present in the studio and rather just place all of the burden on NexGen to handle it all for them. When technology works it's great but when it doesn't... this is one example of what "can" happen... 20 minutes for an engineer to resolve the issue or make contact with someone who could correct the issue in a Major Market seems a tad excessive but if it were to occur, best time for it to happen.
My first thought when I heard this is isn't there a board OP in there? folowed by wait didn't the FCC eliminate there needing to be a body in the studio at some point?
NexGEN is an automation system I'm assuming?
And if a computer went down, you'd think they'd have a backup or something to play in the few seconds it took to get it back up.
That brings up something else. let's say there's an emergency. how that work in radio? Especially if nobody is there. Yes yes I know the internet twitter, whatever but doesn't radio still play a part here?
I'm sure whomever didn't like being woken up at 3:00 AM. but dudy called.
NexGEN is an automation system I'm assuming?
And if a computer went down, you'd think they'd have a backup or something to play in the few seconds it took to get it back up.
That brings up something else. let's say there's an emergency. how that work in radio? Especially if nobody is there. Yes yes I know the internet twitter, whatever but doesn't radio still play a part here?
I'm sure whomever didn't like being woken up at 3:00 AM. but dudy called.
The emergency broadcast system that activates in emergencies is not controllable at the station level. Local, state and national government authorities are the ones to activate EAS:
Emergency Alert System (EAS)
The Emergency Alert System is a national public warning system that requires TV and radio broadcasters, cable television systems, wireless cable systems, satellite digital audio radio service providers, direct broadcast satellite service providers and wireline video service providers to offer to...
Many if not most stations have nobody in the building overnight. In the event of an emergency, the EAS automatically activates. In any event, in an emergency how much would an overnight board operator know how to do? It is better that the notifications come from authorized agencies.
Stations have all kinds of alarms that are triggered by malfunctions and dead air. Even things like failure to update the next day's music log can send alerts to station staffers.
If Q102 was fixed in 20 minutes, then their alerting and on-call systems clearly work. Even if there was someone babysitting the iHeart cluster in Philly for the all-night shift, they would have been hard pressed to respond much faster unless they were devoted to board oping on Q102.
WHYY-FM and WMGK are the local primary EAS stations for Philadelphia.
Not much of one. I can’t think of a single person I know who would bother with radio in a crisis. It’s 2022 for crying out loud.
I do... i know 1200 of them.. and many of them personally.
They will wish for radio when they find that cellular is down, the power is out and the Internet is dead.
Just last week in Puerto Rico, the hurricane showed that the only thing working for about 100% of the population was... radio.
Floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, forest fires and even terrorist attack make all the new media inoperable. I often wonder what the high percentage of homes without radios will do when Alexa does not answer, the TV won't bring up broadcast or streamed or cable video and the cell phone has no signal.
I was thinking of that possibility, too.
How many actual people have radios in their homes and batteries ready to go?
This entire idea of FM chips in smartphones is a good one for this very reason.
Do 20 year old really think of physical radios, or would they be more likely to tune into a station if the FM chip was activated.
I'm thinking in cases of emergencies where everything is down.
The problem is that phones use the earbud wire connection as an antenna. If you have an iPhone from the last 4 or so generations, it has no wired earbud connection and thus can not receive FM even were it to have "the chip".
Jeff Smulyan of Emmis led an effort to get the radio industry to push the phone jack and FM chip, but got little significant industry support. Jeff left radio entirely.
That's why I still keep my 40 channel Cobra CB Radio in my trunk.
Mr. Smulyan and NextRadio got support, at least in the beginning. The NAB, iHeart, Cumulus, Entercom, Townsquare, Urban One, Beasley and Hubbard all provided funding to get the NextRadio effort off the ground. However, by year 2 of the project, it was clear NextRadio was not something consumers cared about. It was doomed as most of the partners pulled out, leaving Emmis holding the bag. https://www.radioworld.com/news-and-business/nextradio-outcome-leaves-a-void
I have an Android phone which has an FM tuner activated. It works, but is not a quality tuner. As far as I can recall, the feature was not even advertised on the feature list at the store where I bought the phone.
I worked for a big 50,000 Watt FM in NW PA for 4 years that carries Pittsburgh pirates baseball
We had a west coast game one night that didnt get over till 130am eastern or so.
And when my PD woke up at 6am, he heard dead air on the station.
We discovered the station had sat dead since the game ended at 130.. why? Either the network didn't send or they send but our automation didn't "see" the end of game closure tone .. which would've kicked our computer back into local automation mode.
Radio is not perfect, and i dont always like what happens or why. But you can have the best equipment and staff (which that station has/had/has/does) have.. and things can still fail.
Often those commenting from the outside have no idea whats actually going on, what the cause was or whats being done, but they beat it like a dead fish.
I love this business and treat any station i manage/work on air at like it's my own. i live above the station I manage now and we STILL have dead air or automation issues. I'm checking in and listening all the time, but stuff STILL happens
We had a west coast game one night that didnt get over till 130am eastern or so.
And when my PD woke up at 6am, he heard dead air on the station.
We discovered the station had sat dead since the game ended at 130.. why? Either the network didn't send or they send but our automation didn't "see" the end of game closure tone .. which would've kicked our computer back into local automation mode.
Radio is not perfect, and i dont always like what happens or why. But you can have the best equipment and staff (which that station has/had/has/does) have.. and things can still fail.
Often those commenting from the outside have no idea whats actually going on, what the cause was or whats being done, but they beat it like a dead fish.
I love this business and treat any station i manage/work on air at like it's my own. i live above the station I manage now and we STILL have dead air or automation issues. I'm checking in and listening all the time, but stuff STILL happens
I know Motorola phones still have FM chips and many of them have 3.5MM headphone jacks.
The one I tried worked pretty well!
The GoFlip 3 running kaiOS has one too and it also works well.
The Samsung Galaxy S10 NextRadio app broke after android 11 update.
For the Samsung you had to download the NextRadio app from Google Play to have the chip be able to tune in anything whereas Motorola and the GoFlip 3 has their own native app.
The one I tried worked pretty well!
The GoFlip 3 running kaiOS has one too and it also works well.
The Samsung Galaxy S10 NextRadio app broke after android 11 update.
For the Samsung you had to download the NextRadio app from Google Play to have the chip be able to tune in anything whereas Motorola and the GoFlip 3 has their own native app.
John
That's very good to hear! My biggest beef with radio these days is that issues often persist for days, weeks or even months, and nobody seems to notice or care. Kudos to you for actually LISTENING to the station you manage.
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