It’s weird sometimes when you start out with one idea, and it ends up becoming something altogether different. But that was my Tuesday.
My blog post that day was about Facebook’s outage for several hours. (Facebook’s other social sites – Instagram and WhatsApp went down, too.) It was like a building housing a cluster of stations suffering from an unknown calamity.
Facebook obviously was in scramble mode all day. Finally, Mark Zuckerberg came forward, blaming this technical nightmare on “a faulty configuration change.” And that started an avalanche of memes, jokes, ridicule, and the usual vitriol. As I always do, I posted a link to my blog on Facebook (where else?), and on a whim, compared Facebook’s disaster day to a radio station going off the air. And it reminded me of the creative ways radio engineers try to explain away an event that knocks the station off the air.
My Facebook page lit up, with radio station humor that you can only relate to if you’ve ever worked for a radio station that went off the air. Which is all of them.
I must admit I laughed more than a couple times at the creative excuses for a transmitter and/or tower fail.
So, today’s post is dedicated to those stoics with a First Class FCC License, an oscilloscope, and a pen protector. And let me take this moment to sincerely apologize to any of them I’ve offended over the years, whether inadvertently or on purpose. Here, then, is the way it started, and where it’s ended up.
At the end of this post, I’ll give you a slice of the “nerd explanation” Dave Lange speaks about below:
Dave Lange referenced a “geek analysis” of Facebook’s outage, that I’ve linked here. It was put together by a company called Cloudflare that prevents breaches in networks and the cloud. I especially enjoyed this chart:
Now it makes sense.
Come to think of it, a day without Facebook was strangely…refreshing. Sort of like a month without..
…ratings.
Maybe for my next post, we’ll gather the best excuses we’ve heard (or used) for a bad book. THAT will be a long thread.
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Most used phrase by our engineers: “Everything is correct. You should buy a new radio.”
I’ve heard that. Seriously, though, when a station has a substantial outage (say 5 minutes or more), when they come back on should they acknowledge the problem and, if its cause is known, explain it to the listeners? I’d sure like to know, but as a radio person maybe I can’t extrapolate to the general audience. What do you think?
Of course – user error.
Every station I worked at was knocked off the air.
First job, WCSS-AM Amsterdam NY – tower hit by lightening about 7:30 pm – even the mixing board glowed a weird blue, the entire transmitter was welded together. I left the building to call the Chief.
WFMK-FM, East Lansing, at about 11:00 am on a Saturday morning the antenna conduit rubbed against the tower at the top and shorted against the tower showering the old couple picking wild strawberries in the tower field with molten copper and we were off the air. Called the Chief and just waited.
WWWW-FM, Detroit, noticed the right channel loosing power on the remote monitor when I did the transmitter reading at 1:00 am, then left channel began losing power as well, finally the right channel got below 70% and the left was not far behind so I shut it down and called the Chief – the sub-basement in the office building our transmitter was located in many blocks away was flooded, and filling up with more water – the Chief Engineer could not get the overnight guard to answer the phone. A call to the building management co @ 2:15 am got someone there with keys – the guard was still asleep. We were off the air until mid-day of that same early morning crisis.
I guess I had a black-transmitter cloud over me during my radio days.
So, it was YOU. I especially love the W4 story because things usually get really weird as the domino-effect kicks in – one screwup after another.
Back in my days at WSHE/Miami, I was doing evenings (6-10pm for those that don’t remember real air-shifts). Joe St Peter came in to relieve me because Nancy G (remember her, one of the original Playboy ‘women of radio’ gals) was on vacation or something. Joe and I decided to burn one before he started his shift and I knocked out some production. We went to the side of the building (WSHE was in a trailer park in Davie) and lit it up. The studios were on the tower farm of the AM, WSRF. God, those Milner’s were good at call letters. So we’re sucking down the roach and from behind us, on top of one of the towers, a light started to glow. We both turned around, and watched a huge arc of light spread out from the tower(s) that became so huge and so big and bright that we had to turn around because we were blinded by the light. Just as we turned around, the light “popped.” We turned back to see what had happened, and we could see a ‘donut’ of ionized air emanating out like a giant smoke ring from the tower. We both looked at each other and at the joint, thinking, is this really good shit or did that just really happen? We concluded, yes, it really did happen.
We decided to call the engineer and explain what had just happened, the engineer, blew it off and said don’t worry about it. This particular engineer had just been hired a week or two earlier, replacing the other engineer, who’s name escapes me, but was a great engineer.
The next day, about 4pm I jump in the car and head into work to do my daily shift and all that. Guess what, the station had been off the air since about noon. I get to the station and everyone is crazy like a chicken with their heads cut off. Needless to say, the arching thing hand fried the STL and it also seems, our backup FM antenna on one of the AM sticks. The ‘new’ engineer couldn’t get it fixed, and they had to hire back the old engineer to get us back on the air (personally, I hope he soaked them). I think we were down for a couple of days. That’s my favorite off the air story.
And it feels like it’s right out of a Bill & Ted or Harold & Kumar movie. Great one, John.
First station I worked for, back in the mid-1970s, was in an area where the first heavy rainstorm each fall was guaranteed to cause a city-wide power outage of a couple of hours. Interestingly, that would be the only such failure until the next year.
While the transmitter site was never affected, the studios were, so we’d go off the air because of the STL fail-safe.
Three years in a row, that annual “event” happened during my shift. Almost made me think I was jinxed.
As they say, K.M., timing is everything. Thanks for sharing this radio nightmare.
I guess this is a great way to share “outage” stories. My first night at WBBF in Rochester was celebrated with a station outage, while I was in front of the remote control! I’d never taken directional readings, I’d just finished a very frantic first shift in a new control room and wanted to do everything right. While I was taking the readings on the Mosely remote control the station went “poof” and disappeared from the monitor. Of course the people on duty (we had an engineer and the 10p-2a jock) looked at me with that “what did you do?” look
Come to find out I didn’t do a thing. Our remote control line was in a cable bundle that went by a barn that had caught on fire, burning the cable through. Without the remote control – we were toast until our CE could get to the suburban transmitter site and babysit the transmitter. Yes it WAS out of our control.
OK, let me get this straight – an engineer, a 10p-2a jock, and a chief engineer. It sounds like Fantasy Island. Thanks for the story, Dave.
FM station automated from 8 pm to 5 am. The GM is working late feels a small earthquake, no biggie. The station goes off the air. He’s the only guy in the building, checks things as best he can, everything seems to be working. Calls Engineer, the engineer goes to the transmitter site, everything is fine. An hour has passed, when the engineer shows up at the studios. Checks everything, looks fine. GM goes into the PD’s office, notices a small bulletin board has fallen off the wall above the desk with the music computer that drives the automation, it’s jammed the keyboard. GM lifts the bulletin board up, like magic the station goes back on the air. Yes, the GM was me.
Proving once again those GMs are all-knowing. Thanks for a great story.