I can honestly say that I did let that happen once??
When I was working at WPTR in Albany, NY back in the late 70s we would
sign off on Sunday mornings from 2AM-5:30AM for equipment maintenance.
I would come in a 2am, shut it all down, do my thing (which use to be a
lot of work with that old circa 1947 GE 50KW transmitter), and then sign
the station back on at 5:30. From 5:30 to 10AM I would run the ?Sunday
morning tape shift? out of the production studio, and perform the weekly
maintenance in the main on-air studio (clean and align cart heads, set
levels, etc).
Well, it really only took about an hour to do the studio maintenance, so
I got into the habit of napping during the taped shows. Two of the
programs ran an hour, so I would take an alarm clock into the ?ladies
lounge?, which had a couch (I was the only one at the radio station at
that time). I set the alarm for about 5 minutes before the program
ended, take a nap, get up when the alarm clock sounded, change the
tapes, reset the alarm and go back to sleep for another hour.
Well, you can see what?s coming. One Sunday morning I must have set the
alarm wrong. Because I closed my eyes and the next thing I remember is
suddenly coming to about two hours later. We had about an hour of dead
air. I ran into the studio and made some kind of lame apology on the
air about ?technical difficulties?. I logged the incident on the
discrepancy log as a bad tube (12AX7 to be exact) in a program amplifier
in the air chain.
Here?s where the problem started. Being a typical twenty-something, I
would go out partying with friends on Saturday nights and stumble into
work at 2AM. I would get through the transmitter and DA maintenance
with no problem, but that tape shift was a killer. It was a dumb thing
to do, and I probably deserved to be heavily disciplined, if not fired.
I don?t make any excuses for falling asleep and covering my tracks other
than youthful stupidity. The irony is that about five years later I
was told by a general manager to fire an engineer who was caught
sleeping under the console of an unused studio by the program director
on several occasions. Man, did I have a wicked case of guilt over that.
In so far as what you heard, Bert, I would venture a guess that with
most stations being automated to some degree, someone probably screwed
up the automation log for that hour. Still, the station should have a
silence sense alarm that calls someone. If we have more than two
minutes of silence on our stations during unattended periods, an alarm
calls the Operations Manager, then me, then the Program Director. Any
of us can operate the automation system from our home computers via
PcAnywhere, including rebooting the system if need be. Likewise, the
transmitter control system will also call me if a transmitter dumps.
The silence sense calls my cell phone first, and the transmitter calls
my home phone first. If both go off I know the transmitter is down, if
only the cell phone goes off I know its an automation problem.
73,
Rene?
Rene F. Tetro
Lansdale, PA, USA
W2FIL, WPXG816, WPXU288
Coordinates: 40D12'41"N 75D18'22"W
Grid: FN20IF
Email: rtetro@xxxxxxxxx
Moderator: www.radioveronica.us and www.dxhub.com
-----Original Message-----
P.S. I can honestly say I never allowed that to happen when I was on the
air.