KCPW's Techno Babble-on

Saturday 1-26-08

Around 8 am Saturday morning, we had a power outage or a severe power spike that caused about 4 of our computers to be shut down.  This is why our transmission of Weekend Edition was interrupted until about 8:30 am.

Posted 3 months ago Post a comment   

Weekend problems 1-12 - 1-13

1-12  -  One of the computers that plays programs encountered a power failure causing it to shut down for a couple hours early saturday morning.  When it came back on it played the log from the previous day.  This is why we heard Friday's Morning Edition instead of Saturday's Weekend Edition.

1-13 -  Two audio files failed to play.  One during Justice Talking and One during To The Best of Our Knowledge.  We lost about 15-20 minutes of each program. 

Posted 3 months ago Post a comment   

Things that happen when you go on vacation...

-On 12-22 & 12-23 We experienced corrupt audio files with our Cartalk broadcasts.  This was a File transfer issue that we have been having due to our satellite delivery system being in Park City.  We are continually working to better this issue.  Our goal is to bring the dish to Salt lake.

-On 1-3 there was an amber alert that took over our air waves.  These usually come in and we send them when we have a break, but our machine was forcing them out without our permission.  Also the source that sent out the original alert sent out a faulty one.  This caused the noisy interuptions.

-On 1-6 we lost the first hour of Talk of the Nation's Science Friday.  This was due to faulty audio files that did not copy correctly.

-On 1-7 listeners may have heard spanish radio for a few minutes during the mid afternoon.  Our satellite decoders malfunctioned and did not tune to the correct channel.  We had to call NPR HQ and have them force tune them to the correct channel

Posted 4 months ago Post a comment   

Main Network Feed From NPR....Dead!

Imagine if you worked in D.C. for the main NPR headquarters that feeds all the live programming to public radio stations across the United States and  all of a sudden ...the feed fails.  All across the U.S. stations go dead , sweat beads start to form on the foreheads of engineers and ops managers in every major city.  Chaos ensues!  Then the emails start pouring in.  Stations realize, "This is happening everywhere not just at our station."  Sure it still sucks, but i think most of us felt that large burden lift off our backs, and enjoyed that moment.  

Well friends thats what happened today.  Luckily for KCPW we were airing a pre recorded program and only lost one Top of the hour news.  Still no word as to why the father of NPR failed, we are pending an explanation.

I'll leave you with an excerpt of a pub tech email that someone posted after calling to report this issue to NPR HQ

"BTW- A call to the NOC will get you a quick "yes, thank you" followed by an abrupt hang-up. I called at 12:01 to report this and before I asked if I should manually tune to the D2D stream I heard dial tone."

Cheers to NOC for fixing it so quickly! 

Posted 5 months ago Post a comment   

Tech Talk Up!

Hello good people...Jesse Ellis here, KCPW Operations Manager.  I've been asked to start a blog to inform our listeners and supporters of technical issues that we sometimes experience here at KCPW.  I'd also like this blog to serve as an update on technical upgrades and changes that we are thinking of making in the future.  Please bring all questions, comments and concerns to the table and i'll do my best to address them.

First on the list...

today around 1 PM, we lost power to our AM station.  This causes the breakers to flip.  I Contacted Rocky Mountain and within 20 minutes they had the power back on.  So i drove out to West Vally City to flip the breakers back and restart the transmitter. We were back up with in an hour of the power outage.  To bad for me the AM facility is surrounded by a giant mud pit.  My Mazda was almost taken. I'm taking a poll, should i put a carwash on my next expense report?  Who's with me?

Posted 5 months ago Post a comment