Posted by Jeremy Andrews on May 04, 2013 at 02:01:50:
In Reply to: Silence on 1051 posted by Google on May 02, 2013 at 23:09:45:
STL silence can go on for hours.
WDDW (La GranD 104.7) has had a lot of problems with their STL over the years. There was a time when they were running STL buzz, and silence for almost an entire day.
Sometimes the phone lines go out. This happened to Milwaukee Radio Alliance about a year or two ago. They lost their STL. They went above and beyond. They had WLDB running on a pair of CD players connected to the transmitter.
WLUM's PD put together a mixture of music and liners in Audition, loaded the files on his iPhone, and connected the phone to the WLUM transmitter.
One night in 2003, NextMedia Kenosha had a stray lightning strike that hit the FMs. At the time that was WIIL and WEXT (now WDDW) The stations were dead air and STL buzz for several hours. Chris Tarr, who was the engineer for the Joliet stations had to drive all the way up from Joliet to help assist in fixing the problem.
Sometimes, it's beyond the control of the station. If the lines (usually owned by a phone company such as AT&T) go down, there's nothing that can be done until they are able to fix the lines. The stations will either stay dead air, or if they have the people and the equipment, they'll run out and connect stuff at the transmitter site like WLDB and WLUM did.
AM 1500 in Zion, IL was a Radio Disney station (Simulcasting with WRDZ) from 1998 until 2000. The station never had the most high tech equipment. Sometimes the STL would go out. The station would sign on and broadcast static from the STL all day long and sign off. The STL from the "studio" (actually it was a rack room in a cage at the ABC building) would have had to run from Chicago to about 50 miles north where the transmitter site is. With that distance, its a little more complicated. Some stations can just use feeding dishes and aim it at the transmitter site within line of sight.