Wasn’t he one of the previously made redundant announcers at Nova?
Pulse 94.1 has been playing adverts for 13 hours straight. Possibly more.
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That’s what you call ad nauseam!
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Obviously a automation play-out issue, but that’s likely to get them into trouble with ACMA.
Can’t exactly sneak that through as maximum 5 minutes of sponsor ads per hour.
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Yes, they’d have to go ad free for almost a week to get back to 5 mins per hour on average. And probably couldn’t afford to do that.
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The current legislation doesn’t allow averaging of sponsorship over multiple hours, but interestingly the recent review into community radio has proposed this. The idea is you can get more money for sponsors in key day parts than mid-dawns.
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Yes naturally, but I wouldn’t like to see them be averaged out like this.. but averaging from 6am to 6pm, and then 6pm to 6am might be okay so you have a bit more flexibility if or when things just run over time a little.
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The sector review paper mentioned an 8 minute per hour limit with up to 120 mins per 24hr period, averaged either over a full 24hrs or in 4hr blocks.
In my mind, the restrictions on commercial content are a good point of difference from commercial stations, but a small increase per hour does seem to make sense.
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This is great for local businesses advertising on the station. One bad blunder has led to certain Illawarra businesses’ ads being burned into peoples brains for those listening to the station today. They certainly won’t be forgotten now.
Watch the commercial sectors get shirty over this…
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Lets hope its fixed by now… or someone realised… how long did it end up being all ads?
Probably worth shifting discussion over here given it’s a broader issue with a community radio station now.
Tldr - it appears that SYN 90.7 Melbourne has been off air on FM for several days and might potentially have some issues with the licencing of their transmitter.
Certainly a “watch this space” for a major community radio licence in a capital city.
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I’ve just been catching up on this; looks like a proper debacle.
It doesn’t entirely surprise me though; quality technical expertise is increasingly hard to find, especially in community radio. Unfortunately I don’t possess the skill set required to get into broadcast engineering. Thank goodness we have a technically oriented manager at 2BRW but we could use more back up- I’m trying to learn what I can.
SYN should be a much better resourced station of course being a Melbourne wide concern. However it is targeting an (ever dwindling) user base that don’t give a flying fuchsia about radio. We’ve seen other youth stations give up the ghost (MVH FM Moss Vale) so it’s not out of the realms of possibility that SYN is a dead duck. Didn’t they have a fundraiser a while ago to try and ‘save’ the station?
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Without knowing anything about their operations, something being a student run station means you don’t really have the ability to have long term institutional knowledge, the people operating it would turn over pretty frequently, and the target audience isn’t exactly flush with funds for subscriptions.
If the goal is just having a student radio station so people can get their start in learning the broadcasting skills, I think you could do something like allocate them the 97.4 frequency at a lower power serving the CBD and western suburbs, plus keeping the spot on DAB, and give the wide area FM community service to allow 3CR or 3KND to convert.
If you go off air with very little noise, did you really need to be using up an FM frequency? Triple R and PBS do a good job of being an outlet for independent radio and music - and there’s a lot of community support for them. I dunno if Syn’s niche makes sense in the age of podcasting and streaming platforms - how much would youth be looking to radio to hear their own voices in media now?
I can’t see anything happening on the regulator side though - given 6EBA died in Perth and nothing’s happened, I’m sure nothing will happen with SYN being off for a week or whatever.
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They’ve also got their (now) annual fundraiser happening right now. Would have thought it’d be smarter to delay it considering they aren’t even on air.
3SYN is back on FM. Don’t know when that happened.
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I get what you’re saying BUT I really hope SYN stay on 90.7FM and on radio in general because honestly, I think anything that diverts younger people from algorithm-driven content is really, really important.
Social media and streaming audio is really toxic and it’s causing so many social problems.
I’m 35, I’ve recently made the switch off from Spotify, having a smartphone etc to getting a Nokia and a pocket FM radio. Best thing I ever did. My life is so much less stressful as a result. But for this to work there has to be stations giving younger people a go and playing a good range of interesting music and quality shows. And let’s face it, that’s pretty sparse on FM. Better than a lot of cities yes with RRR and PBS but a lot of the dial is dreck like KIIS and The Light.
A friend of mine said “SYN are what Triple J used to be; actual young people taking risks. Triple J now is just elder millennials.” I agree. SYN is what actual young people are up to, where as Triple J is the “funky” adults who work at the youth centre. It’s still a good station but it’s not as cutting edge as it used to be and SYN is filling that gap.
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I agree but pulling kids from spotify, youtube and tiktok is a hard proposition these days
Great article! Super pumped to now be involved with The Pulse here in Geelong
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The saga continues…
Dead air on SYN 90.7 FM as of 13:00 on Thu 5 June.
DAB+ is unaffected.
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