Well it’s about 3 days now. If was was doing work for the station as a tech & there was a problem I couldn’t fix it immediately I would have turned the power off to the transmitter to conserve energy, station costs & also help the environment with less coal burning for energy generation. Unless the station didn’t want listeners getting confused by reception of Move FM on 107.9FM. Maybe Electricity probably pre paid for I guess. Who knows…?
More than likely with the majority of applicants I guess. But the AFRTS radio course is only 1 year duration & applicants appear to be able to qualify for entry with as little as: “equivalent work experience and/or training” ref: Graduate Diploma in Radio and Podcasting: Full-Time | Australian Film Television and Radio School
So if the announcer AFRTS student applicant could possibly be a teenager who has undertaken experience & training with a community radio station at a young age?
But tougher competing with those applicants with an undergraduate degree at bachelor level unless very talented I guess.
I didn’t know that a Millennial could be someone born as early as 1981!
Thought it was someone born as early as 1996, my embarrassment.
Millennials: Born 1981-1996 (22-37 years old)
Post-Millennials: Born 1997-Present (0-21 years old)
Wow, it’s pretty bad that 107.9FM has been silent for about a quarter of its intended time on-air!
Yep, I agree.
If it’s known that the 107.9FM broadcast won’t be able to return on-air before Wednesday, I reckon AFTRS also need to ask ARN (or whoever runs the currently silent “Zig” channel, if that’s publicly known) if they could help the station out by allowing them to borrow 32kbps of Sydney DAB+ bandwidth!
I know that the good folk at Show Radio aren’t yet industry professionals but it’s certainly not a good look. Responsibility not only falls on the techs but on everyone involved in the broadcast chain.*** I wonder if Show Radio is a graded part of their course i.e. an assessment task? Surely automatic fails must be given.
***As an example, 2BBB’s stream was down on Saturday night. A certain forum member was fully aware of the problem, even though he may not have been able to rectify it himself.
Noted the audio feedback on 107.9FM is back on again.
Perhaps the organisers shouldn’t have run the short audio feed cables through the middle of the pig pen or other such livestock enclosure where the cable would be frequently knocked out of the transmitter by the livestock - LOL
One has to laugh - the on/off/on/off audio feed problem is becoming rather comical.
Automatic fails for something beyond their control? I did AFTRS in 2014 when we just did an internet stream, but i would never blame the students for the transmitter issues.
If you’re not able to rectify the problem yourself, you still have a responsibility to follow it up. That’s basic practice in any workplace I would have thought? That’s akin to a “dog ate my homework” excuse. It’s not even acceptable in high school to blame an IT failure for non completion of work.
I checked it out around Parramatta and got in clearly on 87.7 without anything on 87.6 or 87.8, but since yesterday its gone to dead air so still broadcasting but no audio, but 87.6 and 87.8 are still on air which makes me think it coming from something else like a test transmission or something…
How would you know that the students have or haven’t asked about the transmission issues. They may have been completely unaware. The students have their own duties to attend to and they may not be in a position to be able to do anything
Surely the maintenance of the broadcast signal would be one of their primary duties?
Fixing the issue may well be beyond the immediate capacity of the students, but they need to be resourceful and use outside contacts if needed. Surely someone at the AFTRS can assist?
When I was involved with Sydney University Radio some years ago, we had a transmitter issue that was communicated to everyone in the organisation. I was quite friendly with the tech at Bay and Basin FM at the time and he offered to loan a spare transmitter if required (It wasn’t needed).
AFTRS operations are not like SURG FM, they’re ‘pop up stations’, we didn’t have access to the extreme technical operations and equipment. If there’s a problem, we’d let our lecturers know, but if there was a problem and nobody knew about it…then nobody knew about it.
I don’t think it should matter; there is still an audience to serve.
At the time of my involvement, SURG FM was a temporary ‘pop up’ station and fairly rudimentary, but we still got things done.
Now it is exclusively online.
Which might be the salient point here. The FM signal may well be seen as an adjunct to the online broadcast and hence is given lower priority.
I can understand and appreciate that probably just about everyone involved with Show Radio from the microphone to the transmitter are AFTRS students rather than professional broadcasters. Who knows, some of those involved with Show Radio might eventually move onto bigger and better things in the media industry (as @DJPizarro did being a part of Show Radio 2014, if I’m not mistaken )!
I also get that all broadcasters suffer from technical problems from time to time, but 107.9FM being dead air for three days (among the other dropouts which have resulted in silence over the past week - including earlier today) quite simply, isn’t acceptable in a major radio market like Sydney IMO - even for a temporary pop-up station with relatively limited reach.
Yep, I agree. The Sydney Royal Easter Show is one of the city’s biggest events during Autumn which hundreds of thousands attend every year, so there definitely should be a spot in the marketplace (such as people already at the event or thinking about attending) for a temporary station like Show Radio.
However, the bouts of dead air on 107.9FM don’t exactly encourage listeners to stay tuned for any extended period of time the pop-up station is running for. Neither do I think that advertisers/sponsors (Side note: Do we know if anyone’s paying Show Radio/AFTRS for airtime or if they’re just all spots which have been donated for free?) would be particularly happy that their messages aren’t being heard via the terrestrial broadcast.
Personally I hope my criticisms have been fair and perhaps even constructive. If any other station had been suffering from similarly extended periods of time off air which wasn’t weather related (Show Radio certainly can’t use that excuse, with 2019 being one of the relatively rare times that Sydney has enjoyed/will enjoy great weather for most of the Royal Easter Show’s duration), I’d be commenting about them.
)!