actually, yes, there were some of those. I think there was also Truck Radio for a while in the '90s or later, IIRC based from Albury but relayed to other regional stations.
1 Like
“Colour Radio” 4IP used to go out to a few regional stations that had common ownership like 4WK, 4LM, 4LG.
2 Likes
Ah yes, i liked that one, Phoebe Robinson (?) I think hosted that.
I still remember the Ray McGregor voice-overs “Country Music… on Truck Radio… Doin the all night ask”.
“Rocksat” with Kevin Hillier was another, though was only 1 hour a week.
And of course “Take 40”, couriered by Wards Express in the form of reel to reel tapes, which had to be shared between stations.
2 Likes
When Q FM opened in 1990 the reports said it ran “on computers hitched up to banks of compact disks”.
1 Like
if i missed T40 on Fox FM on a Saturday night, i would listen to it on 3UL on Sunday afternoons! But I don’t know if it was deliberate to have the show fit in the hourly slots to accommodate news on the hour, etc., but it used to sometimes sound somewhat slower when played back on 3UL.
2 Likes
3TT was apparently one of the first stations in Australia to do away with turntables and cart machines. When it moved into its premises at Queensbridge Street, South Melbourne, at the end of 1988, it had all its music stored on hard disc. I was doing work experience there in that week when they had the studios operating at Queensbridge Street but half the back office functions were still in the basement of the old Herald and Weekly Times building on Flinders Lane.
1 Like
Lol, reminds me of the cassette tape player in my Dads Mazda 808, the faster you drove, the faster it played!
4 Likes
Which wouldn’t have been cheap, as storage was so expensive then, home PCs typically had a 40 MB drive, minuscule by today’s standards.
2 Likes
Changing to CDs still didn’t do away with scratches on records; many times there were CDs that developed a fault and would play one segment endlessly until someone noticed.
1 Like
But CDs were less likely to suffer a fault as such.
Reminds me of when I was at Yulara in 1987 and they had an 8HA relay. The song playing developed a “stuck in a groove” fault during Angry Anderson’s “Suddenly”. I imagine it was on vinyl.
The announcer took 30 seconds or so to stop it and apologise and joke that it was the “extended version”.
2 Likes
Either on the first evening that Melbourne’s EON-FM (now Triple M) was on the air or shortly thereafter on a Friday evening, a song was playing on that station when it suddenly became a broken record and kept playing the same two words over and over again. "It was, it was, it was, it was " etc. etc. This seemed to go on forever (i.e. at least a few minutes) until finally the DJ fixed it.
By the next morning, it was a sound effect on Hey Hey It’s Saturday.
1 Like
By 1988 ARN had programs that were delivered to many stations nation wide in the evenings and overnight, from 2UW and 3TT to regional stations. These were satellite delivered - you could hear the delay on other stations compared to 2UW.
Although the shows were hosted by a DJ (at least before midnight), local stations inserted their own ads and stations IDs so perhaps there was some automation by this time.
1 Like
That was the PKE Ouija system, Philips touchscreens controlling either Audiometrics or Sony Jukeboxes, the systems in Australia were QFM Ipswich, 3TT Melbourne, Coast Rock Gosford, SunFM Shepparton and 6GGG Geraldton and the ABC had a variant of it, the commercial playback was called the Store 1000 and the later revision being the STO-MAX, 4BU Bundaberg I know used just the hard drive based STO-MAX for commercial playback, A lot of the cards in the system controllers had the ABC logo along with the PKE logo, I believe it was a joint venture, very cutting edge for an Australian designed system, by memory it used 8 386 PC’s to control it… and yes it was a evil thing… many a late night callout… Jesus that was 31 years ago…
Hope that touch of history was interesting 
6 Likes
Was ARN around in 1988?
There was a machine that consisted of racks of carts. A “hand” would move along vertically and horizontally to grab the required cart for play and shove it into the mouth of one of many cart machines sitting underneath it.
I remember being fascinated by it, but also remember thinking it that being so mechanical it would take a lot of maintenance. It was an Aussie design. I thing it was called Cuerac or similar. Late 70s perhaps.
2 Likes
Not sure whether it was ARN or a different name, but it included stations like 2UW Sydney (now KIIS 106.5), 3TT Melbourne (Now KIIS 101.1), either 6MM Mandurah (now The Wave) or 5MU Murray Bridge, or both, and possibly also 5AD Adelaide (now Cruise 1323).
1 Like
Let’s not forget the early electro-mechanical automation systems like the Schafer system of which a YT video of a recently installed one in action at 2KA in 1975 can been seen below.
This would have been in their Borec House studio the building of which still stands today.
2 Likes
OMG at 3:12, is this rap/hip hop in Australia in 1975??
Here is a bit of history about the old 4RO and 4CC site.
More info in the comments on the page.
3 Likes
