I tuned in to 2CC at 2:30 to listen to Murray Wilton filling in for John Kerr, but all I got was dead air. Upon checking the 2UE webstream I discovered that they were in the middle of an ad break, so it was quite possible that the break hadn’t been fired off locally for one reason or another, however when 2UE returned from their break, 2CC were still out.
Satellite issues perhaps? Check the 2AY webstream…Murray Wilton, half a second behind the 2UE stream. We did just have a storm pass through Canberra and it’s possible that it confused the satellite decoder, but normally that only affects the audio and not the pulses.
I wonder if I’ll hear the news at 3am? It wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if Fairfax Syndication somehow managed to kill 2CC’s feed for the hour, although I would expect 2AY to be affected as well if that were to happen. If there’s no news at 3am then I might be interested enough to leave a radio on and see how long it takes for some audio to grace the 2CC frequency…even the emergency tape would be nice.
On the bright side, the one station in Canberra that I can resuscitate is on-air, so I don’t need to leave the house.
Update 3am: Time pips, news intro and the news. Well done Fairfax, I assume that you fed silence to 2CC for the entire 2am hour. End Update
Further Update: It has been brought to my attention that this was probably caused by heavy rain corrupting the signal, causing the satellite receive at 2CC’s end to change channel. The receiver would have then changed back to the correct channel just before 3am when control signals told it to do so. End Update
Samuel