Daylight Saving does some funny things at times, including giving John Kerr an extra hour for his show. That means that New Day Australia will go for seven glorious hours from Midnight-3am Eastern Daylight Saving Time and from 2am to 6am Eastern Standard Time.
So…on with the (long) John Kerr show!
Samuel
17 comments April 1st, 2006 at 11:26pm
On Thursday afternoon at about 5:55 (GMT+11) Optus Satellite Control lost communications with the aging Optus Satellite B1 during routine orbital positional adjustment. This caused ABC relay stations, Macquarie Regional Radioworks stations, Southern Cross Syndication services, and New Zealand’s main Pay TV service, Sky Television, to stop broadcasting, along with a handful of other Australian TV stations.
Apparently Optus B1 is getting a bit long in the tooth, and has had previous failures, including a complete failure of the main guidance system, which means it is now operating on the backup system, it is also being used well in excess of its original specifications. It was supposed to be replaced by the new Optus D1 satellite late last year, but this has been postponed until at least the middle of this year…assuming B1 lasts that long.
Thankfully Optus regained control of B1, but when they did it was broadcasting in the wrong direction, and they had to wait for it to recharge after the northern hemisphere solar exclipse before they could do anything about it. B1 was back online for its users at 7:17am Friday (GMT+11).
I don’t know what 2CC did about it before midnight as I wasn’t listening, but I would like to congratulate them on not giving up and playing automated music, and instead using the 2UE webstream with a panel operator playing local ads and promos. It did sound a bit rough around the edges, but overall they did a fantastic job under the conditions. I gather that a number of other stations around the nation did similar things with panel operators and webstreams, although there were a few who just went into automated music mode, or played a webstream with the streamer’s ads and all.
Also congratulations to the ABC for replacing some of their C1 services with the lost B1 services so that relays could be back on-air by 2am (GMT+11).
For those interested, the good people over at Usenet Aus.Radio.Broadcast have a good summary of what happened, and what affected stations did.
Heres hoping that D1 is up there soon to relieve the aging and slowly failing B1, as the longer B1 is left up there in its semi working state, the more of these outages we are going to experience, and eventually, we might have a complete failure.
Samuel
14 comments April 1st, 2006 at 07:51am
It’s April, and that means that we are into the birthday month of Samuel’s Blog. April 17 will mark one year since the start of Samuel’s Blog.
This is actually a point of controversy as the first post was actually on the 12th of March 2004, but I don’t count that as the birthday as it was just a post to mark me opening my blogger.com account. I didn’t actually use the account for anything until April 17, 2005, and as such, I count that as the birthday.
Over the next couple of weeks leading up to the birthday, I will be running a “Year In Review” series which will look at some of the things which have happened on this blog over the last year.
Samuel
April 1st, 2006 at 07:10am
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