Well, this is a new one for 2CC…the emergency tape sounds like it’s probably a CD, and it skips chronically. It’s been skipping for at least the last hour and a half, and probably longer.
At 6:15 2CC were broadcasting normally, by 8:15 they were not. In that time there was a fairly large thunderstorm in Canberra (it’s still nearby as I write this) so I believe this had something to do with it. I turned on the radio at about 8:15pm and thought “why is Stuart Bocking playing music”, I only had the radio on for a few moments but could hear the music skipping. About fifteen minutes later I turned the radio on again and it was still skipping…it took at least the next twenty minutes for it to progress beyond the tail end of a song and the following commercial.
It’s not a power failure in Mitchell as 2CA’s night time programming is continuing as normal. It also doesn’t sound like a standard network failure as there have been no network pulses or stray bits of audio interrupting the emergency CD…I’m guessing that something has gone seriously wrong between 2CC’s studio and transmitter causing a complete loss of the broadcast feed, which has left the standby program running.
The skipping emergency CD is a bit more of a mystery, it’s been stuck on extracts of the one song and the sting before it for the last twenty minutes, and has only just skipped back to the ad break before it. The CD was stuck on this ad break at 9pm. I suppose it’s possible that the problem is entirely at the transmitter, because otherwise I’m sure that Duncan McCrea would have rushed in to the studio and put on his own backup program by now.
9:51…and as I finish writing this, they’re back on the air…hooray!
Samuel