One does have to wonder what’s happened this time
February 5th, 2009 at 12:44pm
I’ll admit that I was surprised when I noted that there was no rain falling in Sydney last night, because the signal 2CC were receiving via satellite certainly sounded like it was being interfered with by heavy rain. All of that wonderful half-intelligible audio and erroneous pulses…actually one of the erroneous pulses was quite interesting, I haven’t heard a weather update, the top of hour IDP and an ad break simultaneously before.
This was all between 7:30pm and 8:30pm, and by the time I checked in again after midnight, there was dead air. I had better things to do than leave a radio on to see when the next bit of sound might seep out of it, but I did check back every forty minutes or so, and as far as I can tell they returned to normal around 4am.
This does make me wonder what’s going on today. I didn’t hear any of the Steve Price show, but at the moment Tim Webster’s show appears to be being sourced from the 2UE webstream, and according to a media spy contributor, 2HD Newcastle were sourcing the Steve Price show from the 2UE webstream as well.
I suppose I should check 2AY this afternoon to see how the Derryn Hinch show sounds, because I’d be interested to find out if this is a localised issue or not. If the satellite feed is “wonky” on a national basis, then I wonder how Hamish and Andy will be distributed to the FM stations this afternoon?
Still, it’s all speculation at this stage, so I’ll go and have lunch, and then jot down my thoughts on Kevin Rudd’s stimulus package.
Update: Word has it that 2UE are having issues with the link from their studios to the Channel Nine tower which has the dish linking them to the network. In other words, I’d be wasting my time checking if the the 3AW or various FM Drive shows are having similar issues as they shouldn’t be affected…as long as they don’t use the same link from the heap of equipment at the UE building anyway. I might check for the fun of it! End Update
Samuel
Entry Filed under: TV/Radio/Media
2 Comments
1. padders | February 5th, 2009 at 4:33 pm
This pulsing has beset 2UE’s feed intermittently over the past few weeks. It happened again this morning during the Steve Price program, and a little bit on Tim Webster’s. Later on, during Tim Webster’s show, it sounded like he was doing an OB, but at least there were no morse code-like interruptions. But by then I’d turned it off completely. I’m driving to Sydney on the weekend. Perhaps you’d like to come with me, Samuel, and I could drop you off at Greenwich and you might be able to fix the problem!
2. Samuel | February 6th, 2009 at 2:59 am
Apparently they’ve fixed the problems…but I’ll reserve judgement on that.
I’ll admit that, with 2CC being the only station to take the Tim Webster show from 2UE, I’m amazed that they didn’t use a tieline.
One wonders if Syndication have considered providing a backup webstream at a higher quality than the UE or AW public webstreams.
I know that at 1WAY FM, we take a program from a station in Sydney via a private webstream which is only made available to relay stations. The host station have a public webstream which is a lower quality than the private stream…I honestly don’t see why Fairfax Syndication don’t so something similar, even if it’s just as a backup measure.