Inside radio seems to be hitting its stride, the latest story about a survey they took hits the nail squarely on the head. Of the survey takers, 74% say that the radio is off the rails. According to Inside Radio, 854 surveys were completed.
Granted, most readers of Inside Radio likely work in the industry. The Recession (on which all bad things seem to be blamed) has cast a pall over the working environment in most radio stations, especially those owned by the big three. If anything, this survey is a good inside look at how radio station employees feel.
What is more, telling are the thirteen pages of comments that survey takers left, many of which state precisely what I have said in the past:
It’s about live local connection to the community!
That cuts right to the heart of the matter. Radio has lost its connection with the local community and has marginalized itself. Now the major owners are riding the wave which is in decay. Radio is no longer about the listeners or even the advertisers, it is about maximizing profits and minimizing expenses until the day they throw the big switch and turn off the last transmitter.
I wonder if they’ll talk about that issue at the NAB, or will it be drowned out by happy talk of The Recession ending and a bright future ahead? More likely the latter, no one in high levels of radio management wants to admit there is a problem. A problem they created. Firing most of the local talent will be the undoing of radio. That being said, radio equipment manufacturers and vendors will do pretty well this year. After all, equipment is an asset, employees are liabilities.
The DC circuit court struck a stinging blow to any thoughts about so-called “Net Neutrality” when it overturned the FCC’s attempts to force Comcast the abide by its rules regarding internet access. The three-judge panel ruled that the FCC does not have the authority to force Internet Service Providers (ISP) to give equal access to all its customers. In a nutshell, this means that companies like Comcast, ATT, and Verizon, can filter search engine results and traffic, baning websites for no specific reasons.
So much for net neutrality. Say I type something here that is critical of one of those companies, or any ISP for that matter. With a few keystrokes, my site will disappear. Gone. Just like that. For those that think the internet is this wonderful open global village thing that can spread the word and as a sort of modern-day check and balance system, think again. In this day and age, when corporations have the same rights as people, look for the large ISPs to spend significant lobbying dollars to keep the laws tilted in their favor. I would expect to also see quite a few campaign contributions to legislators that are friendly to large corporations.
There are several letter-writing campaigns, urging the FCC to change its classification of ISPs to a common carrier status, something that would put the ISPs squarely under the FCC’s control. I look upon those with a jaundiced eye. Perhaps the FCC can be convinced to change the rules, this time. What will happen when a new FCC gets appointed? Will those changes stay in effect? The cynical side of me says no.
Independently run media outlets have traditionally acted as a backstop in our society. There are fewer and fewer of those left these days. I will readily acknowledge that the current crop of radio station owners, with some minor exceptions, have left the industry in shambles. Their decision to place profit above all considerations, in spite of the license being granted in the public trust, has decimated newsrooms, reduced staffing, and relegated community involvement to a minor paperwork shuffle at license renewal time. All of this and more have conspired to make radio dull and uninformative. Bland canned formats created and programmed thousands of miles away have ruined local radio flavor. No wonder why people spend money to download from Itunes.
Yet, radio listenership is still high. Radio’s saving grace is it is nearly universal, everyone has a radio, and most households have four or five radios. The technology is time-tested and it works well. Almost every square mile of the US is covered by broadcast radio signals. Some areas are sparse, but there are at least one or two stations that come in. People are used to radio, there is no learning curve, no subscriber fees, and no censorship from a huge faceless mega-corporation. Well, that last part is in theory, anyway. It is almost too much of a coincidence that mega-corporations also own the majority of radio stations too.
Television as a medium is almost gone. Very few people actually watch over-the-air TV, most people get their TV piped into their house via cable. Once again, as those in the NY metropolitan area know, there is no guarantee that the local cable operator will carry a broadcast station, vis a vis the WABC-7 Cablevision dispute from last month.
Newspapers are struggling to stay afloat, even the once mighty New York Times has seen better days.
That leaves us with Radio to fill in the role of un-censored informer. Can they? Will they? It would be a radical departure from the current course and only time will tell.
If you have a shortwave radio and are feeling a little bored lately, late (or early depending on your perspective) at night, tune around to 4625 kHz AM. If the propagation is right, you might hear a peculiar buzzing noise. That is a Russian radio broadcast station, call sign UVB-76, it has been nicknamed “The Buzzer.”
This shortwave radio station has been on the air since sometime in early 1982. Its exact purpose is somewhat of a mystery. It transmits a 0.8-second buzzing sound followed by 1 to 1.3 seconds of silence 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. The station’s transmitter is located about 25 miles northwest of Moscow (56° 4′ 58″ N, 37° 5′ 22″ E) in an area thought to be near the communication hub of the General Staff of the Russian Army. It transmits with a carrier power of 10KW into a horizontal Dipole antenna about 65 feet high.
Dipole antenna for UVB76 transmitter
There are only 3-4 times during its almost thirty-year history that voices were transmitted on the station. They said (from Wikipedia):
At 21:58 GMT on December 24, 1997, the buzzing abruptly stopped to be replaced by a short series of beeps, and a male voice speaking Russian announced: “Ya — UVB-76. 18008. BROMAL: Boris, Roman, Olga, Mikhail, Anna, Larisa. 742, 799, 14.” The same message was repeated several times before the beep sequence repeated and the buzzer resumed.
A similar voice message was broadcast on September 12, 2002, but with extreme distortion (possibly as a result of the source being too close to the microphone) that rendered comprehension very difficult. This second voice broadcast has been partially translated as “UVB-76, UVB-76. 62691 Izafet 3693 8270.”
A third voice message was broadcast on February 21, 2006 at 7:57 GMT. Again, the speaking voice was highly distorted, but the message’s content translates as: “75-59-75-59. 39-52-53-58. 5-5-2-5. Konstantin-1-9-0-9-0-8-9-8-Tatiana-Oksana-Anna-Elena-Pavel-Schuka. Konstantin 8-4. 9-7-5-5-9-Tatiana. Anna Larisa Uliyana-9-4-1-4-3-4-8.
There seem to be two semi-official explanations; One website claims the station is meant to “Transmit orders to the military units and recruitment centers of the Moscow military district,” and the other is the constant buzzer is the High-frequency Doppler method for ionosphere research. Both of these seem implausible since the station was on the air for fifteen years before any voice transmissions and the station’s location is not near any known research facilities.
Naturally, there is a youtube video of it:
Other possible uses include some type of dead hand system. Is Russian, this is called Perimetr or “Hand from the coffin.” It is an automatic or semi-automatic launching system for nuclear ballistic missiles. In theory, if an incoming first strike is detected, the system is turned on and it waits for input from the military leadership. If none is received, as would be the case if all military and civilian leadership were killed in the first strike (as the so-called “decapitation strike,” or more recently “shock and awe”), then the surviving nuclear weapons would be launched automatically in a retaliatory strike.
Think of something like 4 8 15 16 23 42
Is this the true purpose of The Buzzer? The only ones who really know are the Russians and they, of course, are not saying anything.
If this radio station is used in a system like that, I would imagine that there are radio receivers tuned to 4625 kHz at Russian military installations. That frequency likely propagates well to most of the Russian landmass. In addition to an automated launching system, it might also be used as a “communication of last resort” type system. If the buzzing stops, an alarm sounds, and the speaker un-mutes. This would be a good reason to use AM vice some other type of pulsed or digital modulation scheme, which would likely perform better for an automated system.
If that is the case, then we each should say a little prayer every night that UVB-76 aka “The Buzzer” keeps on buzzing.
Another example from my blown-up shit collection, artifacts division:
Delta TCT-1HV current sample toroid destroyed by lightning
This is a Delta TCT-1HV current sample toroid that was pretty well destroyed during a thunderstorm. I mounted it on a piece of plexiglass because I think it looks cool. This unit was installed at the base of the WGY transmitting tower. One June evening, I received a call from the station operator (back when they had live operators) that the air signal sounded kind of “funny.” So I turned on the radio and sure enough, if one thinks a radio station that sounds like a motorboat is funny, then, why yes indeed, it did sound funny.
Since I only lived a few miles away from the site, I jumped in the trusty truck and headed over. Upon arrival, I found the MW50B on the air at full power, with the carrier power swinging wildly from 20-90 KW with modulation. Hmmmm, bad power supply? Turned the transmitter off and tried to place the backup transmitter on the air. Now the old Gates BC5P had never been super reliable in the first place, but it was odd that it would not even run at all.
Then I had a hunch, let’s walk out to the tower I said to my assistant who had shown up to help. When we got to the ATU building it was filled with blue smoke. Ah ha! Somebody let the magic smoke out of one of the components! I was expecting a capacitor blown in half but was surprised to find the copper tubing that connected the ATU to the tower melted in half. Lightning must have caused an arc between the tubing and the toroid and for some reason, the transmitter kept on running while it was arcing. The copper tubing in the picture with the toroid is only missing about six inches, the way the system was mounted at the tower base, fourteen inches of copper tubing was missing, or rather melted into a puddle on the bottom of the ATU.
I quickly found another piece of 1/2-inch copper, cut it to length, flattened out the ends with a hammer, and drilled mounting holes. Luckily I was able to get everything back in order quickly and the station returned to the air about an hour or so after it went off.
Everything has a cause. Investigation showed that the VSWR circuit on the MW50 had been disconnected from the directional coupler. The lead was un-soldered and taped off, so it was quite intentional. I spoke briefly with two of the three prior engineers that had serviced the MW50 over the years, they both blamed the other one. I surmise this; The WGY tower was prone to lightning strikes because of its height. Even if the tower was not directly struck by lightning, oftentimes the guy wires would arc across the insulators, causing the MW50 to momentarily interrupt the PDM signal and drop the carrier for about a second. Some programming people at the station did not like this, it sounded bad on the air, so one of those guys undid the VSWR circuit, and voila! No more momentary outages during a thunderstorm! Brilliant! Except for the 60-90 minute outage one night…
Sometimes it is better to tell the program directors that their idea is not good, then move on.
