Dead Air

[dvboy]

I do remember once hearing a local station which should have been broadcasting a networked show. For whatever reason, the audio feed of the network was not there, but the remote commands to fire jingles, adverts, etc. still worked. The result was after a minute of silence, the emergency CD would kick in, only to be cut off a short while later with a local station jingle, then another minute of silence, then the emergency CD right from the beginning again. Quite embarrassing to listen to.

That used to happen all the time at BRMB when Steve Penk was networked.

[DAS]

I do remember once hearing a local station which should have been broadcasting a networked show. For whatever reason, the audio feed of the network was not there, but the remote commands to fire jingles, adverts, etc. still worked. The result was after a minute of silence, the emergency CD would kick in, only to be cut off a short while later with a local station jingle, then another minute of silence, then the emergency CD right from the beginning again. Quite embarrassing to listen to.

That used to happen all the time at BRMB when Steve Penk was networked.

I can almost feel the tangent veering off on to a grass verge but I'll mention it anyway. The BBC Local stations in the South (used to) have a remote trigger jingle system thing which appeared to have worked on the basis of a fixed playlist (I can't think of a better way to describe it). So on occasion you would have the silly situation of the presenter wanting to go the news, but having to play the phone number jingle two or three times first as he hadn't used up his quota. Or on another occasion the jingles would get out of sync, so in place of the 1 minute news leadup you would have a phone jingle, then instead of the 5 second weather jingle you would have the 1 minute news leadup, then instead of the 10 second show ident you would have the 5 second weather jingle and so on and so forth for the rest of the three hour show. I haven't listened for years but I think they've got rid of that system in favour of generic jingles - yet at pretty much the same time the Eastern stations swapped round the other way, ditching a fantastic sounding set of generic themes for local jingles (hopefully a more sophisticated system though).

[Nick Harvey]

There's a similar system, which actually seems to work okay, for Wiltshire and Swindon.

Round here we get "In Calne, Devizes and Bradford-on-Avon on 104.3FM, BBC Radio Wiltshire", while the other Wiltshire transmitters get a different message and the Swindon one is even more different still.

[Spencer For Hire]

I remember the very primitive system used for local jingles / phone numbers, etc. used for the BBC West stations' evening network from the late 80s to some time in the 90s.

It consisted of a dedicated triple-stack of cart machines in the racks room at each station, which would fire using a series of 'silent' tones played out from Radio Bristol, presumably laid over the start of their corresponding jingles.

The only problem, was that for the duration that each cart was playing at the other stations, the network feed was cut sharp, with no fade in or out. This meant no segueing was possible - something presenters in Bristol seemed oblivious to. So you'd hear, say, a Radio Gloucestershire jingle which would tail out to nothing, and then crash straight into the middle of the network presenter's sentence. Sounded awful.

[westy 2]

The BBC Midlands Late Show seem to use a similar system to fire off different station jingles these days, when in the old days, you got a generic 'Midlands BBC' jingle.

[huddsguy]

Although now (unless the BBC are very behind the times!), it's less carts stacked up than commands being fired electronically to play from that local station's computer. Very clever. When it works.