God is testing us

Stike three. 

On Thanksgiving Day, our main computer went out. Had to run the station off of an Itunes player for a few hours. And since we were gonna put in an entirely new automation system next year, we didn't want to spend a bunch of dough to fix the existing system. So we purchased the Arrakis system and we'll be installing it over the next few weeks. So for now we're limping around with a backup system that has trouble reading the satellite triggers. Some dead air here and there for a few moments. Yikes.

Yesterday at basketball, my dad warned me - You know, you keep having those moments of dead air and you're gonna lose customers, listeners.

That was really the final straw. Or was it?

​On Monday, Harlow the afternoon host sounded choppy. Not him but his feed from new studio to transmitter. Our network VPN guy and I spent hours this week trying to find the problem... and we determined that it's Comcast that's messed up. They're checking it. For now, we're operating on a backup AT&T system. Hooray for redundancy.

So that would be strike two. Last night, producer Ryan called a tech meeting. Kubic, Harlow, Amanda, Debbie, Rob Ellis, Ryan, Angel... did I miss anyone. We discussed the plan to roll out Arrakis, a training schedule and so forth. We're all pretty excited about the upgrade... and apprehensive about the installation and training. We have plans to train and install over the holidays and roll it out on Jan. 5. That's the plan... and God is laughing.

On the way out of the meeting at the new studio last night, Ryan and I did a live test of our backup system. Worked fine. Then we showed up and tried to start it up at 515 this morning.... and it didn't work. I nearly went futures trader and started throwing things. I may have even felt sorry for myself for a moment... before I got in my car to zip down to the old studio. Ryan called me during the drive. "Come back. I fixed it." 

Strike three. Today the Purdue Calumet Radio and TV Performance class did their final shows. They had callers, they reintroduced themselves several times during each of their ten-minute shows. They laughed. Their sound was decent. I am proud of them and can't believe the magic that can happen during live education on AM radio. I'm not sure where this discovery will lead but you never know. Good night.