Ch. 5

NT91 · November 20, 2009

Ch. 5 NBC 5 KXAS has been off the air for almost 1 hour. What's up?

Edited November 20, 2009 by NT91

NT03 · November 20, 2009

1 of the 5

Terrorist

Gays

smu

Mexians

Mangino

KingDL1 · November 20, 2009

1 of the 5
Terrorist
Gays
smu
Mexians
Mangino

So Gay Mexian terrorists from SMU took out 5 because Mark Mangino used harsh language on his players to motivate them. Touchy

NT03 · November 20, 2009

So Gay Mexian terrorists from SMU took out 5 because Mark Mangino used harsh language on his players to motivate them. Touchy

No no no ... Magino tried to eat a smu student , but it turned out it was really a terrorist. When the terrorist shot at him , the bullet bounced off his belly and hit the nbc satellite in outer space and came crashing down in Mexia

TheTastyGreek · November 20, 2009

Ch. 5 NBC 5 KXAS has been off the air for almost 1 hour. What's up?

If it's been an hour, I'm betting it's the transmitter at Cedar Hill.

If the problem were with their national feed, they'd have a "Technical Difficulties" graphic up at their local master control in Fort Worth. If the problem was at their local master control, they'd just route the national satellite feed directly at the transmitter, and you'd be seeing public service announcements about drugs and smoking and forest fires instead of local commercials.

Actually... Now that I think about it, NBC did a deal with their owned and operated stations called Hubbing (or something like that). They run master control for multiple stations out of a handful of regional locations. I think Dallas runs out of Tulsa. This could be a problem with their signal from Tulsa (or wherever the hub that serves Dallas is) to Cedar Hill.

Rudy · November 20, 2009

1 of the 5
Terrorist
Gays
smu
Mexians
Mangino

You forgot Bush. He is the mastermind behind whatever the explanation is.

UNT_playmaker · November 20, 2009

http://www.star-telegram.com/news/story/1777251.html

A fire hit their FW offices and caused some damaged.

Was wanting to watch Conan O' Brien, damn I wish NBC would put leno and obrein back at there times.....

TheTastyGreek · November 20, 2009

http://www.star-telegram.com/news/story/1777251.html
A fire hit their FW offices and caused some damaged.
Was wanting to watch Conan O' Brien, damn I wish NBC would put leno and obrein back at there times.....

That is really, really weird.

Except for the very small stations that have their tower on site (like KLDT), everyone routes their signal through a transmitter out in Cedar Hill. Locals might remember a few years ago, one of the towers was damaged and a few radio stations and one TV station were out of commission for a little while until they could get their signals re-routed.

Usually, there's a dedicated transmitter engineer that works like a lighthouse keeper. That's not just figurative... There's a responsibility to make sure the flashing lights are working to help keep pilots from crashing into the antenna towers. I have a friend who worked at an NPR station, and there was a giant Big Brother sign on their wall that constantly asked "HAVE YOU LOGGED THE TOWER LIGHTS???".

Transmitter stations are generally set up so that the engineer on-site can serve as backup redundancy for local master control. If something goes wrong at the station, they can re-route what signal is being sent out over the channel. After Hurricane Opal made landfall back in the 90's, there was a station in Atlanta that unexpectedly lost power due to rainstorms. They couldn't get their generator working, so they had to improvise. They fed network signal direct through the transmitter station, then did their morning local news in the parking garage. They used a microwave truck to send a one camera signal that the transmitter sent out straight, and they just read off paper with a bunch of parked cars in the background.

If they just had a fire at the station in Fort Worth, they shouldn't have gone off the air. The only way that happens is if they've cut back so much that they don't have a transmitter engineer on duty. It's not inconceivable that they might not have someone camped out overnight... But there should have been someone with an emergency beeper on-call to cover this sort of problem. A well run engineering department has a protocol that dictates who alerts the on-call engineer, and the on-call guy or girl is supposed to be within a very short distance.

I worked at one of the most shoestring, cut-corner, ghetto radio operations in the history of broadcasting, and our engineering emergency protocols had a 40 minute tolerance. Barring some sort of citywide disaster that made transportation impossible, there was never a situation that didn't have the on-call engineer on site and working within 40 minutes, and that's just because the overnight on-call guy lived in Denton and the network operations center was in Dallas.

If the problem was only in Fort Worth... Somebody sucks at running their department. Because a problem like this gets fixed by pushing 3 buttons on a router, maximum. If someone was at the transmitter, it's literally a 2 second fix.