Trust me—it's been just as irritating
for me as it has been for you. Maybe even moreso, because there
seems to be nothing I can do about it.
Three times in the past three weeks
we've been barraged with a ton of dropouts on the air. It will, at
times, render listening to the station almost impossible. We try to
figure out what's going on, but can't. And then it clears itself up
and the problem doesn't occur again for four or six or eight days.
Then, for a few hours, it comes back with a vengeance before
disappearing again.
And there seems to be nothing we can do
about it.
We've been able to narrow things down
just enough to make us think that we're making progress, even if that
progress doesn't show on the air. We know that something is
interfering with our signal as we send it from our downtown Marquette
studios to our transmitter in Ishpeming. Specifically, we know that
something's interrupting our signal between Marquette and a mid-point
tower at Morgan Meadows. We know the interference is occurring
somewhere between here and there. We know that the interference is
causing problems for at least one other area radio station, although
not at the same time it's causing our problems. And yesterday, at least, the
problem really seemed severe during the first 15 minutes of each
hour.
But other than that, we have no clue.
There are so many radio signals
floating around the air today that I'm kind of surprised that this
hasn't happened before. Theoretically, everyone who uses radio
signals is supposed to be registered with the FCC, and they're
supposed to monitor things so that no one interferes with anyone
else. But with so many wi-fi and wireless signals now in use,
signals that span a big swath of the electromagnetic spectrum,
there's just a lot of “gunk” out there. And that may lead to
something called “multiplexing”. I don't know exactly how it
works, because I'm not as smart of some of the engineers who are
trying to figure out this problem, but multiplexing is what happens
when you have a signal on a specific frequency. Apparently, if you double or
triple or multiply that exact frequency by a certain number it can,
theoretically, interfere with another signal on one of those
multiplied numbers. That might be what's happening to us. There are
cell phone and other towers on the path our signal travels from
Marquette to Morgan Meadows; maybe one of the signals coming off of
one of the towers is causing the problem.
That's just one of the theories
floating around.
The irritating thing is, of course,
that we get a little closer to figuring out what the problem is, and
then the interference disappears before we can get equipment or
people out there to figure out what's in the air. It's kind of a
Sophie's Choice—we need the problem to be ongoing to figure out
what it is, but you also don't want the problem to exist at all so
people can actually listen without shutting their radios off.
You're darned if you do, and you're
darned if you don't.
If things go like they normally do, you
should be able to listen interference-free today. After all, the
problem is bad one day, and they goes away for a few days. That's a
good thing for listeners, and usually good for me, too. At least
until the next time it happens. And sadly, with the lack of success
we've had in trying to figure out the problem, there WILL be a next
time.
Wish us luck.
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