> for many of you, that's how the news got on the air in the olden
> days...
I spent a dozen years in and around broadcast facilities (even today,
I occasionally get in a station or two to cause horrible angst and
terror).
Well, my claim to fame is bringing several satellite feeds worth of
NPR programming off the air thanks to my accidently taking a flash
picture in one room. Oops. Optical end-of-tape sensors and strobes
don't mix.
Oh, and then there was that little incident with the BBC which I
probably can never talk about.
Did you know that the broadcast consoles at the BBC had reversed
faders? Up is off, down is on. The story goes that they wanted it
that way because if the board operator should fall asleep that he
would lean forward taking things off the air instead of accidently
putting sources on the air that shouldn't be.
My favorite radio story, though, is about this radio station
(actually a group of five in one building), that had the top morning
show in the Raleigh-Durham market. The program director didn't want
the hosts to talk more than three minutes so he had the station
engineer wire up heat-lamps in the studio that was tied to a
three-minute timer. When they turned their mikes on it triggered the
timer. Fine, until one winter morning when the furnace failed...
My company supplied the equipment and timers to make it work and I
wrote the code to catch the DJs so they wouldn't just cycle the
switch and keep on yapping.
AG
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