An outage on S Mountain, either the transmitter itself or perhaps the studio-transmitter link (STL), has temporarily suspended KHEN 106.9 community radio’s on-air broadcast. The outage was noted early Friday morning, and the interruption will continue at least through Sunday, when a temporary fix can be put in place.
“I was driving to KHEN for Sunny Side Up this morning and noticed that there was dead air on 106.9 FM,” said KHEN board president Leslie Matthews. “Not static, just dead air … (we determined) there is nothing wrong at the station.”
As a short-term fix, KHEN staff is borrowing a transmitter from KCME, a classical radio station in Colorado Springs. Depending upon the diagnosis of the problem, KHEN may need to get a new piece of equipment. KHEN board member Bill Reeves and Doug Rausch, because of their radio engineer contacts, spearheaded Friday’s effort to put a temporary transmitter in place.
The station remains live on its internet feed (www.KHEN.org) and program podcasts remain available for listening.
“KCME has a transmitting piece of equipment on our roof, so we have a relationship with them,” said Matthews. “They’re going to try to help us, but we won’t be back up until Sunday (April 15), when they can get here with a temporary transmitter and an engineer. Really, so much credit goes to Bill, as his networking really helped line things up.”
As of late Friday afternoon, KHEN radio station had come back up but its messaging is garbled, ranging from nearly inaudible voices to loud sound for a few minutes, and back to silence. The failure could be anything from a motherboard in the transmitter to other major damage.
“Really, the story is when something goes wrong, our community comes together,” said Matthews. “We don’t have a lot of money, but we have this amazing community. That’s our mission – community – and that’s what happened today.”
Recent Comments