Public radio recovers from satellite outage
Originally published in Current, May 25, 1998
With adrenalin peaking, technicians scrambled to fill dead air May 19 when the Public Radio Satellite System went AWOL around 6:15 Eastern time, during feeds of All Things Considered. PanAmSat Corp.'s Galaxy IV mysteriously had begun spinning and ceased functioning.
Within minutes NPR and other program distributors had begun rigging various alternative paths for national feeds, including ISDN and plain old telephone circuits, borrowed satellite channels and an Internet feed. The next day, PanAmSat had moved all public radio feeds to a sister satellite, Galaxy IIIR. Late in the week, 75 percent of stations had opted to repoint their dishes to the backup bird, estimated PRI President Stephen Salyer. NPR estimated 65 percent.
Other stations chose to use other backup circuits to avoid two laborious repointing procedures. Sometime Wednesday, PanAmSat plans to switch the public radio feeds to Galaxy VI, which will be relocated to the orbital slot of the dead satellite, according to NPR.
By Friday morning, all public radio feeds were available via telephone and ISDN circuits and the PBS satellite as well as Galaxy IIIR, said NPR spokesman Michael Abrahams.
Besides disrupting public radio and other broadcast signals, the accident interrupted signals to most of the nation's pagers and credit-card systems at Chevron gas stations.
"I was incredibly pleased by how the whole system came together--the sheer selflessness of everybody we came in contact with," including NPR technicians, producers and stations, said Jim Paluzzi, g.m. of KBSU, Boise, and chair of the NPR Distribution/Interconnection Committee.
One of the few positive effects of the crisis, he said, was that it drew attention to the interconnection, which has been "taken for granted" after 20 years of success. Options for the routine future replacement of the satellite system, some of which are "astounding," will be discussed at the Public Radio Conference, Saturday, May 30, Paluzzi said.
Some stunned pubcasters reportedly aired nothing for minutes on end, and others rapidly switched to pretaped programs while finding alternate sources of national feeds.
WBUR-FM, Boston, bragged that it suffered just five seconds of dead air, until Senior Producer Mark Degon rolled a tape, and within 90 seconds flipped into a tape of an earlier ATC feed. Like other big-city stations with high-bandwidth ISDN phone lines, WBUR later dialed into D.C. for NPR feeds and into London for BBC programs. NPR had ISDN ports to feed just 12 stations at first, but later expanded the number.
Minnesota Public Radio used ISDN lines to feed its major stations in the state, to pick up BBC feeds from London and to relay its syndicated Classical 24 music feed, said engineer Steve Griffith. Washington's WETA arranged to take the Classical 24 feed via ISDN and put it on the PBS satellite system, which reached many radio outlets with TV sister stations.
PBS, ABC and CBC all offered satellite capacity to public radio in a pinch. PBS, for instance, made it possible to distribute NPR's Performance Today the morning after the outage began.
In South Bend, Ind., WVPE-FM was able to pick up the NPR feed through public TV station WNIT, located in the same building, said WVPE Station Manager Tim Eby, though the station used pretaped programming until Wednesday morning.
Perhaps the most exotic circuit called upon in the crisis was the Internet. Stations could download NPR's signal in real-time from NPR's web site, using RealAudio streaming audio software and ordinary computer modems (their choice of 14.4 or 56 kilobits/second).
"I think this is the first time that the new media is helping the old media," NPR Director of New Media M.J. Bear told ABC News.
At KUVO-FM in Denver, a technician brought in his Macintosh computer and began feeding NPR newscasts into the station's master control. To station President Florence Hernandez-Ramos, the web feed sounded just as good as the satellite. "This raises in my mind, why do we need the satellite network?" she said. "It's a pretty ancient technology, when you think about it."
Earlier news: Public TV's satellite dies little more than a year before public radio incident.
Outside link: PanAmSat Corp. web site.
Web page created May 29, 1998
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