Today’s 630 reflection…
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The Engineers (Tech) are the golden folks of radio…and are a highly talented bunch.
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I’ve been blessed to work with some of the all time best in the industry over five decades.
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Today’s story surrounds the actual ‘630’ frequency….and I’m not going to get too techy with it or my non radio friends won’t understand it.
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Basically radio frequencies are carved out for all of North America so that they don’t impact on each other. Transmitters patterns are designed for each market; have different power structures; and ‘night’ patterns were pulled ‘in’ a bit to adjust for the thinner air.
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Early in my career you had to manually flip a switch to change to night pattern. The reminder was on your program log and god forbid if you forgot cuz ‘you’d get a call.’
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Several years later they became automated and you often would hear a rapid click in town when this pattern change occurred.
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In the fall of 1971 I was working at CHNL in Kamloops BC and a station pal and I decided to go to Kelowna to watch a Junior Hockey game.
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He had a friend at CKOV, which (at the time) was on the AM dial at 630…so you can see where this is going. (CKOV flipped to FM in 2007)
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OV had the broadcast rights to the game and we dropped by to see my friends pal as he was operating the sound board for the game.
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Well he was a tad ‘distracted’ chatting with us and missed his cue to hit the commercial. In radio talk that left what is called dead air.
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If you’ve ever seen it happen on tv it’s when the picture is blank and there’s no audio.
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I pointed out his gaff and he quickly corrected it.
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But…next break…another missed cue and he’s chatting away with us again.
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This time I wait about 8 or 9 seconds, and you can now audibly hear ‘the other 630…CHED’…creeping over the dead air.
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So he notices it this time and goes ballistic…hitting the commercial and then ranting about “those stupid idiots in Edmonton must have not changed from night pattern….and then he threw in a few expletives about getting hold of the CHED guys to really give them shit.”
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Well my friend waits just a second…and says to the guy….”I think my friend Marty here might be able to help you!”
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The guy says “how?”
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“His Dad, Jerry Forbes, runs CHED.”
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I grinned.
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*Ironically Dad worked at 1260 early in his career so both AM stations that he worked at are now gone.
