Cutting edge

As early as 1981 the station had a 10 foot C-Band satellite dish out in front of the building.. That first dish was provided by UPI (United Press International) and was a fixed position dish, it could only be pointed at one satellite. It used an LNA at the feedhorn and a low noise block down converter at the receiver to amplify the satellite signal. We received UPI's teletype news service via satellite and UPI Radio News. A unique aspect of UPI Radio News was that it contained no national commercials. So any ads that played before or after UPI Radio News were local. Prior to satellite delivery for data and audio, phone lines were used to get that information to radio stations - and phone lines were a monthly expense. Satellite delivery had no monthly expense.

It wasn't too much later that The Missouri Network and The Brownfield Network moved to satellite delivery. Much better audio quality than phone lines and no ongoing expense. Fortunately, radio was being served by one main satellite, WESTAR 3, and all the big networks, including what later became Learfield were on the same satellite. Later the networks would move to COMSAT 4 at a lower angle to the south than the WESTAR satellite.

The station added Mutual News in December of 1986. Mutual had national commercials and actually paid the station a monthly fee to air those commercials (based on ratings). That fee was called compensation and most networks eventually got away from compensation - and provided their services on a barter basis. Mutual News later become Westwood One and CNN Radio News and believe it or not, the station was still compensated several thousand dollars a month up until about 2008-2009

The great recession caused the bean counters at Westwood One to stop compensating stations in small markets - and suddenly, that regular income stopped. The compensation was tied to ratings, and through the years varied from as low as $20,000 annually to as high as as $43,000 annually. And it was paid monthly. Losing that hurt. A lot.

But being on the "cutting edge" with "state of the art" technology sometimes meant things went very wrong on the air. Mutual was fine up until July or August of 1987 when the temperature exceeded 90 degrees. Then we started losing the satellite signal every day about mid-morning. The solution? Put ice on the low noise block converter behind the dish to cool it down. The uber-smart people that designed the Fairchild satellite receiver used capacitors in the low noise block down converter that were affected by hot temperatures. So the block down converter was sent back to Fairchild to have the capacitors replaced with ones  that weren't affected by heat. I think Fairchild was based in Arizona. So you'd figure they would be on top of the heat of the day thing. Apparently not.

Later satellite receivers used LNBs, which combined the function of the LNA and block down converter into one piece of equipment located at the feed-horn and they weren't susceptible to high or low temperatures affecting their operation.

It's been said that if you live on the "cutting edge", you'd better learn to deal with bleeding. We had a lot of bleeding in those early days of satellite delivery.

So it goes.