If a tech-friendly streaming station goes off the radio airwaves, does anyone in a tech-centric city notice?
Seattle nonprofit indie and alternative rock station KEXP suddenly went fuzzy and silent from its broadcast tower during the morning commute on Tuesday. The station quickly tweeted the analog woe as its signal on 90.3 FM disappeared around 8:40 a.m. PT.
Sorry everybody listening to the terrestrial signal but we seem to be off the air right nke. We are working on it. Please listen via the app or @kexp's site for now. https://t.co/bS7kiyUPUF
— KEXP (@kexp) September 11, 2018
Immediately, Twitter reacted. Team GeekWire did, too, even though the newsroom realized it had no easy way to determine if KEXP was still off the air — or, specifically, airwaves — since the stream continued on KEXP’s website and through digital distribution services such as TuneIn, which feed smartphones, Amazon Echo devices and Sonos speakers worldwide. (We had to run to a car parked outside.)
.@kexp just went off the air. Nothing but static.
— Mike (@georgetownmike) September 11, 2018
Where my @kexp ? ???
— Space Force Cadet Erin (@ventogrrl) September 11, 2018
Meanwhile, some went to the KEXP source: Its transmitter located on Capitol Hill in Seattle.
.@kexp I checked ur towers and they’re all good pic.twitter.com/QMqf6EPSpV
— jseattle (@jseattle) September 11, 2018
ICYMI, @kexp current status.
Stream baby stream! pic.twitter.com/sjvGJMjnot— MooMoo (@fredvegasbass) September 11, 2018
An hour into the outage, morning host John Richards concluded — on the stream, but not on the airwaves — “Technology is great. Until it rises up and kills us all.”
KEXP, with the support of donors and a $15 million fund-raising campaign, built new studios and moved its operations to Seattle Center in late 2015, opening the 28,000 square-foot space to the public in 2016. The station was pushed across the fundraising finish line with a $500,000 donation by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, a long-time station supporter and fan.
We’ll update this story when, and if, KEXP finds the cause of its radio silence and beams audio anew. At 10 a.m., when Richards’s morning drive shift ended, the station was still static.
UPDATE: KEXP returned to the terrestrial broadcast airwaves at 10:10 a.m. and discovered the culprit — a failed memory card that contained the transmitter operating system. Read the full story here.
