Because neither campus radio station I worked at was a 24-hour operation, we had to sign-on the station every morning. Talk about an ode to joy. Most notably at the undergrad station, all DJs were required to be at the station 15 minutes before their shift and this was especially important for the first operators of the day, the person who would activate the transmitter.
Of course, first you had to get inside the building – students were required to drive to the far side of campus to the University Police and Security (UPS) offices and get the key to the building: a list of the designated students (as well as all student management) had been provided by this point, making retrieving the key a relatively effortless ordeal. The lucky person got a silly little key ring with two keys: one to get inside the building and the other to get inside the main studio. Ideally you wanted to time your waking up and driving and relaxing so that at 5:45 you could begin the transmitter process.
Our actual radio tower was outside the building; to prepare it for use we had to push three different buttons on a mechanism in the control room. There was a system to the buttons – you had to push the circular one first, actually push and hold it the button in for five or ten seconds. Then you had to wait a few minutes for it to "warm up" and get a reading off a meter. A second button activated something else, and then the third button or switch or whatever finally readied us for broadcasting – you knew this because the volume and wattage meters on the equipment awoke. If you had been listening to the radio station at that time, before the button pushing began, you would have heard static; once the meters moved, you heard the silent lull of dead air. These meters readings were so important that we had to not only log the time we activated the transmitter and what the meter readings were, but at the start of each shift the rest of the day (every three hours), whoever was "in charge" of the control room had to also log the meter readings. This was the transmitter log, as required by the FCC, containing that day's list of operators and what time period they were responsible for the station.
The button pushing probably took five-to-ten minutes tops and it wasn't something you could breeze through if you were running late. Once the transmitter was ready, we had to wait until 6:00 – okay, 5:59 for purists – and then run the sign-on announcement. This was a produced element that contained basic elements such as the station call sign, transmitter power, ownership, and other general information. After the announcement ended it was straight into music and, depending on which semester this was, that could mean either jazz, some sort of rock (as seen with the "morning shows" of my Freshman year) or, more probable, classical music.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125
(Ludwig van Beethoven)
Performed by Orchestre Revolutionnaire et Romantique with Gilles Cachemaille, Anne Sofie von Otter, Luba Orgonasova, Anthony Rolfe Johnson
Conducted by John Eliot Gardiner
From the album Beethoven: The 9 Symphonies
1994
