As you may know, today is the first day of the self-produced Russ Belville Show.  So, of course, I have the worst technical difficulties all happen on one show today.

Thanks to you listeners who stick through it all.  I had one of you write in with some very nice things to say about the show, but lots of complaints about the technical difficulties.  Believe me, I hear you, and I’m working hard to fix it.  If you’re interested in the techie details, click below…

First of, you should understand that I do not produce this show from the studios of KPOJ in Portland.  KPOJ is completely blameless for any of our tech problems.  I really wish I was in the KPOJ studio - that would solve many issues - but I can’t without being an employee of Clear Channel, which ain’t gonna happen.

So I broadcast from my home studio here in Portland.  That means I have to have an engineer (Stevie) to record the show, play commercials, and beam it to the people who fire it up to the satellite and out to XM Radio and KPOJ.

That’s what is causing the delay between me and both Stevie and callers like you.  It takes about ¾sec for the signals to go from Portland to Washington DC to the satellite provider to the satellite and down to your radio.  If you think that’s frustrating, you’re right.  Stevie and I are working on time cues via the internet so we don’t step on each other as much, but it will take some getting used to.

This would be solved if I had an engineer here and phone lines here and a person to answer calls here.  In the future, that may well be the direction I go, but until I have more advertising revenue, I can’t carry that expense.

The biggest obstacle right now is my connection from my studio to Stevie’s in Washington, as you heard this weekend.  It’s this modem/mixer box called a Zephyr X-port and it allows me to connect to Stevie using POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) lines.  It’s a lot like how your computer connects to the internet using a dial-up modem.  Well, you ever have a dial-up modem lose its connection?  That’s what’s happening here.

The maddening thing is that some days we’ll connect for the whole two hours straight with nary an issue, but days like today had me dropping six or seven times!

Now there is a simple solution to this problem, and that is to use ISDN connections (direct digital) from me to Stevie.  And indeed, I have installed those lines and went to hook up the Zephyr X-port to it and it will not function properly.

Either the X-port is malfunctioning or I have phone line problems or both.  Regardless, this week will have me on a few different tech support lines to get this all worked out.  Thank you for bearing with it.

As for the dead air or cheesy music playing in a loop, that may be an issue at KPOJ.  See, what happens is after we play our show and our commericals, a little inaudible tone goes out and tells KPOJ’s computers to switch to their local commercials.  In our first hour, it seemed like KPOJ wasn’t hearing the tone and never switched on their ads, staying instead with our signal.  We play that music as fill during the times we’re not on air, just in case something like this happens.  I’ll see if we can get some better music.

Nobody said this would be easy.  I’m learning a whole new industry here and I’m bound to make some mistakes.  Thanks for sticking with it.  We’ll work all of this out, I promise. — “R”R