KEPW volunteers praise Engineering Committee

When KEPW briefly went off the air, volunteers on the Engineering Committee raced to find a solution.

Neal McDermott (Co-Operations Coordinator): My name is Neal McDermott and I am the Co-Operations Coordinator with Jana (Thrift).

[00:00:12] Okay. So, we got a brand-new internet service. It’s great. I don’t know if you know the details, but we’ve always been dependent on cellular internet, which is this little antenna on the roof and buildings go up, trees go up, so we’ve always had not huge problems, but some slight problems with connectivity, and so we got a brand-new internet. It’s coming from a coaxial cable, real wire, you know, is coming into the building. So it’s a lot faster. It’s a lot more stable, very exciting, right?

[00:00:43] So, the guy came in, he installed that. And then after he left, I noticed that the radio station—for people who don’t know, we always have a radio going in the office so we know that we’re on the air—it was just static.

[00:00:59] And so I was like, ‘What?’ you know, and then I went into the studio and it was playing fine in the studio. We have a live feed on the website, it was playing on the website, but in the office, it was just static. And so my first thought was that the internet guy, something must have happened when he came in.

[00:01:17] John Q: He made a few calls.

[00:01:20] Neal McDermott (Co-Operations Coordinator): Yeah, I just started calling people because, there’s a great show on Saturday nights from 10 to 12 called Discothèque Radio. There’s Jesse, whose radio name is Soul Caller, and there’s Brad Mina. And luckily for us, they’re really great tech guys and they’re also real enthusiastic about the station. I am so glad those guys are here, they have just stepped in—

[00:01:41] So I just called them and Jesse came over from work. You know how it is when you’re troubleshooting, because you don’t know what happened and your first impulse is that you did something wrong. So you’re checking everything you could have done wrong and we weren’t getting anywhere. And then Brad Mina was still at work and he was talking with us over the phone, asking some questions.

[00:02:05] And this is before my time, but there was a guy named Dee who was the tech guy. He set up a lot of this computer equipment. Jana said, ‘If there’s an emergency, just call Dee.’ So I called him on the phone. And that really helped us because Jesse was asking him other questions about things in the studio that he didn’t understand.

[00:02:24] So we tried to figure it out. And we were at it for a while. And then Jesse goes, ‘Why don’t I try and log in remotely.’ And our listeners probably don’t know this, but there’s a veterinary clinic that used to be some sort of media building. So all of our equipment was in a tower attached to a veterinary clinic. I’ve been there once and I knew that we have a computer in the server room and some other equipment, and a lot of it’s controlled by this computer.

[00:02:54] So Jesse tries to log in and it was like there was nothing there. He said, ‘There’s nothing there,’ you know, and it was getting pretty late. I think the place was going to close soon. And I said, ‘Well, we better call down there.’ And he called and the phone service had been disconnected. He goes, ‘Well, I’m going to rush down there. I’m going to see if I can get in there and maybe restart it,’ or whatever.

[00:03:19] So Jesse got there and there’s a note on the door saying, ‘We vacated the building on Aug. 12.’ And so this was the end of last month. And so there was no one in the building. So we’re like, ‘Okay, we can’t get in the building. The power’s off. What are we going to do?’

[00:03:37] And now Brad Mina, the other half of the Discothèque Radio guys, he was like, ‘Well, I’m going to make some phone calls.’ And the other thing is that this building, this tower attached to the building, it has a bunch of other people’s antennas there too. It’s not just ours. So he called around, he found someone else who was there and he was like, he goes, ‘Yeah,’ same thing happened to them, suddenly their power left.

[00:04:00] And then I got a text from Brad Mina saying, ‘I called EWEB and they turned the power back on.’ The station turned right back on as soon as the power came on. And Jesse was like, what probably happened was our computer in the server room, it kept running under battery power. So when the power came back on for the building, it just kept hooking up to the antenna and broadcasting.

[00:04:25] John Q: Neal praised the volunteers at KEPW.

[00:04:28] Neal McDermott (Co-Operations Coordinator): So Brad and Jesse, they’re going to be really great for the station because they’re not just excited about their own show, they’re excited about radio,

[00:04:35] Ryan and Veronica—they decorated for Andrew’s party. Those guys, you know, they’re so great. They’re really good at making people feel appreciated and marking occasions and stuff like that. They made little awards. They made this for me. They’re going to engrave it. They were like, ‘You were like the heart, you know, and that’s a circle connecting people.’ I love those guys. I mean, I see them more than anybody. They’re always in here.

[00:04:59] And then they have these gray granite obelisks, like the Washington Monument. They have one for Brad and one for Jesse. And they’re going to engrave them, you know, ‘for being there to step up when we needed you.’

[00:05:10] I mean, I felt really grateful that I had four people immediately come to help me, and I was really appreciative of Dee willing to come back in and help too. I feel really just glad to know that there’s people willing to step up when there’s kind of an emergency. That feels really good.

[00:05:27] John Q: Thanks and appreciation to KEPW engineers past and present, and a shout-out to Jesse and Brad, whose show, Discothèque, is broadcast at 10 p.m. every Saturday night.