Re: Fire Drill
Mr. Bossman,
I am responding to your prior message of a disaster recovery plan, or “fire drill” as you aptly put it. As it turns out I have been thinking along these same lines, especially in regards to our recent draught, and upon assessing our resources, I have a short term solution, and an ideal solution to any immediate emergency to our facilities.
In the instance of a disaster, or for the sake of simplicity, a fire, our primary prerogative should of course be our automation system, our audio file vault, and our advertising database, in that order. Backups are made regularly, so we can always rebuild, but our primary objective should be continuity. Being able to seamlessly transition from one site to another, without any interruption of our audio feed.
Fortunately, we have recently added the 1.5 hour backup playlist, that’s hosted online, so in the instance of any perceived silence, our transmitters will revert to our web stream, and even if we aren’t pumping out audio, we have an hour and a half of original music and advertisements preprogrammed to run. With this failsafe, we can safely plan on two play cycles before listeners become aware of our repetition, giving us at least 3 hours to recoup and rebuild.
Were an emergency to happen today, I would recommend recovering our automation system, and whatever vaults or logs we can grab on the way out, and migrating our base of operations to your garage, which is still in town and in the instance of a fire, would probably still have internet access. By linking our automation system to our web stream, we can override the backup playlist and continue to play our music, advertisements, and current events as scheduled. Our only loss in operations would be audio fidelity.
In the instance of an ideal back up, I would propose we configure our AM transmitter site for internet, and that we redirect our backup Microwave Studio Transmitter Link from Hill Street to the AM location. Then I propose we set up an alternative audio automation machine at our AM site, as well as a backup database and logs repository. This way, in instance of total infrastructure failure at our FM studio, we could switch to a prepped and configured automation system synchronized with our main feed, and we could run this from our AM site with no loss of audio fidelity.
Also, in the (rare) instance of microwave impediments or impedance, for instance, a crane or derrick interrupting our line of site, or (more probably) a forest fire releasing thermals and bending our microwave signal, we have another geographical angle of attack, so instead of using the same pathway for our redundant audio feed from the studio to the transmitter, we can pipe data along an alternate route.
Having a synchronized stand alone automation machine and alternative STL path would not only cover us incase of a fire, or any other disaster limited to our immediate vicinity, but it would also permit seamless transition in the instance of user or technical failure at the studio.
Thank you Mr. Bossman for your time, I hope I have answered all of your questions concerning the fire drill, and I pray you authorize by proposal to double our preventative maintenance budget, allowing for increased internet, additional microwave licenses, and another automation system, in the spirit of true redundancy.