It’s that time of year when the seasons change, the air gets warmer and wreaks havoc with broadcast signals. The technical term is “tropospheric refraction,” but for us laypeople, it’s when warm air settles in above cool, moist air below it, trapping the cool air and creating a situation where competing radio signals are carried great distance by bouncing through this cool air tunnel, ultimately interfering with local signals like ours. When this happens, we get calls and emails like this one, saying “Tonight there was a mixed / no signal for 92.7 so I was unable to play it from my radio. I tried for several minutes. at one point i faintly heard the station but it was behind much static and another station's music. it's not an issue from my radio because i can still pick up the other stations crisply.” Classical 92.7 and 96.7 are lower-power signals than our main channel at 91.3, and thus are more likely to be subject to interference by stronger signals carried over the distance by tropospheric refraction, but it has happened to 91.3 also. When it happens, it usually doesn’t last too long, and the situation is usually cleared up by a cool front coming through and clearing out the warm air. Still, it’s very frustrating for us and our listeners. If you experience this phenomenon as the seasons change, remember that if you can’t get us on the radio, you can get us online via streaming or from the WHQR app on your phone or your smart speaker.
We had another question about our classical service from a listener who called to say “can you please tell the person responsible for the music to turn it up? The music is on whisper mode, but the speaker is quite loud enough.” Coincidentally, I’ve noticed recently that I get a notification that our classical stream has dropped out for a moment or two, but when we listen to the aircheck to see if we went off the air, it was just a very quiet section of music. The morning we got the call, our host Linda Markas was on the air, so I asked her about it. She assured me that she does increase the volume manually for very quiet music segments, and she usually knows the music well enough to bring the volume back down before the loud part kicks in. However, she showed me one quiet part while she was on the air that was so quiet, even with the fader all the way up as far as it would go, it was still low audio. A wide dynamic range is part of the nature of classical music, but still, we’re going to look into this with our engineer to see if there is some solution we can find that doesn’t distort or compress the music.
In the other musical realm, we got a question from a listener to Smooth Landing asking “You just played a song around 720 on Friday evening… I caught the second half and would love to get to hear the whole thing! The lyrics included something about “Carolina Roads” in the chorus.” George Scheibner responded “The song you heard was “Carolina Roads” by Rod Abernethy, a veteran singer/songwriter/guitarist from Raleigh. It’s on his CD entitled “The Man I’m Supposed to Be.” Rod comes to play here in Wilmington a couple of times a year at Ted’s, and we’ve had him here at WHQR for a Soup to Nuts concert. “I’ll add that you can listen to Rod Abernethy’s Soup To Nuts Live concert and many others on the WHQR website at whqr.org/soup, and you can even see the video from Rod’s concert on WHQR’s YouTube page.
We love to hear from you. Please send us your questions, comments and criticisms. You can find us on Facebook, Instagram and Bluesky. Or you can email us at feedback@whqr.org. Thanks for your feedback, and we look forward to hearing from you.