Ken Redmond had called a halt on their efforts to repair the main mixing board shortly before midnight, right before Spencer Dawes would wind down the Disco Ball and sign off. It was becoming increasingly obvious that everyone was tired enough to affect judgement, and given that the midnight-to-six segment was run by a software robot that selected songs and could make basic announcements, it made far more sense to send everyone home for a good night’s rest and start over in the morning.
Now that morning was here, Ken was no longer feeling quite so sanguine about the ease of repairs on this issue. It didn’t help that he couldn’t go straight to the studios of Shepardsport Pirate Radio, since there were a number of other issues around the settlement that he needed to follow up on first. Not that Juss Forsythe was a bad tech, but he was still young enough that he simply didn’t have the years and decades of experience that often allowed an old hand like Ken to make intuitive leaps on fragmentary information.
By the time Ken finally had his docket cleared enough that he could even consider going over to look into matters personally, Brenda was winding up Breakfast With The Beatles and getting ready to hand things over to Lou Corlin. They were both experienced enough with dong remote broadcasts to be able to use that system to its best advantage, but there was no mistaking it for the full studio system.
On the other hand, the network traffic reports he’d gotten from IT were showing that the lowered transmission quality hadn’t led to a significant drop in listenership. In fact, it looked like connections from outside the lunar Internet had actually picked up, which made him wonder. Could it be a case of people trying to connect multiple devices in hope that one would have better reception?
From some things that Autumn Belfontaine had said, it was sounding like a lot of dirtside radio stations were resorting to various makeshifts just to be able to broadcast at all. Some of them were sharing transmitters, running simulcasts, even going all Internet when their ability to broadcast over the airwaves was lost. So it was possible that a lot of people were getting used to making do with whatever they could find.
It must be getting really bad down there. It made him realize just how little connection he had with family on Earth. Both his parents were deceased, and Jenn was estranged from her mother. He had a couple of siblings, but they’d drifted apart, to the point they rarely corresponded other than at the holidays. No hard rupture like Jenn’s break with her mother, just an ever-growing lack of common points of reference that made it hard to communicate.
As Ken walked into the offices of Shepardsport Pirate Radio, he encountered Juss walking out. The younger man had a worried expression. “I was just looking for you. We’ve got a major problem. I’m thinking we’re going to have to tear that mixing board down and rewire about half of it.”