Load shedding is creating havoc among the major South African broadcasters, including GoldFM in Welkom.
Sentech who is the official service provider of transmission equipment for GoldFM and also most major radio and television networks in the country, have their hands full with load shedding,” says Brian Emmenis, station manager of GoldFM.
The constant switching on and off of the power is causing severe damage to the various systems used by the broadcasting fraternity.
Emmenis says GoldFM makes use of a single Sentech transmitter site situated near Theunissen.
“Because there is only one transmitter we at the radio station suffer severe losses when we go off air, and this is a major disruption to our programming. When the regular FM signal cuts out, listeners only hear static noise.”
In the past week the radio station suffered catastrophic failure when they went off air for two to three hours.
“There was a scramble to get the station back on air. There is a saying in the industry that once a listener turns the dial you have to work three times as hard to get that “ear” back to your station,” says Emmenis.
The power cuts are affecting all the radio stations and television stations that are not on satellite.
“We at GoldFM are busy with intense planning as to how we can effectively alleviate the constant breaks in transmission.”
There are several options being considered by the GoldFM board.
To further aggravate the problem was the announcement by the government and Eskom that continual daily load shedding will remain with South Africans for the next 24 months.
Emmenis says the station recently brought in a top electrical engineer who installed a state of the art inverter with proper batteries.
“This enabled GoldFM to be self sufficient for at least seven hours at a time. The problem is that our transmitter is on a separate power supply. The one advantage is that our live stream is not affected by this,” he says.