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East Lansing, Michigan
Galaxy 4 Dies; the Internet to the Rescue

By Richard Wiggins

illions of Americans knew something was wrong one recent evening when their favorite drive-time program, "All Things Considered," went off the air in mid-broadcast. I happened to be returning from the mall when I noticed dead air on my local NPR station (WKAR-FM in East Lansing). The NPR voices were quickly replaced by classical music. I switched to the other NPR station my car radio can pull in, and noticed they were also playing classical musical; clearly, something had happened to the NPR feed.

The next morning, the nation found out how bad the loss was. Millions of consumers have some awareness of satellites, thanks to the boom in home satellite TV. As the large dishes rural consumers bought in the 1980s required users to re-aim the dish and to select a transponder. The 18-inch dishes of the 90s generally require one time setup. After initial setup, the dish always points to the same bird, and the user thinks about the satellite only when heavy precipitation interrupts the line of sight and blocks programming.

Thus most of us don’t know satellites by name, and don’t know a transponder from the transmission in our cars. So long as communications satellites do their jobs, most of us never think about how it all works – or how reliably.

NPR was a pioneer in the use of satellite program distribution: back in 1979, they switched their programming feeds to satellite from terrestrial. Before satellite, NPR voice programming such as "All Things Considered" had AM fidelity even when broadcast over FM. Thus, NPR has a tradition of using advanced technology, and its member stations employ talented engineers. When Galaxy 4 failed, many NPR stations used the Internet to recover from the sudden loss of programming. Parts of the NPR network were actually restored by using real-time streaming via the Internet.

In Michigan, the outage affected every NPR station, but it also interrupted the spot news feed for a statewide network, Michigan Public Radio. I asked Matt Ferguson, a board operator at WKAR and a production assistant at Michigan Public Radio, how the Galaxy 4 outage impacted a particular station and statewide network.