We had another line of storms roll through Bismarck-Mandan on Friday night, and it appeared to be another instance of a problem I mentioned in a recent post about local stations and the weak link in their system. In fact, I got nothing but black from KFYR and KXMB at times when the storm was hitting the hardest, when one is most fervently seeking weather information!

I was dismayed that, although my system indicated 97% signal, there was nothing to be had on the screen except black with an occasional jitter. Apparently the transmitters were operating faithfully, but just didn’t have a signal to transmit! Shame.

You can put all the money into weather talent, fancy graphics systems, street-level radar products, and heavy promotion…but if you can’t even manage to feed it to your transmitter, what’s the point? If I see even a single “weather leader” promo after Friday night’s performance, I think I might just throw up a little.

Not everybody is a cable subscriber, especially out of town. If these stations are content with only distributing their signal reliably over cable TV, then why bother transmitting over the air at all? Otherwise, I implore them to please get their severe weather performance problems under control.