Chaos During the Facebook lives

2018-05-02 09:36:05.000 – Adam Gill, Weather Observer/IT Specialist

Being short staffed has not been too big of deal so far since we are in between the summer and winter season so the work load is a bit less. The one thing that is being affected is our Facebook lives that we do on the weekend. If any of you joined us for our Friday Facebook live, you would have noticed that there was a distinct lack of sound. Back when Mike Carmon was on our shift, I did all the behind the scenes controlling and could monitor the video. Now it is much more of a challenge trying to control what is going on as well as being on camera. This Friday, while moving the computer into a position where I could be on the webcam as well as move through all the scenes, the microphone came partially unplugged so from our end, it had power. We did not realize until almost half way through the show that the sound was not actually getting picked up and exported to the video stream.

Saturday luckily went ok without any issues and we were able to go outside without any problems but Sunday the camera decided to disconnect as soon as I went outside. Luckily our intern Jill was able to keep the live going with the forecast discussion as I rushed back inside to get the camera going again. The second time was the charm and what had happened was the connection was lost in the tower. With 2 foot thick steel reinforced concrete walls it makes it difficult to get any sort of signal into the tower! I did not run fast enough up the stairs, guess I will need to get my running shoes on and practice!

The plus side is that for every one of these mistakes, something new is learned. With the sound issue from Friday, I know to test to make sure that the microphone is picking up sound. I was doing that when we first started the lives many months ago but became too overconfident. With the camera issue, I need to set up the camera outside so it is already set up and won’t lose connection. With summer this will not be too hard because it is much warmer outside and will not drain the battery of the camera. We still need to find a better winter solution though!

Adam Gill, Weather Observer/IT Specialist