Central Arkansas public radio listeners were wondering whether KUAR-FM’s signal had been hijacked Thursday morning when Christian music came over the airwaves instead of the station’s usual news and National Public Radio programming.
Actually, a technical problem at its broadcast transmission site on Shinall Mountain put the University of Arkansas at Little Rock station off the air for about 25 minutes, according to Jonathan Seaborn, general manager of KUAR and its sister station, classical KLRE-FM.
“We had an electrical issue at the transmitter site that blew a circuit,” Seaborn told Arkansas Business early Thursday. “Our engineer had to drive up there. It was an easy fix once he got there, but it’s way up on Shinall Mountain.”
Seaborn said broadcasting has resumed as usual, and that technical upgrades are scheduled to prevent similar breakdowns in the future. “There was about a 25-minute window where, depending on where you were, listeners were either just getting static or picking up a Christian station that must be operating at a similar frequency, but at a low wattage.”
That station apparently was WDNX-FM, 81.9, out of Savannah, Tennessee, about 115 miles east of Memphis. WDNX is the school station of Harbert Hills Academy, an independent private day and boarding school owned and operated by the nonprofit Rural Life Foundation.
“We got a couple of calls from people who were saying they thought we’d been hijacked,” Seaborn said. “We said no, no. Just a transmitter issue.”
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