Getting connected in Canadia

Spectacular view, right? Not a spectacular night.

If you're a bottom line person, you might want to skip all the way down to the end ... this is how NOT to do a soccer radio broadcast.

I remember having problems with setting up my connection in Toronto last year – and the connection giving out shortly after each half, apparently on the hour – but not too much about how I resolved them. But having dealt with that last year, I was definitely on the early bus to the stadium today, even though my broadcast was not scheduled to go until eight minutes before kickoff.

Upon arriving, I found my booth even smaller than I remembered it; I could probably stand in the middle of the room and touch both walls at the same time, or come pretty close. There’s only one window, and it opens like 80 degrees upward, so it obstructs your vision a little. And there’s no good place to run a crowd mic. In short, I hate this booth.

To make matters worse, the SPIDs listed on the wall appeared bizarre to me. Usually SPIDs (numbers used for an ISDN connection) have a four digit binary extension, usually 0101 or 0000 or 1111. Here, the numbers were listed with oo after them. oo? WTF? I didn’t know if it was supposed to be an inifinity symbol, two zeroes, two letter ‘O’s, or some Canadian number I had never heard of!

Continuing the trend of things getting worse, I was having trouble with my XPort. That’s the machine we use to connect to the radio station back home, and the one we have is temperamental. You have to choose ISDN or POTS (plain old telephone service) line when you first boot up, or nothing will work.

Unfortunately, my machine has a tendency of not giving you the options at the beginning. It just goes straight to a screen that could theoretically be used for a telephone-line connection but in practicality never works, period. I can seriously turn the machine on 10 times and only get the option to choose between ISDN and POTS maybe once. If that. So pregame can be a frustrating cycle of turning the machine on and off, waiting for the menu.

It also seems to matter whether there’s a cord plugged into the ISDN line or not. I seem to have my best success when I turn it on with no cord, get no menu, then turn it off, plug in the cord, wait 60 seconds, and turn it on again. But even that doesn’t work every time.

So I finally got the machine on and into ISDN mode, figured out which of the six phone jacks was the ISDN line (they’re not labeled; thanks, Toronto!), and was trying various SPID combinations with absolutely 0 luck. I tried ’00,’ ‘0000,’ ‘0101,’ ‘1111,’ no extension at all, and so on, and each time I got ‘SPID error.’ That’s bad. Then I remembered that this thing usually does best when it’s been reset, so I instructed it to reset (which you can only do from ISDN mode – in all other modes, you have to turn it off and turn it on again) and figured that might give me a chance.

Of course it took me another 8-10 times of turning the thing on/off before I got a menu again. Freaking brutal. I was starting to get that angry/nervous feeling when it finally gave me a menu, I chose ISDN, and it came up with the magic word ‘Ready.’ Thank God!

With that out of the way, I found a way to arrange my stick microphone on top of the window, angled toward the field, so I thought it would pick up good crowd noise (but couldn’t prove it with no crowd) and moved on with the rest of my setup. And my life. Oh, the trials of a broadcaster.

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Great post, right? A little technical, perhaps. The irony is that I left it unpublished to post after the game ... and then I couldn't connect to the radio station! They tried to dial and got a message that the line was not in service. Toronto technicians assured me the line was working. Maybe it was an international thing? We tried a normal phone line but couldn't get a good enough connection, and I failed to make it on the air at all for the second time in my soccer career. Terrible, terrible night.