Lightning Strikes 1WAY FM

Photographer: Tristan Laundon

What happened?

On 13 January 2025, we discovered our transmitter had developed a fault and was running on reduced power.  😵‍💫

Further investigation revealed we had probably had a lightning strike. Two of the power modules in the transmitter had failed. With the support of the technicians from other community radio stations in the ACT, our team was able to jump in quickly to diagnose the issues, send the power modules for repairs, and resolve the immediate issue. 

Now you might be thinking, hang on, if it was sorted quickly, why were we still having dropouts until very recently?…  

…Cue a series of unfortunate events. 🥴 

What we found

The lightning strike revealed critical components in our broadcast chain that need replacing. It also showed that we had multiple units that could become single points of failure. We need to get redundancy in place to continue to broadcast.  

As parts were replaced, others revealed faults. Errors, and gaps in the system were highlighted and we discovered we didn’t have failover systems in place to keep us on air if one piece of equipment failed. We have had to work through our technical environment from the studio to the transmitter, to ensure our message of hope and encouragement goes out over the airwaves 24/7. 

A lot of the equipment we are now using was replaced through our Rise and Survive campaign and was installed in around 2013. It has served us well but has reached the end of its lifespan! Some of this equipment failed while we were dealing with the other technical difficulties. 😶

While we were working on cleaning out our server rack, the server running our automation system had a catastrophic failure. We were very blessed to have our old automation system onsite that we could fall back on. The team worked quickly to put in a new server and reload the software to get us back to our usual programming. 

Due to this failure, we lost about 3 years’ worth of on-air data which is why the music sounded quite nostalgic for a few weeks 🙃. Our team is working to bring everything back up to date from backups and other records, please bear with us as we bring the music and messages back into 2025.

Amazing team support!

A huge THANK YOU to Chris Miles, Chris Deacon, Roger Bean and Kieren Webb, who poured so many hours into rebuilding our systems. We are so grateful for the way you have stepped in and are working to make our technical environment better than it was before. 🙏

What next?

To finish this work, we need your support. We thought we had everything covered. God has blessed us with some amazing donors who have provided funding to replace critical pieces of equipment.

But there is more to do to ensure our system is stable and can weather the storms that will come.

We need to have more redundancy in our technical environment and make sure our system is more resilient than it was before the lightning strike. We also need to have some reserves to make sure that we can replace our equipment as it reaches its end of life, ideally before we have a catastrophic failure! 

To help ensure that our systems are strong and stable, please give now to meet this critical funding need. 🫶

Building our sustainable future

We have drafted a new financial model for 1WAY FM to ensure we are ready for when our equipment needs replacing, that we have a plan for growth and to pay our bills:

If you would like to contribute directly to one of the ‘buckets’ you can deposit your donation to the following accounts: