The Weirdest Tech Problems We’ve Faced (So Far)

From phantom echoes to cables that mysteriously worked yesterday, here's the chaos behind the calm.

OK, so here's the thing about starting a radio station: everyone expects you to sound professional from day one. Which is brilliant, except for the fact that literally everything that can go wrong, will go wrong.

And it'll happen when you're live on air.

I'm writing this from my kitchen table, which, incidentally, has been our YouTube livestream headquarters for the past few weeks. Why my kitchen table? Because that's where my laptop is, and that's where our entire YouTube presence lives.

Very sophisticated stuff.

But here's where it gets properly weird: every single day, like clockwork, our livestream would cut out after exactly 11 hours and 55 minutes. Not 11:54. Not 12:00. Eleven hours and fifty-five minutes, every time.

I've asked three different tech people about this. I've googled it until my eyes bled. I've tried different cables, different software, different everything. No one knows why. It just...does this thing.

At 11:55, the stream dies, and somewhere in the digital ether, there's probably a very confused algorithm thinking it's doing us a favour.

Our Alexa Stream

For our first two weeks on air, we had no Alexa stream. None. You know that moment when you launch something and half your audience can't actually access it? That was us.

We spent hours (literal hours) hunting down a human in Amazon's customer service chat. Different chat bots, different departments, different levels of confusion. "My radio station won't work on your smart speakers" isn't really a problem they're set up to handle, apparently.

Turns out, after weeks of back-and-forth, our phrase "Play Do Radio" was too generic for Amazon's system. Too generic!

Like we'd accidentally chosen the digital equivalent of asking for "some music, please."

Our Alexa phrase is now "Play Do Lectures Radio," which makes us sound more academic than we actually are, but at least people can listen on their kitchen speakers while making coffee.

Small wins.

When Everything Goes Wrong

Despite weeks of testing, halfway through our very first proper show, the audio decided to have what I can only describe as a nervous breakdown.

Picture this: David and Mike are mid-conversation, when suddenly the audio stops, skips forward an entire hour, and cuts them off mid-sentence. Just...gone. One second they're making a brilliant point, the next second they've vanished into the digital void and we’ve dived into the middle of Cat’s first show.

So there we were, scrambling to work out what happened and get us back on track (all credit to our resident tech genius Adam for sorting this so quickly). All while trying to explain to our listeners why they'd just experienced time travel, and pretending this was all part of the plan.

The Art of Panic Broadcasting

Then there are the shows that run short. You plan for an hour, you prep for an hour, and somehow, through the mysterious alchemy of radio, you end up with 50 minutes of content and 10 minutes of dead air.

This is when you discover what you're really made of. Can you talk absolute nonsense for 10 minutes while sounding like you meant to do it? Can you stretch "so, what are everyone's weekend plans?" into meaningful radio content?

Turns out, yes. But it's not pretty.

We've had website crashes during crucial moments. Audio levels that worked perfectly in testing but sounded like we were broadcasting from inside a tin can once we went live. Microphones that decided they didn't want to be microphones anymore.

Here's What We've Learned

But you know what? It's a startup. Of course it's messy. Of course nothing works the way it's supposed to. Of course the technology chooses the worst possible moments to remind you that you're basically held together with hope and determination.

A few weeks in now, things are genuinely so much better. We're learning from every disaster. We're responding to feedback. The polite feedback about our audio quality, and the lovely positive feedback about our content.

Each problem we solve makes us slightly less likely to embarrass ourselves next time. Each crisis we survive makes us marginally more confident that we might actually know what we're doing.

The weird thing is, I'm starting to suspect our listeners quite like the chaos. There's something honest about hearing a radio station figure itself out in real time. Something human about admitting that yes, we're making this up as we go along, and no, we don't have all the answers.

The 11-hour-55-minute mystery continues. Our Alexa stream works. And somewhere in my kitchen, surrounded by cables and backup plans, we're slowly becoming the radio station we always imagined we could be.

Just...with slightly more technical difficulties than we'd planned for.