FM radio hopes Sky Tower stays on the air next time

Radio stations are asking for reassurance that there will not be a repeat of the Sky Tower transmission centre failure which left FM stations off-air for about 45 minutes during this week's Auckland power cut.

Most radio networks have their FM transmitters atop the tower, while AM transmitters are in Henderson.

Newstalk ZB's operations manager, Peter Everatt, said the first thing the public usually did in an emergency was turn on the radio to see what was happening.

Newstalk ZB - which has the biggest breakfast audience in Auckland - went off the air from 8.30 to 9am on Monday. Mr Everatt said the Sky Tower was supposed to be effectively "black-out proof".

"We have a lot of concern about that. I would imagine the Sky Tower is upset about it as well.

"We all effectively moved on to the Sky Tower because it was the most reliable source of power. That was up until [Monday]. So we are obviously interested in hearing from the Sky Tower as to how it might not happen again."

He said Newstalk ZB was also the only AM station affected - it was down for half an hour after power spikes affected the transmitters.

Richie Fullard, operations manager of RadioLive, said the station's AM frequency stayed up, but FM was down until about 9.15am because of the problems with Sky Tower.

"But we are in a medium where we can deal with these things. It's the first time it's happened and one-off things like this aren't too much of a problem."

Both understood that power surges just before the cut caused problems with the generator at the tower.

A spokesman for SkyCity, Paul Gregory, said the power surges and the cut were beyond the company's control and staff got to work restoring power to the radio masts.

"Effects of this nature are rare," he said. "We set about fixing the problem as quickly as possible and this was done in 30 minutes."

He said the Sky Tower had been one of the few buildings in the CBD to remain lit using back-up power during the 1998 power crisis.