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About The daily Astorian. (Astoria, Or.) 1961-current | View Entire Issue (Sept. 8, 2016)
4 // COASTWEEKEND.COM A JACK-OF-ALL-TRADES MUSIC TECHNICIAN FILLS A VOID AT COAST COMMUNITY RADIO Story and photos by DWIGHT CASWELL A According to Graham Nystrom, his new job is actual- ly, “fi ve jobs in one: a mixture of IT, fi le management, audio engineering, electrical engineering and maintenance.” Nystrom has done all those jobs at one time or another, in one place or another, but he’s never before combined them into a single job like the one he now has: operations manager at Coast Community Radio. If you’re a listener of KMUN 91.9 FM, KTCB 89.5 FM or KCPB 90.9 FM, you may have heard occasional requests for additional support to purchase new equipment, or heard about a “major upgrade” of “broadcast computer sys- tems and software.” Nystrom is the guy who takes it all apart and puts it back together again. He began volunteering for the station a year ago, and it soon became apparent that more than a volunteer was needed; Nystrom became a part-time employee in April and was working full time by June. For the past 16 years or so (“my whole working life”) he’s made his living as an independent contractor in what he describes as, “the music technology fi eld.” From a foundation in studio and live recording for bands and ven- ues, Nystrom moved to radio, becoming a technical director for Live Wire Radio and Ore- gon Public Broadcasting. If you look for Nystrom at work, which might mean a remote antenna site but usually means Coast Commu- nity Radio’s Tillicum House in Astoria, you might fi nd him repairing something on a pro- grammer’s board, but you’re more likely to fi nd him in deep in the bowels of the studio, in the server room. “That’s where the action is,” says Nystrom. To the naked eye, though, nothing much seems to be going on. There are metal shelves stacked with boxes lit with small lights, and the web of wires connecting the boxes would confuse a spider. A cheap work light clamped to a shelf provides harsh lighting. All the action is by electrons zipping along those wires. Servers (the boxes) receive sat- ellite feeds from public radio stations like NPR and BBC, and fi le servers send Coast Community Radio’s content to automation computers in the KMUN and KCPB studios. Switches fl ip from one source to another, and computers pro- cess the sound before sending it the Megler antenna. Nystrom comments with considerable understatement, “It’s quite a matrix of wiring and signal paths, all of which require maintenance.” If the server room wasn’t enough to keep him busy, Nystrom may be called on to engineer and/or record a pro- gram, or to produce a “spot” for an underwriter. “In the morning I think I have a full day, and then I discover that I have to fi x a turntable and a microphone and record a spot, and that has to be added to the to-do list,” he says. Not that Nystrom is some kind of technology geek. He has a broad range of interests, from sailing to music. He plays piano and guitar, and he pursued a music composition degree with the initial goal of composing for fi lms. “But my friends were playing rock music,” he explains, “and I spent some time playing in bands.” He also discovered “the consistent paycheck was in the technical work rather than the performing side.” A few years ago, about the time Nystrom was growing tired of the independent contractor lifestyle, he made some friends in Astoria while engineering a remote broad- cast for OPB. “I thought, what an amazing place to work. It has history and charm, and I love community radio.” “When I was brought on, it was understood that all the computers had to be updated,” he says. “There were a lot of 12- to 14-hour days and calls in the middle of the night.” Nonetheless, “things are be- ginning to coalesce, and I love what I do here, and the staff, and the amazing volunteer programmers who make it possible.” Above: You’ll often fi nd Graham Nystrom, the new operations manager at Coast Communi- ty Radio, in the server room of the radio sta- tion’s homebase in Astoria. “That’s where the action is,” says Nystrom. Left: As Coast Community Radio’s new oper- ations manager, Graham Nystrom maintains the radio station’s servers and also engineers or records programs.
