This article is about 20 years too late. Back in the late 1990's, I worked for a rural radio station -- they were in the process of moving to full automation,

This article is about 20 years too late. Back in the late 1990's, I worked for a rural radio station -- they were in the process of moving to full automation, and was working on getting the country station in full automation: I had a background in Audio/Video Productions (and computers/electronics), so, I spent a lot of time working on the automation (old Harris Automation System, vs the rest of the cluster using AudioVault from BEI). There was someone in the studio from 5AM Until Midnight (sometimes later if there were west coast ballgames) Monday-Friday: We'd do the news at the top and bottom of the hour (each station in the cluster got sent back to network audio at different times -- 4:15, 6:00, 6:30 after the hour, which required some really good pacing and reading skills to not let the other stations know you're pushing something back to network), cut live and recorded weather for other stations, and then answer the phone/distribute faxes/etc. I learned a lot about RF and Broadcast engineering during this time, and it honestly was the catalyst to push me into electrical and computer engineering (admittedly, restoring a VAX/VMS with the station engineer was the biggest driver). I can identify a "Satellite" station from a mile away. The liners sound different -- if they even match up -- the clocks at the top and the bottom of the hour are sync'ed with :30:00 and 00:00. Sunday mornings was religious programming (the "hangover" shift), and we'd do Friday night Football for High School and Saturday/Sunday College and Professional Football games, and Basketball games during the winter months. Add in some NASCAR and Indy racing (on the country music station), and there were plenty of weeks where I had 50/60/70 hours (at 17, I thought I was financially set -- lest I know that I was completely wrong!) To this day, the group of stations that I grew up with are still using split ownership to get past FCC rules about station clustering (but, all ran out of the same building).