I am sure if I lived in DC and heard it, I would just tune past it to the next stop on the AM band. The TIS's I've heard that were the most interesting were the NOAA repeaters off the Oregon Coast, which sometimes make their way up to my region of the PNW. Most other ones are just boring tape loops. I can only imagine how dull that is to the average listener, regardless of the tape loop being played.
Who really pays attention to TIS's, anyway? Nobody? Maybe just MW DXers? And if you hear one that seems off-kilter, who's really going to report it?
I've heard jittery, sped up speech noises on a local TIS for the past couple weeks, and I'm not about to go through the effort to search out the exact website try to inform whatever municipality that their computer-operated TIS is glitching and sounds like a little girl stuttering on helium. And if I, a radio aficionado, am not about to do such, why would the average listener? And the FCC is looking for pirates, and dealing with other matters. TIS's are probably very, very low on their enforcement totem pole.
It's interesting that the department responsible for the TIS in the article didn't bother to check it, but maybe -- like the article suggests -- they have a bunch of them out there and just forgot about it. I doubt most municipal or highway personnel are all that aware of them.
The coolest thing about this article, of course, is that someone actually wrote about the station. A bit of 2013 history, like a time warp, still broadcasting in 2021. It's too bad they took it off the air.
www.thedrive.com
