Monday, October 16, 2017

Hoagland's radio show goes from bad to worse to FAIL

Back story: In July 2015 Richard Hoagland, the former museum curator who hasn't had a job since the 1970s, launched a two hour, five-nights-a-week radio show The Other Side of Midnight, live on  Dark Matter Digital Network, and archived for members only. This blog commented several times as he first lost his best producer, Ross Campbell, then got kicked off DMDN, went to KCAA-AM for a while and thence to the cheaper WBCQ ($50/hr cf. $150.) In October 2016 the show folded.

        It was back in June this year, on a reduced "weekend only" schedule. In July the membership fee was doubled from $5 to $10 per month. From 15 July until 8 oct there should have been 26 shows, but seven of them were cancelled for various reasons, mostly technical issues. It became obvious that Hoagland was no longer paying a professional engineer.

        A week ago the announcement was made that Hoagland was abandoning the radio medium and falling back on the oh-so-cheap ($99/month) BlogTalk Radio. The announced show for Saturday night 14th October was Barbara Honegger: Historic 9/11 breakthroughs. NB: BlogTalkRadio is supposedly foolproof.

        What follows is a verbatim transcript of the train-wreck that ensued. The "Keith" referred to is not Keith Rowland of DMDN, the original tech. manager of the show,note 1; but Keith Laney, an imaging expert who had guested on the show numerous times. Laney has no known experience at managing radio or even podcasting.

00:05 BH: "I'm hearing music."
RCH: "Yes, yes, you and I should not be going out over the air."
00:20 RCH: "Keith can you hear me?" [MUSIC VOLUME INCREASES]
[..?..] Can you call Keith and tell him..?? I need Skype
00:58 RCH: "OK, well, that's good. ?..? should hear it.
01:09 RCH: "OK, Barbara, what are you hearing?
BH: "I keep hearing music."
RCH: "No, I mean, when I called on you, you said you could not hear. What could you not hear?"
BH: "You mean when we were on the air?"
RCH: "Yes, yes, what could you not hear?
BH: "No, I can hear everything but there is a delay. When I spoke..."
RCH: "Ohhh it'''s a delay. Keith... You.. you're cutting out horribly, I can't hear you.
01:40 BH: "You talking to me?"
RCH: "I'm talking to Keith. My engineer. My temporary engineer. [LOUD THROAT-CLEARING] Keith I cannot hear you.  ... OK. Well obviously we can't solve this so we're gonna have to go to a back-up show, and we will recycle the ?show?, have the proper filters in place by tomorrow night. Guys I am so sorry. .. All right?
BH: "So are we on tomorrow night?"
RCH: "OK, I'm hearing a terrible delay. So this is a technical catastrophe. I guess....?? But, er... yeah, let's try and recycle the ?show? for tomorrow night."
BH: "Yes, that's fine."
RCH: "OK, good. So let me goodnight you, and then goodnight the music. And... good night everyone, and we'll go to a backup show, and tomorrow night same time, same bat-channel. We will try it without the echo. OK?"
BH: "Same time, same place. Tomorrow."
RCH: "Yep, yep.Thank you."
BH: "OK, all right."



[Insert Homer Simpson D'oh icon]

        The 21st October show was CANCELLED, Hoagland complaining that after "hours and hours of checking" the settings suddenly changed. Personally I don't find that credible. However, he did get through an entire 3-hour show on 22nd October—Robert Morningstar commenting on the Las Vegas massacre. Now why, I hear you ask, would AM* be considered an expert on the topic, considering that he can't even get the name of the perp right? He first called him Steven Pollack, then half-corrected it to Steven Paddock. The actual name is Stephen Paddock.

Thanks to Bellgab commenters "Nobody" and "Pablo Smash" for info

===========================/ \=============================
[1] The very first three words ever heard on the show were from Rowland. The words were: "I said go!"


Chris said...

I was going to write that you cannot put a price on Richard Hoagland's apathy and contempt for his fanbase. But apparently you can; $9.95 every 30 days.

astroguy said...

Sometimes-guest Andrew Currie claims that the show is "under attack." Funny how no other show that covers similar or even more controversial topics doesn't have these issues. When will RCH ever realize that sometimes the problem isn't OTHER people, it's HIM?

Chris Lopes said...

He didn't hire a real engineer because he doesn't have the money for it. He doesn't have the money because there really aren't enough Hoagie fans with disposable income to support this clown show. Maybe pissing in George Noory's corn flakes wasn't such a great career move.

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the heads-up. I will listen if he has shows anymore.
Just like that chewed-up old plastic dinosaur from your childhood
you just can't quite throw away, RCH has a place down at the bottom
of my bureau drawer next to the Dungeons and Dragons magic item index

Bill Belcher said...

Hi Expat, I was just listening to the radio clip form bell gab that you linked, I didn't see a reason why they cancelled because toward the end of the clip they seemed to have got the technical issues sorted! ....going off topic but still on RCH, I have a copied an interesting YouTube clip of RCH spouting the same stuff and more conspiracy predictions from the mid 90's, from an art bell show. I didn't realise that he predicted(wrongly) that the mars pathfinder would magically loose radio contact then be ' found again', ..must have been 1996 before pathfinder landed. Bill

expat said...

Bill: I think there was either an echo or a delay we weren't hearing.

So, so many of his predictions from those days were pure bullshit. This blog has cited many of them over the years...

Bill Belcher said...

Yes you are right! Sorry I forgot the clip,
Yes I've listened to these too way back 20'years ago, its more amusing now to hear him rattle on the same old stuff!
On his blog radio there is a picture of him with a huge medallion, is this the Angstrom medal that he was mistakenly given?

Anonymous said...

Not exactly on topic, but I thought this was an interesting story from a credible source:

Maybe Hoagie should try one of these. Apparently, it has way more listeners.

Chris said...

Cheers Anon, interesting article. If you head over to and enter the "The Buzzer" frequency of 4625 kHz, sure enough there it is sending out its high-energy weather control rays. Oops, you didn't read that bit.

Binaryspellbook said...

I am actually beginning to feel sorry for him.

expat said...

On the up side, Sunday night's show went OK other than a long delay introducing the guest during which we heard Hoagland say "Why can't I hear him.... dum... dum... Oh, that's why. Too many buttons here."

Anonymous said...

Thanks Chris.

Now that is very, very impressive!

I recommend everyone to give it a try.

393 simultaneous users of the one receiver, while I was on there. I wonder what its limit is - and what would happen if someone set up a competing transmitter on the same frequency, and jammed The Buzzer signal? Would it start raining [nuclear warheads]?

Chris said...

Anon, aye it's v impressive, I'd never heard of these Software Defined Radios. It was that article you posted which prompted me to see if Ham-Radio-as-a-Service was a thing. You can buy boxes and dongles that do the job, and you just need an antenna, anything from a small whip to a huge rod. I found a big list of them all over the place with various setups. They all seem to use some version of the same interface, some a little more advanced than others. Very interesting!

Let's hope The Buzzer stays buzzing away for a few more years! The article you linked includes a couple of other oddities which you can hear on these SDRs.

George Benkel said...

You may warn people that ANY type of Shortwave receiver may be rendered next to useless in an electrically noisy area - such as an Urban setting.

Anon42 said...

I guess that's the real beauty of WebSDR!

You can "tune in" to just about any WebSDR in the world, located just about anywhere, and hear what it picks up locally, without leaving the comfort of your own comfy computer chair. So, you could listen to The Buzzer from the West Coast, the East Coast, from England, Australia or wherever there's a working Shortwave WebSDR.

Of course, the downside is that when the SHTF and the Internet (or your connection to it) goes down, you're right back to whatever you've got immediately to hand. Up the creek without a paddle. That's my warning, George.

Here's to prepping!