There was an irony to the ABC Radio Brisbane story last week about a century old gramophone being restored and donated back to the station that once would have been connected to a microphone to transmit music to audiences. Who would have thought that a week later contemporary radio stations across Australia might be forced to attempt to do the same thing?

Below is triple j‘s Abby Butler manually playing the news theme into the mic off their phone:

The worldwide significant outage, affecting radio’s automated playout software responsible for playing music and pre-recorded content such as interviews, commercials and other segments, brought out the best at some stations, who improvised with what they did have available to still put a show to air.

As this wasn’t an “emergency situation” as such, in that lives and livelihoods were merely inconvenienced, not threatened, I wanted to celebrate stations and presenters who made lemonade from lemons, starting with the Nova Network‘s Ricki-Lee, Tim and Joel:

ARN‘s Star 102.7 in Cairns decided to try the live DJ route with hilarious results:

2GB‘s Chris O’Keefe was sans pre-records and ads so had to talk for the entirety of his drive shift:

Trevor Long, the Technology Commentator & Speaker, was kept very busy on the phone across radio networks all evening.

Hope 103.2 had Stephen Wilkinson (main picture) panelling the emergency program and reading from the paper.

NEWFM was proudly unaffected:

And while this isn’t radio, the Townsville Bulletin‘s response was my favourite of all:

How’s things going where you are? Would love to keep updating the inventiveness of stations and people during this outage.

Jen Seyderhelm is a writer, editor and podcaster for Radioinfo. You can email her at [email protected]