Live radio has a cruel property: nobody cares about the transmission you missed three seconds ago. They care about what's on the air right now. We learned that the hard way when a handful of mobile listeners on flaky LTE started hearing audio that was already old news — everyone sounding like they were broadcasting from a time machine set to "yesterday."
Conference-call apps solve this by buffering everything and catching up later. CB radio is not a conference call. Half-duplex keyed transmit means bursts of speech, not a continuous two-way stream. When a listener falls behind, the humane move is not to replay every missed second — it's to snap back to the present.
We landed on a live-first posture: if you can't keep pace, you skip ahead to what's on the air now. That sounds brutal until you sit in a busy channel and realize delayed audio is worse than a tiny glitch. Operators notice a half-second hitch. They do not notice — and actively resent — hearing a punchline after the room has already moved on.
The hard part is making that feel invisible. Congested listeners shouldn't punish the whole channel. Recovery shouldn't require a full page reload — because nothing kills community radio faster than "turn it off and on again" as a daily ritual.
We're still tuning the ergonomics around slow networks and background tabs. But the lesson stuck: treat live channel audio like a radio signal, not a file download. If you're behind, you catch up by skipping ahead — not by playing every moment you missed while the band kept talking without you.