June 2011 – Page 2 – Engineering Radio

Engineering Radio is Two Years Old

Happy birthday to us! I was looking through the past posts of this blog and found much of it still relevant today. There were some older video posts where the videos are no longer available on youtube, those were deleted.

I continue to look for subjects to blog about while keeping the subject matter pertinent to broadcast engineering or some aspect of radio in general. With so many things going on, this can be hard to do.

Here are a few stats:

Average daily page views: 400
Average unique visitors, daily: 240
Average returning visitors, daily: 37
RSS subscribers: 73
Total posts: 323
Total comments: 911
Total $pam comments: 52,403
The average number of comments per post: 2.8
The average number of $pam comments per post: 162

This brings me to this; I use an aggressive $pam filter. There is no way that I would be able to keep up with the number of junk comments received otherwise. If you have posted a legitimate comment and it doesn’t show up after a period of time, e-mail me and I’ll look into it. Chances are very good that some legitimate comments have been deleted by the $pam filter, for which I apologize.

Many of my unique visitors come from Google searches which is strange considering its page rank is 0/10.

I continue to enjoy blogging about the everyday life of a broadcast engineer and thank all of my readers and subscribers for their interest. It is entertaining and enlightening to read all of your comments and e-mails. For as long as there is interest, the writing project will proceed.

AM radio sucks! It’s horrible, sounds terrible and should be turned off!

This is a youtube video of a Police song from the 1980s received via skywave and recorded off-air on an AM radio.

Video Description:

The classic 1983 #1 smash hit, as received in analog C-Quam AM Stereo… in Japan… via nighttime skywave in the Tokyo area, roughly 500 miles away from Sapporo (ed: where the station is located). The audio quality is among the best I’ve ever heard from analog AM radio, thanks in large part to an excellent wideband receiver, very quiet band conditions, and the Orban Optimod-AM 9100 audio processor being used by HBC Radio to its maximum extent: 12.5 kHz audio bandwidth with stereo enhancement added (above and beyond the amount naturally provided by the matrix processing used by AM Stereo).

Absolute trash, I tell you. Just awful.

Of course, I know several FM stations around here that wished they sounded as good. Naturally, Japan, they have sought to minimize night-time interference problems by limiting the number of stations on the air and enforcing the rules and regulations in place to protect those stations on the air. They also seem to allow greater bandwidth, out to 12.5 KHz in spite of the narrower channel allocations (9 KHz in ITU regions I and III, vs 10 KHz here in the US, ITU region II). One other thing to note, there is no digital buzz saw occupying several channels of the broadcast spectrum. Keep in mind, this was received in Tokyo, likely a very high noise environment.

I was trying to find out the power level of the transmitter, the call sign is JOHR in Sapporo Japan, frequency is 1287 KHz. HBC is the Hokkaido Broadcasting Company, a privately held company. The state-run radio outlets in Japan are NHK, which has several radio and TV stations throughout the islands.

Anyway, AM is dead. Killed by the very owners of the broadcasting companies themselves with help from the NAB. They are the ones that petitioned the FCC to loosen up the allocations and allow more and more stations to be crammed into the band. That is old news. The new news is same forces that killed AM radio are diligently working their magic on the FM band as well. More stations, translators, digital IBOC nonsense that doesn’t work, more of everything. After all, more is better. Until it is not. Then it’s too late.

Longwave Radio, Atlantic 252, Ireland

We don’t have any long-wave stations in this country, other than the government’s failed attempt at using long-wave (WGU-20) for emergency communications in the 1970s and 80s. In Europe, Longwave continues to be used, mainly because of its excellent ground wave propagation can cover large distances without fading or interference. Several have closed in recent years due to the expense of maintaining tall radio towers and higher-quality programming sources.

This is a video of the transmitter site for Atlantic 252 in Ireland. Atlantic 252 went defunct in 2001, however, the frequency is still in use by RTE radio 1.

500KW is quite a bit of power. The antenna mast is 248 meters, or 813 feet tall. Interestingly, RTE discontinued service on MW (AKA AM broadcast or standard broadcast) but left this signal on the air. Reportedly, this station has less power but better coverage.

WICC WEBE damaged tower removal

Damaged in last year’s F1 tornado, this thirty-foot Rohn 25-G tower needed to be removed from the roof. It actually went faster than I thought it would, the worst part being moving the 4-foot tower sections down to the salvage truck via elevator. Naturally, the day we choose to do this is the same day that one of the two elevators servicing the seventh floor is out of order.

Damaged Rohn 25G STL tower on roof of studio — Damaged Rohn 25G STL tower on the roof of the studio

This was the same tornado that picked up a twenty-ton rooftop air conditioner and deposited it in the parking lot. Luck would have it that no one was killed or injured.

Using a circular saw with a metal blade, a sawsall and a hand grinder, the tower was cut up into four foot sections. The sections, brackets, and tower base were taken to the scrap yard and disposed of.

Tower and transmission lines ready to be removed from the roof

There were several lengths of unused 7/8 inch foam coax, broken antennas, RG-59- RG-58, RG-6, rotor cable, etc that we cleaned off of the roof and tower.

A good little project to have completed.

The studio build-out for WEBE is also nearly done. August will mark one year of our company’s involvement at WICC/WEBE. I was looking around today and comparing the difference between when we started to now. Many things have been done.