I mentioned this briefly in my last post, many radio engineers have difficulty parting with things. It comes from being the poor stepchild in the radio station hierarchy. Many times I have loped off an XLR connector thinking: Man, a new Neutrix XLR connector is $4.00, I’ll save this one so I won’t have to genuflect as deeply in front of the owner at the station Christmas party this year. Another one: If I save $100.00 on connectors, perhaps the corporate overlords will grant me my $65K studio project. It is sort of silly, no matter how one looks at it.
The other thing that often occurs is retention of old equipment. It makes some sense to hold onto things that may be used again. Back when we first started installing computer automation systems, I kept the cart machines around for a while, just in case. That old Denon 951 CD player, hey those things were expensive. Otari MX5050B, those were really expensive. It seems almost unfathomable that they are now scrap, although having a working reel to reel machine somewhere in house makes sense. You never know when you might need to grab something from the tape archive.
One thing that I never understood was saving bad parts. Once, when I was trying to repair a BE FM30A transmitter, I thought there was a whole shelf of spares. As I picked up each part to look at it, the letters NG, NFG, or BAD were written it with a sharpie. If one is going to take the trouble to write NFG on something, why not just through it away? Which brings me to this:
Speaks for itself
Found in the parts closet at WEBE/WICC in Bridgeport. WEBE and WICC are going through a major clean up/clean out due to a tornado that struck the building on June 24th. The storm ripped the 15 ton HVAC unit off of the roof, damaged the roof membrane and cause major leaks into the studio space. The company I work for was hired to clean up the engineering space so the water damaged carpet and ceiling tiles can be replaced.
The ITC Delta series cart machines were tanks. Once upon a time, Papst Motoren, GmbH would take those bad motors back and rebuild them. They were expensive motors. All of that being said, ITC has been out of business since 1998 and those times have long past.
Storage space is a luxury item. Keeping equipment for studio spares is a good thing. Equipment that is still valuable, but not usable at that location should be sold or traded. Old equipment that no longer has any use or value should be pitched or recycled. Unless something is a collectors item, or belongs in a museum, throw it out, for Pete’s sake.
With the advent of computer file storage and automation came the unmanned operation. Unfortunately, what often happens with unmanned operations is somehow the engineer becomes responsible for station operation and ends up getting all the phone calls when anything goes wrong:
Traffic forgot to transfer the Sunday log and the station is off the air at 12 am Sunday morning. Call the engineer.
Part time DJ didn’t read the directions on merging logs, call the engineer.
Widows has encountered a problem and needs to reboot, call the engineer.
The server has locked up, call the engineer.
Silence sensor, engineer’s phone number
I got sick of driving to the radio station when things got out of whack with the AudioVault, so I installed VNC on all the machines. From that point, I could log on from home and see what the problem was. It was great, when traffic goobered up the log transfer, I called the traffic director at home and had her go in a fix it. Untrained operators, called the program director. Unfortunately, I don’t have Bill Gate’s phone number, so the windows issues are still on me.
All of this was great as long as my laptop was around. Being married, however, I had to occasionally listen to my wife, who insisted that we not take the laptop to diner or the movies with us. There were those occasional times when it would have been nice.
With the purchase of the Android phone, however, I no longer have to worry about that. Android VNC is a free app that allows an Android phone to connect to any VNC server application. The user can save all the VNC connection information in the phone. It has several mouse options including touch pad, touch pad mouse, mouse track ball, etc. It connects to most VNC servers: incl TightVNC, RealVNC on Win and Linux, x11vnc, and Apple Remote Desktop on OS/X. 0.4.3. Special commands such as ctl-alt-del are available through the menu. It is also fully zoomable. All in all, I can do almost anything with the Android phone that I can do on the laptop. My wife is thrilled.
If you have ever wondered about those ubiquitous NOAA all hazards radio (formerly National Weather Service radio) station, wonder no more. These stations transmit on one of five frequencies in the 162 mhz band with power ranges between 250 and 1,000 watts. There are over 1,000 transmitters scattered throughout the country including outlaying territories like American Samoa, Guam, Northern Marianas, Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico.
The original 1958 plan was for these stations to transmit Aviation and Marine weather forecasts. The system was expanded for use by the general public in the early sixties. Since that time, it has been slowly expanding until, with the most recent survey concluding that NOAA weather radio station can be received by 95% of the US population.
One of those stations in my neck of the woods is due for a transmitter upgrade. WXL-37 uses two Scientific Radio Systems SR-416P transmitters, as a main and a standby. The programming audio comes from the NWS office in Albany, New York, via TELCO line. The old transmitters are tube type made by in 1976. They are reliable transmitters, however, after 34 years of continous use, they are getting a little tired. They are also big and bulky and since Scientific Radio Systems went out of business, not supported.
This year, NOAA is replacing these transmitters with a Nautel NG1000. I have worked with Nautel’s military grade transmitters before and found them to be extremely rugged. Those transmitters are what the original AMPFET design was based on. Nautel is not the only vendor that NOAA is using however, others include Armstrong Transmitters and Crown Broadcast.
NOAA Scientific Radio Systems SR416P VHF transmitters
The Nautel NG1000 is a little thing, taking up about half an equipment rack with an outboard cavity filter and dummy load. There are two drawers, a controller an antenna switch and a remote control. Each drawer is it’s own 1 KW transmitter. The GUI is a on a laptop, which is what I prefer. If there must be some sort of computer driven GUI, then make it removable, so that when lightning strikes the 1,000 foot steel lightning rod 25 feet away, it doesn’t get blown up. Each transmitter is connected to a 30 AMP 240 Volt breaker via a 4 prong twist lock plug.
Nautel NG1000 NOAA transmitter
The antenna for this station near the middle of this 1,000 foot tower, thus the station gets excellent coverage with a TPO of 1,000 watts.
American Tower site, Highland, NY
On a related side note, the computer synthesizedvoices normally heard on NOAA stations took several years to evolve. Remembering when this began back in the mid 1990′s with “Paul.” Several years later, “Craig” and “Donna” were introduced. Finally, “Tom,” which is able to change voice inflections for emphasis. When I was in the Coast Guard, we did high seas synopsis and forecast on HF without aide of computers. At times, especially during typhoon season, it got a little busy in the weather broadcast position. There are advantages and disadvantages to both methods. Personally, I’d rather hear a human voice, especially in a crisis.
Expect to see great news about radio around the corner! Elections are coming! With them will be the first glimpse at new politics in the US, courtesy of the Supreme Court overturning 100 years of precedent regarding corporate campaign contributions. Horay! We will all be bombarded with endless political attack ads set to ominous music.
Radio and TV should see a windfall from this new development, as the election process will now become awash (or rather, more awash) in special interest money donated hand over fist by PACs and big corporate players with something to gain or loose. After all, corporations are people too and campaign contributions are free speech.
During and immediately proceeding the elections, expect the FCC to be out roaming around looking at political files. I think they may see an increase in their take as well because the political rules; they are a little confusing. With the crop of radio station managers these days, or the complete lack of any local mangers, I’d expect a number of finable infractions.
One of the AM station around here that I am familiar with is considering a downgrade, which is to say reduce power and get rid of a directional antenna system in favor of a non-DA antenna. In this particular case, it makes sense, as the station can co-locate with another AM that is closer to the COL by a good distance. The coverage from the new site at reduced power looks to be a good fit. If this can be arraigned, the AM station in question would loose a multi tower AM antenna system that is 50 years old and all the attendant headaches, expenses and labor that goes with it.
Many AM stations that are DA-2 or even DA should consider downgrading to a lower power level and getting rid of their DA system. Directional antenna systems on AM stations are maintenance nightmares. Unfortunately, in the 50′s, 60′s and 70′s, it was often thought that adding power, extra towers to an AM station would give them great swaths of extra coverage. Sometimes it worked out, sometimes it did not. Often what happened was some area was added, but in areas that where nulls toward protected stations, signal strengths went down. What the station ended up with was more towers, more maintenance, monitor points, a sample system, and more expense.
Taking an AM station in the other direction might actually make more sense. Go back to one tower non-directional 1 KW or whatever power can be used in the daytime. Time was when the FCC would only allow certain power levels; .5, 1, 5, 10 and 50 KW. Those were what a new station had to work with. No longer is that the case, any power level can be used so long as it meets interference contours and the city of license contour coverage requirements.
Presunrise authority is normally 500 watts and is available at 6 am, post sunset authority varies but often a PSA extends the on air time to 9 pm in the winter time. For a local radio station, which is what all but the class A AM stations are destined to become, this will be adequate. For a loosing station, it may be that, or turn in the license and sell the land to a developer.
Diplexing on another AM stations tower closer to town is also a good way to get out of maintaining an expensive antenna array with diminishing income.
In previous years, I have had the very pleasurable experience of setting up a fire works show remote with music synchronized to our FM radio station. Ordinarily I don’t go near a remote broadcast, however, this is one of the more intricate broadcasts requiring coordination between the studio, the remote site and the fire works barge anchored 300 yards off shore, out in the Hudson River. The fireworks company, Garden State Fireworks, are consummate professionals and produce a very well choreographed show.
Giving them the synchronizing track on site is not very hard, however, I was surprised to hear that not every radio station does that. In fact, one of our, ah, ehm, Clear Channel competitors from The big Metropolitan Center Nearby could not be bothered to do it for the 4th of July fireworks this summer and last summer too.
The synchronizing track is on the left channel of a CD that Garden State Fireworks created, it is 1200 baud FSK data, 8,N,1, so it is pretty robust.
I thought I would post on how I do it and why. First of all, for the how part, there are two options:
Play the music CD at the remote site and relay broadcast quality music back to the studio without any time delay. Hard to do even with an ISDN line.
Play the music CD at the studio and relay telephone quality audio for the firing track to the remote site from the studio. Have the remote site play the air signal over the local PA system.
Option number 2 is technically far easier than option number 1, although it takes a fair bit of coordination. Also, the sound reinforcement guy didn’t like the air signal idea because the quality of the audio. That is a little nit picky, especially given the fact that much of the music at the fireworks show will be drowned out by the fireworks explosions. In the end, he saw it my way.
Here is a list of equipment needed:
Telco auto answer coupler, such as the Indy Audio
Telco Hybrid, such as the Telos
If the announcer is at the fireworks site, a POTS CODEC such as a Comrex Matrix or blue box
Wireless microphone
Telephone set and cord with RJ-11 connector
Miscellaneous mic cables, power cords, etc
At the remote site, two pots lines from the local phone company, long distance service as required.
Here is the block diagram:
Note, this assumes no delay in the telco network, which under ordinary circumstances using wired, not cellular network, there should not be any. The touchiest part of the whole thing is getting the stage coordinated with the studio during the transition to the remote broadcast. Once that is done, everything else just falls into place.
The firing computer is located on shore next to our broadcast booth. They send the signal out to the barge on a wireless LAN link.
That is the how part. Here is the why (soundtrack is a little low):
That is from three years ago, but you get idea.
Even though I don’t work for these people anymore, I asked if they needed help with the broadcast this year. ”Nope, we got it, thanks.” I will be paying close attention.
On this blogging thing, I decided that I was a little be behind the curve, so I have created a mobile edition of Engineering Radio. If you have a smart phone such as iPhone, Android, Blackberry, or any web enabled cellphone, the mobile web browser should automatically redirect to the mobile edition.
I find it works very well with the android phone and the iPhone. I put one Google ad at the top of each story to defray costs, once again.
Let me know if you have problems, we aim to please.
On a slightly related note, I am also experimenting with a customizable android app that will convert radio station web streams into mobile content. If a radio station is already doing song titles using RDS, that output can be adapted and applied to the android app. I could then market it to individual radio stations, in my spare time.
Ahh, since I posted about my android, a few readers have emailed me and would like to know. If you have tried to stream audio using a smartphone web browser, you have found out that it simply doesn’t work. The web browser is unable to decode the radio station stream because most of them are in AAC, AAC+, HeAACv1 or some other codec. At this point, most people give up on the idea and move on. I, on the other hand, determined that it should be doable.
First, I attempted to down load a few apps, but they either crashed or didn’t do what I wanted or weren’t in the right language, or something.
Clear Channel has something called iHeartRadio, which is a clearing house for mobile users that want to listen to Clear Channel radio streams on their iPhones. I don’t know, once you have heard one Kiss-FM station, you’ve heard them all as far as I am concerned. Most other Clear Channel programming is boring and uninspired.
What I finally ended up doing was going to Moodio and reading up on a few things. Here is a good step by step way to use Moodio to listen to radio station web streams on any mobile device.
Be aware that not all data plans are the same. ATT, Sprint, and others now cap data transfer and charge extra if a subscriber goes over. Know your plan.
Select from there list, the stations you want to listen to. They have many US stations as well as many from Europe. If the station you are looking for is not there, you can request that it be added.
Select the default data rate. Since I have unlimited data, I chose the highest rate for the best sounding audio. Others may want lower data rates so as not to exceed data caps.
The stations on your listen list will be displayed.
That is a lot of steps to take. Somebody has to be very into radio or a radio station to do something like that. A forward thinking radio station or group will be writing or paying somebody to write mobile streaming apps for their stream(s). A forward thinking radio station or group would then feature links to these apps prominently on their web pages. Very prominently if they are in a PPM market. Ahem, very prominently if they are in a PPM market.
That is what a forward thinking radio station would be doing…
I was reading the July 14th radio world, on line because I still haven’t subscribed, and found this blog quoted by the editor. More specifically, on page 4, the editor writes about this post where I debate keeping my radio world subscription. Without actually naming the blog, asks how well he (the editor) is doing his job.
One of my aims in writing this thing is to provoke thought. The fact that the editor of Radio World is asking his readers about the direction the publication is heading is a sign that, at least in one case, I have been successful.
My other aims are:
pass along useful information
tell my story
write stuff (I am compelled to write things)
Regarding Radio World itself, I still read the digital version of the magazine found on the Radio World website. The importance of impartial reporting of radio broadcasting’s technical issues cannot be overstated. These days there are many pressures being applied to Radio in general from things like the FCC, Big Group Radio, MMTC, Ibiquity, NPR, the recording industry and others. Some of these groups do not have the radio industries best interests in mind, but rather are looking to improve their take. Indeed, some of the schemes proposed are technically flawed or down right destructive. Biased reporting degrades the integrity of any publication and diminishes it’s value and when it comes to the most read technical trade magazine, that is alarming.
I applaud Radio World for it’s recent publication of articles that bring to light HD-Radio’s technical issues. That is a welcome development and such things should continue. Technical writers need to be technically minded people, not someone that retypes press releases. When it comes to new technology, hard question need to be asked and answered, that is a reporter’s job after all.
I finally broke down and purchased a smart phone. Instead of the ubiquitous iPhone however, I opted for a HTC Incredible Android phone. Not that I have any distaste for Apple, Inc. Rather, it is more because of the lack of ATT coverage in areas where I travel and the new data plans from ATT.
The phone is great, I enjoy the functions, the GPS navigation tool, gmail, news, and all the other apps. It fills many roles while I am out gallivanting around earning a living.
I have tried Pandora in the past on my computer. I found it to be okay, not great. I guess my main issue was it seemed a little boring just listening to music. It was good music, and when I interacted with the programming, voting a song up or down, the music selections got better. But it was distracting to interact while I was trying work on the computer and in the end, I turned the volume down an it became background noise.
In the car, I figured, things would be different. I could listen to Pandora the same way I listened to my car radio. Lots of music would be great and not distracting at all.
Except… I found it to be… boring. The music was great but the whole thing lacks personality. I suppose we are blessed around here with several radio stations that play new music. With Pandora there was almost no new music, even if I created a new music radio station. Further, it seemed like something was missing: human interaction. I enjoy hearing the deeeejay talking about some band factoid or some such. Just listening to music endlessly left me wanting something more. Perhaps that is just me.
Whilst on the road to various places, I like to listen to WEQX in Manchester, VT; WDST, Woodstock, NY; WKZE, Salisbury, CT; WXPK, White Plains, NY. All of those stations have personality and play great music. They also stream audio, which means I can listen to them on my phone.
So Pandora gets a meh, the phone gets a thumbs up.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
~1st amendment to the United States Constitution
Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.
~Benjamin Franklin
...radio was discovered, and not invented, and that these frequencies and principles were always in existence long before man was aware of them. Therefore, no one owns them. They are there as free as sunlight, which is a higher frequency form of the same energy.
~Alan Weiner
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes the freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers
~Universal Declaration Of Human Rights, Article 19
On this blogging thing, I decided that I was a little be behind the curve, so I have created a mobile edition of Engineering Radio. If you have a smart phone such as iPhone, Android, Blackberry, or any web enabled cellphone, the mobile web browser should automatically redirect to the mobile edition.
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