business – Page 2 – Engineering Radio

The last AM station

AM; it has a future or not? I cannot make up my mind sometimes. As some AM stations can and do make a profit, many others do not. Truth be told, the engineering effort that goes into an AM directional antenna is becoming a black science. And some people may say, “oh, but that gives you job security,” but that is not usually how it works. Instead of paying somebody more money (or any money) to maintain something, the business philosophy these days seems to be to chuck the baby out with the bath water. Because after all, if not AM then FM right? Yes, of course! Except, the very thing that happened to AM is happening to FM too. Increasing noise floors, jamming signals into every possible nook of the frequency spectrum, no thought toward technical facilities and infrastructure, and horrible, horrible programming ~~will result~~ has resulted in the decline of listening for FM too. Mark my words and the date; FM broadcasting will suffer the same fate as AM if current trends continue.

How will it end? I would hazard with more of a whimper than a bang. I imagine something like this:

One day, in the not very distant future, at an AM station somewhere, the transmitter faults and goes off the air. Chip, the computer guy, goes in the back room, moves a bunch of cleaning supplies, cases toilet paper, a garbage can and the remote gear out of the way so he can reach the ON button on that box the old guy told him about. The big box makes some clunking noises and comes on for a second, but then the fault light called “VSWR” or something comes on and the transmitter shut off again.

Chip, the computer guy, remembering what the old guy said about that big tall thing behind the building, pushes the back door open. What used to be a field is now completely overgrown with weeds, brush, and trees. He follows the pipe from the back of the building, through the prickers until he comes to an old fence, which is falling down. He pushes on the locked gate and it falls off the hinges. Inside the fence, there is a rusty tower and a white box. Finding the box unlocked, he opens it and sees a baffling array of metal coils, copper tubes, and black round things. He sees that one of the black round things is cracked in half and black goop is coming out of it. The computer guy takes a picture with his cellphone and emails it to the market manager/vice president of sales.

A few minutes later, the the market manager calls back and Chip tries to explain what is going on, stating the the transmitter went off and the black thing in the box by the tower looks broken. The market manager/vice president of sales asks “Has anyone called and complained?” Chip says no, not that he is aware of. The market manager says, “Eh, fuck it leave it off.”

The end.

Effective Communication

Communications men, US Navy WWII Pacific Theater

In almost every broadcast company I have ever worked for, there is always some communication dysfunction between management and the technical staff. It is perhaps, inevitable given the different cultures. Most managers come from a sales background, where everything is negotiable. The engineering field is fixed in the physical world, where everything has two states; right/wrong, on/off, true/false, functional/non-functional, etc. Try to negotiate with a non-functional transmitter, let me know how that works.

Engineering eggheads often couch their conversations in technical terms that tend to confuse the uninitiated. While those terms are technically correct if I said “Радио генератор инвалида.” You’d say “Huh?” and rightly so. If the receiving party does not understand the terms used, it is ineffective communication.

The other mistake I often see, which irritates me beyond reason, is long rambling e-mails or other documents that fail to come to the point, directly or otherwise. Time is a precious commodity, wasting other people’s time with long needless diatribes is ineffective communication. Likely, the recipient will not read the entire thing anyway. If a person gains a reputation for generating huge amounts of superfluous verbiage, then it only becomes so much background noise to be filtered out. When I was in the service, I went to a class called “Message Drafting.” This was back in the day when everything was sent via radio. The gist is to get the complete idea across to the recipient with as few words as possible. Think: “ENEMY ON ISLAND. ISSUE IN DOUBT.” Clear and concise, six words paint the picture.

The key to effective communication is to know your audience. If you are writing a white paper for a bunch of MIT graduates, use all the appropriate technical terms. More often than not, however, as broadcast engineer, our intended audience is more likely station management and/or ownership. Their backgrounds may be in sales and finance.

In order to get those technical ideas into the heads that matter, a good method is to use the lowest common denominator. If the general manager is a formerly used car salesman, car analogies might work. The transmitter has 200,000 miles on it, the tower is rusting out like a ’72 Pinto, and so on. Almost anything at a transmitter site can be compared to a vehicle in some way. Find out what the manager’s background is then figure out what language he or she speaks and use it. You may say, “But he is the manager, it is up to him (or her) to understand this stuff.” You are not incorrect, but that is not how the world works.

Secondly, use brevity in communications. Managers are busy, engineering is but one aspect of the radio station’s operations. If written, provide a summary first, then expound upon it in follow-up paragraphs if required. If you are in a meeting, give a brief presentation and then wait for questions. Always have a high ballpark figure in mind when the inevitable “How much?” question comes along.

Don’t assume that the manager will follow through with your ideas up the chain of command, always follow up a few days later. If it is important, continue to ask, in a friendly way, if there is any progress on the issue.

There are so many ways to communicate these days that failure to communicate is almost unfathomable. One additional thought, if you find yourself out of the loop, find a way to get back in or you’ll find yourself looking for a new job.

Simulcasting: The sound of broadcasters running out of ideas

There seems to be a growing trend lately; Stations that had previously separate programming being simulcast. There are two big ones around here: WGY and WHRL and WPLJ and WXLM.

Lets begin with the first one: WGY, now WGY AM/FM.

WGY (Clear Channel Communications) has been the regional powerhouse since it’s inception in 1922. It consistently ranks in the top 5 Arbitron ratings for Albany/Schenectady/Troy NY and is well-received in the community. It carries the standardized Clear Channel talk radio format of Limbaugh, Beck, Hannity, etc. As of September 20th, WHRL 103.1, class A licensed to Albany changed its call sign to WGY-FM and began simulcasting WGY 100%. 103.1’s 60 dBU contour is entirely within WGY 2.5 MV/M contour.

It would seem that radios, even bad radios, would have no problems picking up WGY’s signal within the 103.1 listening area. According to Clear Channel Management:

The decision to simulcast our 24-hour news/talk format on the FM will open up our content to an even wider audience. Despite the huge audience we currently enjoy, the fact is a significant portion of the Capital Region audience never thinks to visit the AM dial.

There is some small amount of truth to that statement; the younger segment of the population generally never listens to AM. Yes. The reasons, however, are not just because it is AM and they are prejudiced. More likely, there is nothing on the AM dial that interests them. Satellite-syndicated talk is not everyone’s cup of tea, so to speak.

The other side of the coin is the former WHRL had an alternative rock format, which never did all that great (I have a theory on why Alternative Rock, AAA, and other such formats never get good ratings, but not right now). They also had a station staff, which by the time they pulled the switch, was down to one person. The Capital District Business Review notes:

According to BIA/Kelsey, a media research firm in Chantilly, Va., WGY did about $2.8 million in revenue in 2009. WHRL took in about $875,000.

Which is really not bad for a class A FM in market #63, during a recession. Apparently, not good enough, however.

The second example in our little story is that of WPLJ and WXLM. WPLJ 95.5 (Citadel Broadcasting) is of course one of the heritage FM stations in Market #1. WXLM 104.7, now known as WELJ broadcast from the far eastern end of Long Island (Market #18), so the respective coverage areas do not overlap. Prior to September 24th, that station was doing a News/Talk format.

That end of Long Island is pretty affluent, a local (unique) station might even prosper. In fact, up until 2003 it did quite well for itself, then known as “The Beach.” However, nothing lasts forever, and in 2003 Citadel Broadcasting purchased the station.

It has gone through a number of changes since then, most recently a syndicated news talk format. Unless I am missing it completely, during the last ratings period, this station did not even show up in the book. As of September 21, it began to simulcast the co-owned out-of-market AC station, likely for the drive-by PPM listeners in it. Again, no word on the fate of the former radio station’s staff (if there was one).

So what gives? Consolidators have already cut staff levels to the bone with voice tracking, syndication, and automation. Even a voice-tracked syndicated station still needs some staff members; the occasional morning show, somebody to do promotions, and some form of program direction due to things like music logs and other such behind-the-scenes work. Staff require salaries and salaries are expensive. Anyone that has ever looked at a company’s P&L can tell you, salaries are the number one expense. If, however, the entire format is blown out, and something can be plugged in to fill the void that costs nothing and has no overhead and no staffing, well, now they are really saving money. That money from reduced expense is much better (far easier) than actually earning more money and it goes right to the bottom line.

This never-ending drive to reduce expenses at the expense of everything else drives programming quality and thus entertainment value down. Who wants to listen to the radio and be bored? Not I. This continuing trend is what will ultimately spell the end of terrestrial radio.

The Problem with the Phone Company

It they don’t care all that much about traditional phone service anymore. Through attrition, they have reduced their tech workforce to about half what it was 15 years ago. All of the infrastructure; overhead cables, buried cables, office frames, switching equipment, is getting old. Some of the cabling around here, both buried and overhead, is the original stuff, installed 100 years ago. Because it is expensive to replace, they don’t want to change it out, opting to simply limp along, swapping out pairs when a line or circuit goes dead.

I will be surprised if the traditional wired telephone network still exists in ten years. Think about it, ten years ago were just heaving a collective sigh of relief that Y2K turned out to be nothing, remember that?

For the local phone giant, offering 3 in one (telephone service, internet service, and cable TV) is more appealing than servicing their existing accounts, including HICAP (high capacity) data circuits like T-1, BRI&PRI ISDN, etc. Much less so for a POTS line, which, good luck if you really need it fixed right away, we’ll be over when we get to it, just keep your paints on mister.

I’ve written about this before. A particular station for my former employer uses a T-1 circuit to relay the program from the studio to the transmitter site. This is fairly common in larger metropolitan areas where 950 Mhz STL frequencies are not available, nor is a line of sight between the studio and transmitter site obtainable.

Back in 2002, when the company was in the process of acquiring said station, I recommended a 950 Mhz STL. There was an existing STL license, fully coordinated, that came with the main station license. Only the equipment was needed. No, I was told by the CFO, we will do a T-1, thank you very much. I argued my point, saying that putting our radio station exclusively in the hands of the phone company was a bad idea. We would have problems with outages and service. No, said the CFO, this is New York, all the radio stations do that. Not exactly, New York is about 15 miles SOUTH of here, this is Westchester, the cables are old, and a lot of them are overhead, which exposes them to lightning, vehicle damage, water, etc. There will be service issues if we rely solely on a T-1.

No, he said, “We are using a T-1 and that is final.” I hate to say I told you so, but… Let us examine the history between then and now:

Date of outage	Date of restoration	Total days
April 5, 2004	April 9, 2004	4
September 8, 2006	September 10, 2006	2
May 2, 2007	May 5, 2007	3
August 27, 2009	September 4, 2009	10
September 5, 2010	September 15, 2010	10

Fortunately, I wrote all this down in the transmitter site log. I was able to check it yesterday when I went to restore the station to normal operation after the latest T-1 failure.

During those periods, we used BRI-ISDN, which is okay but it carried the same phone cable. It is likely to go down if there is a major cable interruption. We have installed a second T-1 circuit, which fails when the other T-1 circuit fails. We have used 3G wireless sprint card and streamed audio from the internet. That didn’t sound great, but we did clear inventory. We have moved one of the AudioVault servers to the transmitter site, and updated it once a day via the shoe leather network, that sounded great, but it was difficult to do. We have borrowed an ethernet connection from another tower site tenant onsite and streamed internet audio via a wired connection, which sounds pretty good.

Still, the best thing to do would be to establish our own STL path to the transmitter and get rid of the T-1 lines.

The Problem with the Phone Company is they are not all that interested in simple copper circuits anymore. Now, there is something called FiOS, which, it would appear is a much better profit center than ordinary copper circuits.