Rocky Mountain Update
Amanda Hopp, CBRE

My First NAB

This year was the first year I was able to attend the NAB spring convention. I am grateful for the opportunity. It was a bit overwhelming, and even though it has been two weeks at this writing since I returned, I am still digesting everything. I was only able to have two full days on the floor, and those two days were packed with educational sessions and meetings with various vendors. It was great meeting some of the engineers that are responsible for the operation of our equipment.  We were able to discuss issues we have had and offer suggestions on what we would like to see. We have already discussed it more with them once they all returned to their home office. It was wonderful putting faces to the people I have spoken to many times on the phone or over e-mail. I hope I can continue going each year, but only time will tell.

Tractor Maintenance

I was able to take a Saturday morning last month with my husband and get the Kubota tractor ready for the season. This meant changing the oil, oil filter, fuel filter, air filter and greasing all the various points. It took a couple of hours, but we are good to go for the season. Dylan was also able to do the oil maintenance on our John Deere riding mower. We still need to get the weed eater and push mower ready to go for the season, but those should not be too hard to do. Things are greening up fast and growing. We’ve had a lot of moisture as of late, which prevents us from mowing, so hopefully we can find some time here and there between storms and get some of it done.

New Transmitter!!                           

We received our new transmitter for 95.3 FM, a beautiful Nautel VX-150. Installing it was a chore, which had nothing to do with the design of the transmitter. First off, this is a site that is in the mountains of Colorado. It is about 30 minutes outside of Denver. The road to our site is a steep incline that is very shaded. We typically avoid it in the winter because there is too much snow. When we installed the new antenna for this station back in March, we nearly got stuck going up the road as did the tower crew.

When we took the new transmitter up in April, the snow was deeper and impossible to drive through, so we had to hike up the road. This meant grabbing bags and filling them with the tools we would need and hand carrying the transmitter up to the site so we could do the work. Even then, the screw stick I brought could not finish the job, so I ended up having to do everything with a regular screwdriver, which was a blast. We had to rearrange equipment in the rack only to find that certain cables were not long enough. We called it and the next week (after the NAB trip) we went back, and although we still had to hike up, we had a plan. We made the cables we would need and got everything in the rack where we wanted it. We did notice some anomalies having to do with the filter we have on the frequency. The transmitter does not like the skirts on the filter passband with modulation, so we do get periodic high-VSWR alarms. This is one of the things we were able to discuss with the Nautel engineer.

The other anomaly we found had to do with the modulation loss RF mute. We had it set to 60 minutes on our BW transmitter and duplicated that value on the new Nautel.  However, as soon as we would turn the transmitter on it would immediately mute itself. After going back and forth with engineering, they were able to replicate the problem and found it worked at 24 minutes and eight seconds but not a second more.. So, for now we have it set to 20 minutes while they continue working to correct it in a future software update.

Another thing Nautel is working on is RDS. This transmitter has its own RDS encoder, which is great. However it does not allow DPSTEXT=, which on the Inovonics RDS generators populates both the Radio Text and Program Service fields. Doing that allows all radios to decode DPS or TEXT depending on what the radio uses to display title/artist metadata. Short of using some sort of middleware, there is no way to do both without that DPSTEXT command and Nautel only allows DPS or TEXT for this. They will have an update soon for us to allow the full command, and I think once it has done, we’ll be off to the races. For now, we’re using the Inovonics 730 external RDS generator.

A/C Woes

It is that time of year when the air conditioners will be running more. At the KLTT transmitter site, it runs year-round. Earlier in the year, the main unit would go down and the system would switch to our backup unit. This is immensely helpful to us as it means a trip to the site can wait a little bit if needed. I recently took some time and went to the site and found the filters needed changing and a couple fell inside the unit and the economizer filters fell out of the unit. Those secure oddly, so it was no surprise. I went ahead and changed the filters inside both units and made sure the economizer filters were secured. After that, the main unit seemed to run fine until right before the NAB trip, when I noticed it had again switched to the backup. I was able to get service contractor Wern Air out to look at it, and they found the thermostat was not working properly. It was calling for cool but the unit on the roof did not get the message. He replaced the thermostat, and it was working. We thought we were good. The next day, I went out to set up the Wi-Fi access on the thermostat so I could keep an eye on things, but noticed it was off. The backup A/C unit was running again. We could not get the main unit to come up at all. Wern Air came back out and found the breaker on unit’s low voltage power supply was tripped. He reset it and it worked for about a day. I am currently waiting for them to make another trip out to troubleshoot. Something is causing it to trip and they need to find it.

Upcoming

I have said it the last two months, but mowing will begin any day now. The first week in May we will take the water tank and pull-behind sprayer out to KLVZ and lay down some herbicide to get rid of the Canada thistle before it gets big. We have a project coming up that includes us moving the 250-watt 94.3 FM into the transmitter building. It is currently located in a weatherproof cabinet at the tower base and just does not operate as well as we would like – temperature swings are too great with the transmitter running at 600 watts into a half-wave-spaced antenna. We believe moving it into the main transmitter building will allow it to operate properly. Plus, it would make it easier for us to work on. It is gearing up to be a busy season here in Denver. Hopefully for you, it is not as chaotic. That about covers it for May. I pray you all stay safe and well.

 

 

Random Radio Thoughts
Cris Alexander, CPBE, AMD, DRB

 

NAB 2024

Another NAB spring convention is in the books. I’ve lost count as to how many NAB conventions I  have attended over the years, but this was my first in quite a few years (2016 was the last time if I recall correctly). I had several years of health issues, and then COVID, and then I was trying to avoid getting COVID (again!). This year, the time seemed right, and it was. It was an exhausting trip, but worthwhile, and nobody in my entourage got COVID, thank God! In fact, I haven’t as of this writing heard about anyone getting it at the convention, a sharp contrast from the last few years.

We attended several sessions and spent a few hours on the exhibit floor meeting with manufacturers, engineers and vendors. All that was time well spent, and we checked off everything on our list of  things to do. In addition to that, we had a number of other meetings, and it was great to renew old friendships. It’s always amazing to me how small a universe our business really is, and that is  apparent at the NAB spring show.

So what did we see at the show that was of interest? We got a good look at RCS Zetta and were able to ask a bunch of questions. We will, over the next few years, be transitioning from Nexgen to Zetta,  so it was important for us to really see it work. I plan to do some more in-depth exploration of that platform in the coming months using some materials that RCS provided.

We spent some time with the Nautel folks, asking a lot of questions about the VX-series of low-power FM transmitters. Right before leaving for the show, we took delivery of our first VX transmitter, and our early experience with it raised a number of questions that we were able to explore with  some of Nautel’s engineers. We also requested certain features and modifications.

Over at the Inovonics booth, we spent a productive hour with Ben Barber and one of his engineers,  discussing the new FM and AM monitors as well as other products. Those folks are the best. They’ve come a long way from their humble beginnings making solid-state electronics for Ampex reel-to- reel tape decks! Their name is entirely appropriate for the innovative products that they manufacture.

 

After a session on dashboard displays and metadata, we met with the folks at Broadcast Electronics and discussed TRE+. We even met the Australian engineer that wrote the code. More on this later.

Burk showed us some of their new products, including their Arcadia NOC system and Climate Guard TOC monitor. Exciting stuff.

Over in the Central Hall, we spent some time with Frank Foti and our other friends at Telos. It’s  always great to see them, and they always have some new, innovative and interesting products to show us.

Also in the Central Hall, we met with Jacob and the other folks at Tieline. The new Bridge-IT was the hot new item that we were interested in. Just when you thought a product couldn’t get any better…

We met with vendors, including RF Specialties and BSW, discussing pricing models and new procedures.

And we spent some time at the SBE booth talking with Megan, Chriss, Jim and Cathy about various SBE activities. We regularly interact with those folks throughout the year in our functions as Certification Committee member and local certification chairman, and Amanda as chapter chairman, but it’s always good to see them in the flesh.

At the end of our two-day stay, we were exhausted but excited at all we had seen and learned. We  should be just about recovered by the time next spring’s convention comes around!

Dashboard Displays

A couple of months ago, I wrote in these pages about metadata. Our friends at Radio World picked that column up and ran it. Since then, I’ve done some thinking about metadata, and the conference session further stimulated some thought.

One of the things I got from an interaction with the NAB’s David Layer last fall was that car radio manufacturers (and automakers) handle metadata differently, particularly with RDS. There are two fields of interest: RT (Radio Text), and PS (Program Service). According to various RDS equipment manufacturers, RT should contain title/artist metadata and PS should be a string describing the  radio station. Oh, that it were so!

I recently helped Amanda install a new Nautel VX150 FM transmitter at our Denver Lookout Mountain site. We had hoped to utilize the internal RDS generator so that we could keep the  outboard Inovonics RDS generator on the aux transmitter, but we found that the internal Nautel generator does not have a function that will populate both the RT and PS fields with the same string.  We ran it for a couple of days with just RT populated, and lo and behold, just like David Layer said, a  lot of radios, including the Pioneers in my work car and Amanda’s car, stopped displaying title and artist! As I noted in that earlier column, missing or inaccurate metadata is at best a listener irritation and at worst, a tune-out factor. That could not stand.

The short-term fix was to use the outboard Inovonics generator with the new transmitter. The Inovonics generator has a DPSTEXT= function that populates both fields with the same string.  Nautel needs that same function, and I have submitted a request both with support and  engineering. Hopefully it won’t take long to get the change made.

That little exercise was an eye opener for me. It brought home what I already knew. And I will restate  it here: all our stations should be populating both RT and PS with title/artist metadata. If you’re not  doing that, you’re going to irritate or run off listeners.

While we’re on the subject of dashboard data displays, we have purchased TRE+ licenses for our Chicago/Rockford market stations as well as WDCX-FM in Buffalo, and we hope to get it up and running in the coming days. Right now we are awaiting development of an ingest for Nexgen. We were initially told at the product demos that we could use the RCS Zetta ingest, but when we tried it  in Chicago, it didn’t work. The formatting is different in Nexgen. BE has developed an Nexgen ingest,  but it’s still not quite working.

Mod Monitors

In two of our markets over the past months, we were part of a beta test program for a new AM modulation monitor from Inovonics. The monitor is the 526, and it’s a Jim dandy.

The folks at Inovonics asked a lot of questions during the development phase, and I was very pleased to see the  features and functions that we had asked for in the beta unit. One (or two, really) of those functions were dual high-level RF inputs for main and aux transmitters. Monitor input switching has always been a chore. The 526 not only has two inputs but they are remotely  selectable by GPI, so it’s fairly easy to make the monitor follow the transmitter that’s on the air.

We warned the engineers at Inovonics that there may be situations out there where tube-type transmitters are still in use and the RF pickup mechanism may be… unsophisticated. A hefty voltage could possibly be applied to the inputs of the monitor, so some protection should be in   place. They listened and it is.

There is a great GUI as well as a very readable local screen on the unit. Metering includes RSSI,  positive and negative carrier modulation, demodulated audio level, loudness and MDCL. There is also a spectrum plot that will show any significant issues with emissions. Bandwidth is selectable, as is average or peak detection. And there’s even an oscilloscope display of the IF or demod audio.

The monitor will email you with alarms. It will stream demodulated audio to you over the internet so you can remotely give a listen, and if you live in the AOIP world, you can feed the output to your system via AES67. What more could you ask for?

We’ve got 526 monitors ordered for the AM sites in Birmingham, Buffalo/Rochester, Detroit, Costa Mesa and Oakdale and KLTT in Denver.

Last month, we purchased 551 HD Radio mod monitors for our FM markets. This, too, is an amazing device. We’ll get one of our FM chiefs to tell you all about it sometime.