The Newsletter of Crawford Broadcasting Company Corporate Engineering

The Newsletter of Crawford Broadcasting Company Corporate Engineering

The Newsletter of Crawford Broadcasting Company Corporate Engineering DECEMBER 2014 • VOLUME 24 • ISSUE 12 • W.C. ALEXANDER, CPBE, AMD, DRB EDITOR Winding Down and Looking Ahead engineering personnel complement. Last spring, we It’s always a bit of a relief when we get into made some radical changes in Chicago, bringing December of each year, that is if we have gotten all Rick Sewell back to Crawford Broadcasting of our projects done for the year. Thankfully that is Company as Engineering Manager of that incredibly the case this year. There are no eleventh-hour busy market. Mack Friday, the longtime Senior projects to wrap up. Everything is done and we can Engineer in that operation, retired at the end of begin thinking about the coming year and its projects September, and Art Reis departed to pursue his and demands. contract engineering business. In Detroit, another The budget is finished and finalized for busy and important CBC market, Brian Kerkan came 2015. We pared it down quite a bit from the original aboard as Chief Engineer. What a difference that has draft but kept the essence in place. The big project for made in the technical excellence of that operation! 2015 is the transition to Wheatstone AOIP Last month, Bill Agresta left KBRT to infrastructure in several key markets, specifically pursue other interests. We wish Bill all the best and KBRT (Southern California), Chicago, Detroit and look forward to a continued good relationship with Birmingham. We will also complete the transition to him. We have gone to a contract engineering model AOIP in Denver where the on-air Nexgen in that market. workstations have yet to be converted. WDJC-FM in Mike Duffy should be a familiar name to Birmingham will get a new Nautel GV40 transmitter. readers of these pages. Mike was studio contract We tabled RCS Zetta (replacement for Nexgen) until engineer for KBRT from 1987 until 2012, when Bill next year. There is simply too much to do in 2014 to Agresta moved from Catalina Island to the mainland give this omnibus project the time and resources it and took over those duties. Mike has come back will require. aboard as studio contract engineer, and we look In addition to the Wheatstone AOIP forward to working with him going forward. transition, we have considerable work to do at KBRT Over on the transmitter side of the KBRT to get the studio facility outfitted for a duplex satellite operation, we hired Fred Fulmer as transmitter feed for both the KNSN simulcast/separate contract engineer. Fred comes highly recommended programming and the feeds to the KBRT transmitter by our good friends at EMF Broadcasting. He has site (STL backup), KCBC and KKPZ. The equipment lots of AM and AM directional experience, and he for this is all on hand and will likely be installed early has already jumped in to deal with a number of next year. longstanding maintenance issues at the Oak Flat I will be sending out budget documents to transmitter site. our market engineering managers shortly so they We welcome Mike and Fred and anticipate a know what to be thinking about and planning for. In long and profitable working relationship with these the meantime, December will hopefully provide a professionals. time for us all to catch our breath before we dive into Finally, last month we welcomed Angella 2015’s projects. Thomas aboard as IT Coordinator at CBC-Chicago. For her own reasons, Angella took another position Changes and departed our employ after just a few days on the The past year has been one of changes in our job. We wish her well. Rick Sewell is back on the 1 The Local Oscillator Dec 2014 hunt for a capable individual to fill that position. Walker involved. Brian logged into the KBRT NX50 AUI and NX50 Issues duplicated its settings, including software version, It seems that any new transmitter design has power presets and max power lockouts. The remote unanticipated issues that emerge as production I/O was set up to select max power lockout with an models make their way into the installed base. That active low. Brian determined that while the AUI has certainly been the case with the Nautel NX50, showed active low, it was acting as an edge-triggered although none of the issues have been serious. input, so the continued presence of the low on the The really great thing about the NX50 and remote input from the generator transfer switch was Nautel in general is that the company is very ignored as the transmitter went through its remote- receptive and responsive to the needs of its selected night and day power selections (which also customers. With a phone call or email I can bring select different max power lockouts). issues to the attention of Nautel engineers, and they As it turns out, the issue was addressed by a always respond. software update that we have not yet implemented on Last month, we had a power outage at the the KBRT NX50. This software update also provides KBRT transmitter site that spanned a couple of days. for a low-to-high order of priority in max power We have the transmitter wired to the generator lockouts. Lower power lockouts take priority over transfer switch so that whenever the generator is higher power lockouts, so we need to re-order our supplying power to the site, the power output of the power lockouts from low to high instead of the transmitter is capped at 35 kW. This affects the current somewhat random order. Another issue that station very little because with MDCL active it is a was corrected was the need for the remote selection rare thing for the carrier power to climb over 35 kW of max power lockouts to operate independently of to begin with (that only happens during periods of the remote/local status of the transmitter – remote silence). We use a “Max Power Lockout” set to 35 lockouts need to work regardless of whether the kW to fold the power back to a 35 kW maximum transmitter is in local or remote. when on the generator to prevent overloading the 70 This also has application in day/night and kW generator. With the power so capped, the other operations with disparate power levels. Antenna generator can easily handle the entire site load, control systems usually provide contact closures to including HVAC. force the transmitter(s) to the appropriate power What I found during the prolonged outage level. The idea is that if everything is wired, last month was that while the contact closure in the configured and working properly, you should not be transfer switch would select the 35 kW max power able to put the 50 kW day power into the 1 kW night lockout in the transmitter, the change to night power common point of the antenna system. Really ugly, at sunset and the change to day power at the messy and smelly things happen when you do this subsequent sunrise would override the 35 kW (don’t ask me how I know). lockout, even though the hard closure from the We will very shortly be updating the transfer switch remained. I brought this to the software of all three of our NX50 transmitters to attention of Mike Woods of Nautel, who got Brian software version 4.3.1 and rearranging the remote max power lockouts in low-to-high order. Satellite Changes I mentioned above that we will in the coming months be replacing the satellite equipment at KBRT, KNSN, KCBC and KKPZ. This has been in the works for some time as a means to provide for a (sometimes) separate feed to KNSN in San Diego. What we did not know when we ordered the equipment was that our long-time space-segment and equipment provider, Clear Channel Satellite, would be closing its doors. For the most part that has already happened. CC Satellite has only a couple of employees still working, dealing with closing out The existing Max Power Lockouts for KBRT are existing inventory and finding its customers other not in ascending order. Both they and their vendors to provide service. external wiring will have to be reordered. 2 The Local Oscillator Dec 2014 CC has indicated that it will honor its soon anyway. existing space segment contracts through their The bottom line here is that we will be expiration date, which in our case is the earlier of the moving to a new frequency for the KBRT feeds in replacement date of the SES AMC-1 satellite or April the coming months, but the date of that change and of 2015. The last we heard was that SES plans to the equipment swap (which must happen at the same swap out the AMC-1 satellite in February, but that time) is somewhat up in the air, no pun intended. date has been somewhat fluid. Those stations that have received new satellite We have found another space segment receivers should go ahead and mount them, set the IP provider and are prepared to make the move. Since addresses and get them ported to the outside world. we no longer use the CBC-2 and CBC-3 channels We can then reprogram them for the new frequency (distribution is now being made using the TieLine IP and channels as soon as we are ready for that. codec system), this affects only KBRT and KNSN, which we plan to move to a new 300 kHz channel The New York Minutes By Brian Cunningham, CBRE Chief Engineer, CBC – Western New York Hello to all from Western New York! for electricity to the Boston, NY area gave way due By now, I’m sure all have seen and heard of to the enormous accumulation of snow on the the super snow storm that hit overhead lines.

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