The Newsletter of Crawford Broadcasting Company Corporate Engineering MAY 2016 • VOLUME 26 • ISSUE 5 • W.C. ALEXANDER, CPBE, AMD, DRB EDITOR Translator Update been installed in the tower #1 base enclosure as can It seems like translators are all I ever think be seen in the photo below. Fred Folmer and Todd about anymore, which is weird since until early this Stickler got power run to the cabinet. Now we have year, I didn’t think of translators much at all! to run two other conduits with fiber-optic cables to I would say that this is just a season – and to the cabinet. The antenna, coax and isocoupler are on some degree it is – but the reality is that translators the tower. I plan to be there the 11th of this month to are now part of our corporate topography; we’ll be wrap all this up. dealing with them from here on, always looking for more and for opportunities to improve on what we already have. The last week in April we got the Birmingham translator on the air. This is the third of the original four grants, 250 watts ERP at 143 meters on 95.3 MHz. We brought the Wireless Infrastructure Services tower crew in from Corona, California the last week of the month and they got the antenna and line up on the Red Mountain tower in no time. Stephen and his crew already had everything else ready to go, so as soon as he had everything KBRT transmitter engineer Fred Folmer with the connected I filed the license application and we temperature-controlled, weatherproof translator began operation under program test authority. cabinet at tower #1. It’s too soon at this writing to tell you what the coverage is. It should be fairly good, but the core Detroit’s new translator went on the air market in Birmingham sits in an ocean of 100 kW earlier this month, right before NAB. It’s doing about signals that are sited along the spine of Red Mountain what we thought it would, with some interference from southwest to northeast right through the middle coming in from across the border in Leamington, of the city. I suspect that we’ll find coverage highly Ontario. dependent on individual receivers. Those that do a We continue to tweak the Denver signals. good job of rejecting second-adjacent channel signals Clearly we need some vertically-polarized signal on will do well; others, not so much. Hopefully we’ll 95.3 MHz. The H-only signal does well into vehicles have a good handle on it for next month. with embedded window antennas and antennas that We still await FCC grant of our applications slant (such as the short “rubber duck” antennas that in San Diego. Those apps were filed really late, as in are prevalent on many new cars these days). It late March, so they are at the bottom of the pile. doesn’t do well at all into cars with vertical whip Hopefully we’ll get grants this month. antennas. We’re working on a couple of different KBRT’s translator installation is moving solutions, both short and long term. right along. The weatherproof, temperature- The Denver 100.7 signal should be a lot controlled cabinet from Kintronic Laboratories has better than it is. I am suspicious of the antenna, a 1 The Local Oscillator March 2016 broadband stainless steel CP dipole. It’s been my On the noise issue (and speaking specifically experience that very broadband antennas tend to be about nighttime interference), Gary Cavell used a that way because of resistance, and I suspect that the great analogy of a room that is initially quiet and easy losses in the antenna in use are significant. I would to converse in but as it fills up and other very much like to move into a brass/copper tuned CP conversations begin to fill the air, becomes antenna, such as the ERI 100A or PSI FMT-1A. increasingly more difficult for individuals to be heard That’s on my short list. and understood. I agree that we’re in a very crowded We’re also dealing with some internet and room with not only a lot of conversations (radio network issues at the Lookout Mountain site. While signals) but also with a vacuum cleaner, a blender we might move into a Part 101 microwave link to and a table saw running. It takes a loud voice to be that site at some point, for now the internet provides heard over all that racket, and even then the the STL path. We’ve had one codec failure and had communication distance will be short. to install Surestream licenses on four other codecs to I learned a lot about translator antennas and get path redundancy and error correction. More on equipment at the show. Mike Bach of Kathrein was that from Amanda in her column below. gracious enough to give me a good bit of his time, Finally, we are working with another explaining various antennas and schemes and telling translator licensee at the site. We think that their me what can and can’t be done. transmitter is making some IM product with our 95.3 At the end of the show, I felt like I knew a MHz signal being one contributor. We have our lot more than I did at the start. It was very much transmitter heavily filtered, but theirs is only worth attending, but I’m sure glad it’s over until next nominally filtered. I borrowed a set of cavities and April. tuned them up as a pass/reject filter. We hope to install them as a test later this month and if they do PPM Encoding/EAS Issue the job, we’ll order a custom pass/reject filter for the We noticed in Chicago recently that we have other station. That’s our responsibility as the not been receiving EAS tests from the LP-2 station in newcomer to the site. northwest Indiana. Rick Sewell opened a dialogue with the engineer for that group and found that they NAB 2016 had indeed been sending the tests right on time every This year’s NAB convention is in the record week but other stations were not decoding them. books. There were a reported 103,000 in attendance They have been in communication with and I think I bumped into 102,999 of them. It was Sage, even sending them logger recordings of the four days of long days, short nights and sore feet. I EAS tests. Sage was able to decode them without was very glad to get home. issues at the factory, so the results of that are We had a great time visiting with our inconclusive. favorite vendors and manufacturers as well as Sage reportedly mentioned that they were colleagues. There were two hot topics on the radio aware of some issue with the new Nielsen PPM show floor: AM improvement and translators. algorithm interfering with EAS tones. The Indiana Just about everyone I talked to expressed an CE noted that the issue started coincident with the opinion on the proposals that were floated by the encoder software upgrade the week of November 10, FCC and others introduced in comments and reply 2015. comments. Everyone I talked to on the topic While these good folks and the people at expressed a desire to see skywave service protection Sage continue to investigate, I wonder if any of our for class A stations go away. Opinions on what the readers have experienced anything similar. Drop me remaining class A protections should be varied, but or Rick an email and let us know. Rick’s email is all seemed to agree that we have a serious noise issue [email protected]. that’s (a) not going to go away, and (b) must be overcome with additional power. 2 The Local Oscillator March 2016 The Motown Update by Joseph M. Huk, Jr. P.E., CPBE, CBNT Chief Engineer, CBC – Detroit The WEXL Translator Project had otherwise. Our WEXL-AM, W244DL FM translator is on the air! This installation uses two Kathrein log NAB Convention periodic antennas. The power is divided, phased and In preparing for the NAB convention, I was applied to one log periodic oriented looking to solve some issues with a for vertical polarization and another project we were working on at our log periodic oriented to create the Detroit stations. Our general horizontal polarization component. manager Frank Franciosi and The net result is a circularly polarized operations manager Vito Faletti were signal. The antenna system is looking for a way carry out some mounted on a 15-foot pole and remote broadcasts without using all oriented at 350 degrees True per our of our sophisticated Telos road construction permit. equipment. Sometimes, our crew We made third-order IM likes to travel light. Therefore, I product measurements and the results thought of some of the videos I showed that our installation is very viewed by Kirk Harnack that showed clean spectrally. Listening tests have a utility called Luci Live determined that our coverage is generally within the (http://www.luci.eu) that could be used to encode a 70 dBu contour or city grade. Our coverage is stream back to your station using the Telos Z/IP. directional and reaches part of Detroit and some Since we are only interested in streaming, northern suburbs. The channel is mainly plagued by we chose purchasing the Luci Lite product which co-channel interference from a Canadian broadcaster only streams using a G722 codec.