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Showing posts with label engineering. Show all posts
Showing posts with label engineering. Show all posts
Thursday, February 16, 2012
I am a Broadcast Engineer
I admit, the meme was getting a little stale. But hey, I didn't see any for broadcast engineers and that's just not right. So I made one myself - enjoy!
Thursday, November 17, 2011
EAS and Anonymous
FEMA is responding that the system is secure enough, thank you very much.
Who's correct? Read on...
Monday, November 14, 2011
Play Ball! Remote Tech Options for Sportscasts
While I'm specifically talking about radio remote broadcasting options for sports, most of this info can be used for any remote broadcast. And I do recommend that for most college radio stations: don't stay hiding in the studio - get out and do a weekly live broadcast from the student center for a few hours...it's totally worth it.
Note: this is a written version of a presentation I often give at the annual fall CBI Conference.
This article is going to cover several topics surrounding remote broadcasts both on- and off-campus. Read on, after the jump...
Note: this is a written version of a presentation I often give at the annual fall CBI Conference.
This article is going to cover several topics surrounding remote broadcasts both on- and off-campus. Read on, after the jump...
Friday, November 11, 2011
EAS: Politics vs. Engineering
Was the November 9th National EAS Test a qualified success or a total failure?
Like most things in life, it kinda depends on your point of view.
First, the system itself did indeed fail during the test. The final tally will take weeks, but there are tons of anecdotal reports that most stations did receive the data tones, but did not receive proper audio. Early reports indicate that a loop of the audio (including the data tones) played over itself, delayed by several seconds. The second airing of the data tones caused many stations' EAS encoders/decoders (aka "endecs") to stop outright and mute the test audio until the "End of Message" (EOM) data tones were sent at the end of the test, 30 seconds later. Other endecs just played the whole thing, looped audio playing over the main audio like a bizarre version of "row-row-row your boat". Given the widespread nature of this effect, the thinking is that it must've happened at the national level (FEMA) somehow.
The TV side of things, including satellite TV, may have had a similar issue in play, just with different effects: namely a Lady Gaga video playing across DirecTV, for example.
There's also reports that some stations didn't get anything at all due to equipment failures at the state and local levels. Fortunately these seem relatively uncommon.
Like most things in life, it kinda depends on your point of view.
First, the system itself did indeed fail during the test. The final tally will take weeks, but there are tons of anecdotal reports that most stations did receive the data tones, but did not receive proper audio. Early reports indicate that a loop of the audio (including the data tones) played over itself, delayed by several seconds. The second airing of the data tones caused many stations' EAS encoders/decoders (aka "endecs") to stop outright and mute the test audio until the "End of Message" (EOM) data tones were sent at the end of the test, 30 seconds later. Other endecs just played the whole thing, looped audio playing over the main audio like a bizarre version of "row-row-row your boat". Given the widespread nature of this effect, the thinking is that it must've happened at the national level (FEMA) somehow.
The TV side of things, including satellite TV, may have had a similar issue in play, just with different effects: namely a Lady Gaga video playing across DirecTV, for example.
There's also reports that some stations didn't get anything at all due to equipment failures at the state and local levels. Fortunately these seem relatively uncommon.
Monday, October 13, 2008
ISDN + Empty Studio + NPR = Profit!
(below is an expanded version of my September 24, 2008 Radio World article: ISDN Can Help Generate Studio Rentals)
If you’re a commercial radio station, or a college campus, and you’ve never thought about ISDN, I have two words for you: public radio.
The generic term for content creators National Public Radio, American Public Media and Public Radio International (among many others), and their affiliate broadcast stations, “public radio” is an award-winning source of news for over 20 million listeners every week.
You might be wondering: “So what? Both NPR and ISDN have been around for decades, why are you talking about them now?” ISDN hasn’t changed, but public radio has: there are a lot more listeners, a lot more prestige and a lot more producers. These producers need studios to book their guests in, and you can help fill that need.
If you’re a commercial radio station with a lightly used extra studio, public radio has the cash to rent that studio to interview a local guest in. And if you’re a college or university, or a college radio station, you can make your professors available to be interviewed by public radio, thus bringing you national prestige and publicity…and the respect of your college.
Earning extra cash, bringing extra prestige, what’s not to love?
What exactly, is ‘the deal’ here?
Public radio, in general, places a premium on audio quality; ISDN helps achieve that.
In this case, ISDN refers to dedicated hardware that uses special telephone lines and high-speed algorithms to deliver CD-quality sound with almost no delay. In short, even though a guest might be in a studio 1,000 miles away, with ISDN they sound like they’re sitting in the same room as the host.
When an average public radio producer wants to interview a guest, that producer is looking — often frantically — for a readily available studio, convenient for the guest, that has the following:
• A quiet/soundproof studio or room with a studio-quality microphone.
• A location convenient for guests.
• A means of doing a backup recording.
• An ISDN codec compatible with the MPEG Layer 2 algorithm at 128 kbps (a.k.a. “L2 mono/128”).
What makes a good “broadcast studio”? Dense, solid walls, internal acoustic treatment, soundproof doors, baffled HVAC vents, and a method for allowing a trained technician to handle the techie stuff, so the guest doesn’t have to.
Don't have all that?You can still create a “studio” of sufficient quality with much less effort and cost. A regular room that’s naturally quiet — with thick concrete walls, no windows, a solid-core door, and egg-crate foam (make sure it's the fire-retardant kind) on the walls — can do the trick. Or a “pre-fab” solution such as a WhisperRoom booth can work well, too.
One note about WhisperRooms - they don't have built-in cooling, just vent fans that do nothing to cool the air. Once the door is closed, the temperature inside the WhisperRoom quickly climbs to 5 to 15 degrees higher than outside. If you're going to use a WhisperRoom, or a similar "vocal booth", make sure the room it's in has really good cooling (able to be down to 60-62 degrees F) so the vent fans are sucking in chilled air, lest your guest be sitting in a puddle of his or her own sweat.
Harping on the fire issue a bit more, The Station Nightclub disaster really rammed home how dangerous the fire risk really is. However, while a water-based sprinkler system is a great idea for saving people's lives...you may also want to consider that a water sprinkler may - in the process - also destroy your setup as thoroughly as a fire would. Check with your campus IT and campus safety office about finding a "electrical equipment / computer-safe" means of extinguishing fires; such as an aerosol-based system.
Okay, back to business. If you’re a college radio station, try talking to your college's marketing or public relations office, which may be willing to pay for your ISDN in exchange for free/cheap access to your production studio. The rest of the time you can rent your ISDN to bring in some extra bucks to your station, or use it for remote broadcasts like concerts and sports.
An installation note: strictly speaking, ISDN is a special data telephone line from your local phone company, or the campus telecommunications department. It’s a somewhat esoteric technology, and telcos are slowly retiring it in favor of IP-based technologies, like VoIP. It may take several calls, and four to eight weeks, to see if ISDN is available and get it installed. To cover your bases, try to get a codec that can handle IP/internet audio connections as well as ISDN. However, I'd also suggest asking your telco if and/or when they plan to “retire” ISDN in your area. Assuming you're talking to someone who will give you an honest answer (first-level tech support is not going to give an honest answer here!), and the answer is "more than five years" then go ahead and get ISDN now and plan to upgrade to IP codecs later. Five years probably is long enough to amortize the cost.
For help with your installation, three major ISDN hardware providers, Tieline, Comrex and Telos Systems, have excellent “ISDN ordering guides” in the Support sections of their Web sites: www.tieline.com, www.comrex.com and www.telos-systems.com.
Okay, I’ve got this ISDN but no one to call!
To fix that, a little marketing and some patience is required.
First, set up a Web site page just for the studio. Include lots of details: directions with maps, parking information, equipment lists, availability guidelines and your rates/charges. I cannot emphasize this enough: time is critical in booking; so include enough contact information that a producer can reach a booking agent quickly and easily. Whenever some pubradio producer is looking for an ISDN studio to put a guest in, they're usually frantically looking...calling at least three or four potential studios. First one to answer the phone "wins" the rental. And I mean "answer the phone". Here is one place that e-mail is useful but it won't cut it alone; you have to have a live person that answers the phone when the producer calls.
Next, make sure your studio is listed on the appropriate websites. When I’m looking to rent a studio, the two I use the most are the “Wisconsin Public Radio’s ISDN Directory” (www.wpr.org/isdn) and the “DigiFon Digital Dialup List” (www.digifon.com/aboutddl.html).
If you’re a college campus, make sure every department head knows about your studio and that their professors can use it to be interviewed by so-called “prestigious” public radio. Make sure the campus public relations/marketing office knows, too. And while you don't want to be obnoxious about it, you probably will have to remind them every once in a while, too. If you hear about a professor getting on the radio and they haven't come into your studio...sent a polite letter saying "Next time, think about coming in to our station - we have ISDN!".
Don’t forget to just call up NPR, PRI and APM, and also any local public radio stations nearby. (Not sure who the local stations are? Try Radio-Locator and search on your ZIP code.) Call 'em up and ask to speak with whoever handles their studio booking on their end, and ask them to keep you in mind if they ever get overbooked. It’s not uncommon for other studios to get requests for studio rentals they just can’t deliver on, and they’ll usually be happy to send you the business.
Even after all this effort — be patient. Most of the time, a producer will find you by stumbling across you through Internet searches. Or because they call a potential guest and, if you're lucky, the guest remembers that they can come to your station. Still, over time you’ll build up a reputation; as more producers find you the first time, they'll remember to call you the next time.
Finally, how much should you charge for your ISDN?
There’s a lot of variation, but to get you started: rates typically run from $40/hr to $250/hr, with a one-hour minimum. The most common is $100/hr but that usually includes a trained engineer to run things for the guest. If you don't have a trained engineer, be ready to offer a steep discount.
If you’re a college station, offer free rentals when it's one of your campus professors being interviewed; it helps build good relations with your parent college.
It's not uncommon for studios to offer extra fees, like $10-$50 to make a backup recording on CD or MiniDisc. Or charge an extra "ISDN usage fee" in quarter-hour chunks to offset the ISDN per-minute fees your telco provider will charge you. Personally, I don't recommend this; I don't like the nickel-n-dime approach and I think it just complicates things unnecessarily. If you need the extra money, just charge a higher main rate.
Conclusions
Getting ISDN…or if you have it, getting the word out about it…is a great way to help turn an empty room into revenue generator; your business manager will love you!
Plus, it can open up a new avenue of free publicity on a national platform; your college PR office will love you!
And you’ll help some poor public radio producer, like I used to be, have it just a little easier. Spread the love! :-)
If you’re a commercial radio station, or a college campus, and you’ve never thought about ISDN, I have two words for you: public radio.
The generic term for content creators National Public Radio, American Public Media and Public Radio International (among many others), and their affiliate broadcast stations, “public radio” is an award-winning source of news for over 20 million listeners every week.
You might be wondering: “So what? Both NPR and ISDN have been around for decades, why are you talking about them now?” ISDN hasn’t changed, but public radio has: there are a lot more listeners, a lot more prestige and a lot more producers. These producers need studios to book their guests in, and you can help fill that need.
If you’re a commercial radio station with a lightly used extra studio, public radio has the cash to rent that studio to interview a local guest in. And if you’re a college or university, or a college radio station, you can make your professors available to be interviewed by public radio, thus bringing you national prestige and publicity…and the respect of your college.
Earning extra cash, bringing extra prestige, what’s not to love?
What exactly, is ‘the deal’ here?
Public radio, in general, places a premium on audio quality; ISDN helps achieve that.
In this case, ISDN refers to dedicated hardware that uses special telephone lines and high-speed algorithms to deliver CD-quality sound with almost no delay. In short, even though a guest might be in a studio 1,000 miles away, with ISDN they sound like they’re sitting in the same room as the host.
When an average public radio producer wants to interview a guest, that producer is looking — often frantically — for a readily available studio, convenient for the guest, that has the following:
• A quiet/soundproof studio or room with a studio-quality microphone.
• A location convenient for guests.
• A means of doing a backup recording.
• An ISDN codec compatible with the MPEG Layer 2 algorithm at 128 kbps (a.k.a. “L2 mono/128”).
What makes a good “broadcast studio”? Dense, solid walls, internal acoustic treatment, soundproof doors, baffled HVAC vents, and a method for allowing a trained technician to handle the techie stuff, so the guest doesn’t have to.
Don't have all that?You can still create a “studio” of sufficient quality with much less effort and cost. A regular room that’s naturally quiet — with thick concrete walls, no windows, a solid-core door, and egg-crate foam (make sure it's the fire-retardant kind) on the walls — can do the trick. Or a “pre-fab” solution such as a WhisperRoom booth can work well, too.
One note about WhisperRooms - they don't have built-in cooling, just vent fans that do nothing to cool the air. Once the door is closed, the temperature inside the WhisperRoom quickly climbs to 5 to 15 degrees higher than outside. If you're going to use a WhisperRoom, or a similar "vocal booth", make sure the room it's in has really good cooling (able to be down to 60-62 degrees F) so the vent fans are sucking in chilled air, lest your guest be sitting in a puddle of his or her own sweat.
Harping on the fire issue a bit more, The Station Nightclub disaster really rammed home how dangerous the fire risk really is. However, while a water-based sprinkler system is a great idea for saving people's lives...you may also want to consider that a water sprinkler may - in the process - also destroy your setup as thoroughly as a fire would. Check with your campus IT and campus safety office about finding a "electrical equipment / computer-safe" means of extinguishing fires; such as an aerosol-based system.
Okay, back to business. If you’re a college radio station, try talking to your college's marketing or public relations office, which may be willing to pay for your ISDN in exchange for free/cheap access to your production studio. The rest of the time you can rent your ISDN to bring in some extra bucks to your station, or use it for remote broadcasts like concerts and sports.
An installation note: strictly speaking, ISDN is a special data telephone line from your local phone company, or the campus telecommunications department. It’s a somewhat esoteric technology, and telcos are slowly retiring it in favor of IP-based technologies, like VoIP. It may take several calls, and four to eight weeks, to see if ISDN is available and get it installed. To cover your bases, try to get a codec that can handle IP/internet audio connections as well as ISDN. However, I'd also suggest asking your telco if and/or when they plan to “retire” ISDN in your area. Assuming you're talking to someone who will give you an honest answer (first-level tech support is not going to give an honest answer here!), and the answer is "more than five years" then go ahead and get ISDN now and plan to upgrade to IP codecs later. Five years probably is long enough to amortize the cost.
For help with your installation, three major ISDN hardware providers, Tieline, Comrex and Telos Systems, have excellent “ISDN ordering guides” in the Support sections of their Web sites: www.tieline.com, www.comrex.com and www.telos-systems.com.
Okay, I’ve got this ISDN but no one to call!
To fix that, a little marketing and some patience is required.
First, set up a Web site page just for the studio. Include lots of details: directions with maps, parking information, equipment lists, availability guidelines and your rates/charges. I cannot emphasize this enough: time is critical in booking; so include enough contact information that a producer can reach a booking agent quickly and easily. Whenever some pubradio producer is looking for an ISDN studio to put a guest in, they're usually frantically looking...calling at least three or four potential studios. First one to answer the phone "wins" the rental. And I mean "answer the phone". Here is one place that e-mail is useful but it won't cut it alone; you have to have a live person that answers the phone when the producer calls.
Next, make sure your studio is listed on the appropriate websites. When I’m looking to rent a studio, the two I use the most are the “Wisconsin Public Radio’s ISDN Directory” (www.wpr.org/isdn) and the “DigiFon Digital Dialup List” (www.digifon.com/aboutddl.html).
If you’re a college campus, make sure every department head knows about your studio and that their professors can use it to be interviewed by so-called “prestigious” public radio. Make sure the campus public relations/marketing office knows, too. And while you don't want to be obnoxious about it, you probably will have to remind them every once in a while, too. If you hear about a professor getting on the radio and they haven't come into your studio...sent a polite letter saying "Next time, think about coming in to our station - we have ISDN!".
Don’t forget to just call up NPR, PRI and APM, and also any local public radio stations nearby. (Not sure who the local stations are? Try Radio-Locator and search on your ZIP code.) Call 'em up and ask to speak with whoever handles their studio booking on their end, and ask them to keep you in mind if they ever get overbooked. It’s not uncommon for other studios to get requests for studio rentals they just can’t deliver on, and they’ll usually be happy to send you the business.
Even after all this effort — be patient. Most of the time, a producer will find you by stumbling across you through Internet searches. Or because they call a potential guest and, if you're lucky, the guest remembers that they can come to your station. Still, over time you’ll build up a reputation; as more producers find you the first time, they'll remember to call you the next time.
Finally, how much should you charge for your ISDN?
There’s a lot of variation, but to get you started: rates typically run from $40/hr to $250/hr, with a one-hour minimum. The most common is $100/hr but that usually includes a trained engineer to run things for the guest. If you don't have a trained engineer, be ready to offer a steep discount.
If you’re a college station, offer free rentals when it's one of your campus professors being interviewed; it helps build good relations with your parent college.
It's not uncommon for studios to offer extra fees, like $10-$50 to make a backup recording on CD or MiniDisc. Or charge an extra "ISDN usage fee" in quarter-hour chunks to offset the ISDN per-minute fees your telco provider will charge you. Personally, I don't recommend this; I don't like the nickel-n-dime approach and I think it just complicates things unnecessarily. If you need the extra money, just charge a higher main rate.
Conclusions
Getting ISDN…or if you have it, getting the word out about it…is a great way to help turn an empty room into revenue generator; your business manager will love you!
Plus, it can open up a new avenue of free publicity on a national platform; your college PR office will love you!
And you’ll help some poor public radio producer, like I used to be, have it just a little easier. Spread the love! :-)
Monday, August 11, 2008
VR3's Add-On Car HD Radio Hits Target with a Miss, but Makes a Grazing Blow
In my review of the VR3 add-on HD Radio auto tuner, I erroneously reported that the radio could not be forced to return to an HD-n multicast channel after power off.
Thanks to alert reader Tom Wilson, who said his VR3 would indeed return to a multicast channel after power off, I tried some of the other VR3's that I grabbed at the discounted price of $38, and they all would indeed return to a multicast channel after losing power. Even my original VR3 did it.
Why would not work originally? I did a little more testing and couldn't figure it out. Maybe it's something to do with my car's cigarette lighter/power jack? Maybe I just wasn't paying attention to the right thing. Honestly, I couldn't sworn I tested this before writing the review, and the only difference I can think of is that at the time, I was leaving the VR3 plugged into the power jack, and just turning off the key. But trying that now made no difference.
Anyways, as Tom says, just remember to tune to the multicast channel in question, hit the POWER button on the VR3 to power off, then hit it again to power on. Now every time you kill the power at the power cord (i.e. simulated or real loss of power), when power is restored the radio will automatically power up and re-tune to the multicast channel.
Anyways, this does somewhat change the usefulness of the VR3 for in-house monitoring. Unfortunately, after about 10-15 seconds of loss-of-signal it will default back to
the main analog channel. So it's not perfect for in-house monitoring...you'll probably want to rig it so the power is automatically cycled every 12 or 24 hours just to be sure...and yes, you'll have to listen to it now and then no matter what since a silence sensor could be fooled by a radio tuned to white noise instead of real programming.
Thanks to alert reader Tom Wilson, who said his VR3 would indeed return to a multicast channel after power off, I tried some of the other VR3's that I grabbed at the discounted price of $38, and they all would indeed return to a multicast channel after losing power. Even my original VR3 did it.
Why would not work originally? I did a little more testing and couldn't figure it out. Maybe it's something to do with my car's cigarette lighter/power jack? Maybe I just wasn't paying attention to the right thing. Honestly, I couldn't sworn I tested this before writing the review, and the only difference I can think of is that at the time, I was leaving the VR3 plugged into the power jack, and just turning off the key. But trying that now made no difference.
Anyways, as Tom says, just remember to tune to the multicast channel in question, hit the POWER button on the VR3 to power off, then hit it again to power on. Now every time you kill the power at the power cord (i.e. simulated or real loss of power), when power is restored the radio will automatically power up and re-tune to the multicast channel.
Anyways, this does somewhat change the usefulness of the VR3 for in-house monitoring. Unfortunately, after about 10-15 seconds of loss-of-signal it will default back to
the main analog channel. So it's not perfect for in-house monitoring...you'll probably want to rig it so the power is automatically cycled every 12 or 24 hours just to be sure...and yes, you'll have to listen to it now and then no matter what since a silence sensor could be fooled by a radio tuned to white noise instead of real programming.
Thursday, May 22, 2008
How to Engineer a Show for Public Radio
I was thinking about this on my commute home today. It feels like an awful lot of public radio shows aren't really engineered all that well. And in some cases I mean the big, long-running shows, too...not just the little/new ones. Being someone who's been Technical Director and who now runs a radio station, I thought I'd pass on a few nuggets of truth. These are things that I personally look for in a pubradio show when it comes to technical compliance. They may not be true for every station, but I think you'll find that most stations will appreciate this.
Ed.note: When I originally wrote this, it was a semi-rant after a long weekend of screw-ups with my automation system, mostly due to producer errors. So the tone is a tad snarky, even if the information is 100% valid. Y'all have been warned...
http://www.prss.org/training/online/moving_sound/creating.cfm
http://www.prss.org/training/online/moving_sound/file_formats.cfm
I also recommend Transom.org, too:
http://www.transom.org/tools/beginnings/
http://www.transom.org/tools/editing_mixing/
Ed.note: When I originally wrote this, it was a semi-rant after a long weekend of screw-ups with my automation system, mostly due to producer errors. So the tone is a tad snarky, even if the information is 100% valid. Y'all have been warned...
- Remember that most stations will be automating the playback of your show. Ergo, you must make your show friendly to automation software...and not make your show in such a way that it requires human intervention to broadcast.
- Public radio lives and dies by the clock. Everything is done by coordinated breaks at specific times. If you're not on the clock...and I mean to the exact second...then you've broken format. "Broken" is a good word here because it'll sound like crap as a station's automation cuts off your show because the timing is wrong.
- There is no excuse for not having a fixed length. Hourlong shows should end at 58:00, 58:30 or 59:00. Half-hour shows should end at 27:30, 28:00, 28:30 or 29:00. Pick a length and stick with it! It must remain the exact same length for EVERY episode. If your show isn't be fed live, then you have absolutely no excuse. There's this thing called "Protools" and it's been around a while. It makes editing to time really easy. And it also has time-compression/expansion while is audibly transparent and perfect for getting that last 20 or 30 seconds in/out of your mix. If you are doing your show live, learn to backtime a music bed to fade in under your host's intro/outro. It's not that hard.
- Understand the difference between a audio file's time-length and the program audio time-length. When coming in/out of a break, remember to leave at least a full one second (preferably 1.5 to 2) of absolute silence, centered on the cutaway time. That lets stations "cut away" cleanly without cutting off your program material. This concept is what is meant by a show's "time" being 29:59 (29 minutes, 59 seconds). However, in today's age of ContentDepot and automation, even though there might be 29:59 of program audio (plus the one second of silence) the actual audio file (MP3, MP2, WAV, etc) must time out to exactly 30:00.000 - again, with Protools (or any audio editing software) it's very easy to do. And if you don't, it will screw everything up for the station. If you have four segments and you leave each audio file one second short, that means four seconds of dead air at the end. That sounds bad. Stations don't like it.
- Stations have to pay the bills, that means they need breaks in your show to play underwriting. If you're an hourlong show, at least one sixty second break in the middle is required. Two 60's or two 30's (or some combination) is preferred. Halfhour shows need one 30 or 60 second break...two is nice, but not required. Remember, ALL stations need that last 60 seconds at the end for legal ID's, so that cannot be used for your overall alloted time for breaks.
- Floating breaks suck. Everybody hates "floating" breaks. I don't care how much it "comprises your artistic vision" to have a break right in the middle of something. Deal with it and make your frickin' breaks the exact same time every week. One exception: half-hour shows I don't care as much because odds are good I'm not going to take the break anyways; I'll just let it play through. Actually, one other exception: if you're good about using segments (see point 9 below) then floating breaks aren't as big a hassle. But I still dislike them on general principle.
- Follow the NPR clock for break times. For an hourlong show, the standard NPR break times are 60 seconds starting at 19:00.0 past the hour, and 90 seconds starting at 38:30.0 past the hour. That's assuming no cutaways for newscasts at the top and bottom of the hour. For a half-hour show, there isn't really a standard, but the break should fall around 15 minutes past the hour. If you want to really time it perfectly, call your local NPR station and ask them to give you a copy of the show "clock" of a show you like. Wait, Wait...Don't Tell Me! and Only a Game are good "example clocks" for non-hard-news shows. Weekend Edition and All Things Considered are good for hard-news shows. OnPoint and Talk of the Nation are good for call-in talk shows.
- You don't have to have a cutaway for the TOH newscast, but it's not a bad idea to do it...especially if you're an hourlong show. Some stations will refuse to air a show that doesn't have a cutaway at 01:00.0 and 06:00.0 for the Top-Of-Hour NPR newscast. I'm not one of those stations; but I do prefer to have the option. Still, I admit it's hard to justify it because you know that any content you put between 01:00 and 06:00 might never get aired...so many shows put something of a "throwaway" segment in there (World Cafe plays one music track unrelated to the day's topic, TechNation has the "Five Minutes with Moira Gunn" commentary) but just playing music for five minutes (Living on Earth) can really screw a station that doesn't air NPR newscasts. Having a cutaway for the bottom-of-the-hour newscast is largely unnecessary unless you're a major daily news show meant to air during morning or afternoon drive. Halfhour shows don't need a newscast cutaway so much since it would leave very little time for the rest of your show.
- I mentioned making it "automation friendly" - that means multiple audio files for multiple segments. ContentDepot works this way these days; each segment of the show is a separate MP2 audio file. That way a station can easily program which segments to air and which to ignore (and insert their own local segment for a break). For example, a show like Only a Game has eight audio files: billboard (01:00), newscast (06:00), newscast return music (00:30), Segment A (11:30), Break 1 (01:00), Segment B (19:30), Break 2 (01:30), Segment C (19:00). Add up those times, and you'll notice they total 59 minutes and zero seconds; a perfect hourlong show. What if you are not distributing through ContentDepot, and instead are using, for example, a podcast distributor like Liberated Syndication to distribute your show to stations? In that case, create an "extra" segment that is the assembled show as one audio file. That way stations that want the segments can take 'em, and those that don't care have an assembled show ready and waiting for them.
- Automation is all about "the same"...as in, have your show distributed and ready to air at the same day/time every week. Pick a day and time and stick with it. You can't ever be late, or you'll screw over your affiliates. Have an "evergreen" show (something vaguely generic without any specific, dated, references) ready to distribute if your planned show isn't going to be ready in time.
- Watch your audio levels. This shouldn't have to be on the list at all, but lately there's been too many shows that are produced in someone's basement on a Mac laptop running a portable Protools Mbox and mixed on headphones. This isn't entirely a bad thing; lowering the barrier to entry has resulted in many talented people getting access to the airwaves. Unfortunately, it's also led to a tremendous erosion of quality production values in many shows. One of the biggest transgressions is inconsistent audio levels; where the guest speaks really, really, quietly and then suddenly the host is REALLY, REALLY, LOUD!!! The rub is that there is no "level meter" that really works for loudness. The only way to really make sure your levels are right are to use your ears...and you cannot use headphones for that. Headphones inherently screw up the concept of ambient listening. Plus remember that while dynamic range is great in theory, in reality most FM radios can't handle very much difference between peaks and valleys...and when listening in the car (the place the vast majority of radio listening is done) anything in the valleys is lost in the ambient noise floor. If you lack the audio mastering skill and/or proper studio & speakers to deal with this...then I recommend the "brute force" fix: The Levelator processor. It's a RMS Normalization tool, and actually works pretty decently for people talking. It produces weird results for music, though...and really it's no substitution for a proper studio and proper mixing. Please note, I never advocate dynamic range compression unless you really know what you're doing. Compression gets wonky because every radio station in the country has its own compression scheme going on at their transmitter. And compressing an already-compressed audio source leads to unpredictable sound...remember, using RMS Normalization is "bad" enough - don't make it worse by using compression. The best solution is to use your ears while recording and mixing and make the loudness sound consistent that way.
- Can't spare the bandwidth to send out an uncompressed WAV file to stations? Use MPEG Layer II (aka "MP2") instead of MPEG Layer III (aka "MP3"). MP2 is older and both less efficient at data savings and less flexible than MP3. So why use it? Two reasons: first, it's the standard that the public radio satellite system has standardized on for ContentDepot. Second, it's algorithm is superior to MP3 at surviving cascading algorithms (i.e. later re-compression of the data) which is a real concern with HD Radio which compresses everything down to a max of 96kbps using HDC (a variant of sorts on the AAC codec). There are many free tools out there for encoding into an MP2. I like the PRX encoder, even though it's slower than many of the others, because of its ridiculously-easy user interface and rock-solid results. If you don't use the PRX encoder, remember to turn frame padding off, and set it for 256kbps/stereo or 128kbps/mono and 44.1kHz sampling rate with 16 bits.
- Speaking of PRX.org, it's a good reasonably-priced way to distribute your show if you want public radio stations to be able to find it. ContentDepot is even better but admittedly more expensive. If you're really broke, though, a cheapo podcast from LibSyn or someone else is better than nothing.
- Speaking of filenames, name your segments the exact same filenames every week. The whole point is to drive stations to use the newest episode, not hoard old shows forever and ever. Keeping the filename the same makes it much easier for a station to set up automation; they just tell it to play an audio file named "whatever.mp2" from a given folder (that the podcast aggregator will dump your podcasted audio files into each week) at a specific time.
- Too confusing to have everything with the same filename? If you must delineate the files somehow, put the date you're distributing the show as part of the filename and be VERY VERY consistent in how you do it. For example, let's say you distribute this week's show on May 31st, and you have three segments: first half, break, second half. Your filenames should be: 20080531-yourshow-1sthalf.mp2, 20080531-yourshow-break.mp2, and 20080531-yourshow-2ndhalf.mp2. Important point: the "-yourshow-1sthalf.mp2" part never changes. Only the date part (and I recommend the YYYYMMDD format, it makes sorting easy). That way a station can set up an automatic renaming tool to strip out the date part and copy the new audio file to the appropriate folder for the automation to play it. It is crucial though, that you never change the non-date part of the filename. It must always be the EXACT SAME CHARACTERS (and upper/lower case, too). In that same example, if one week the first segment was "20080524-yourshow-1sthalf.mp2" and the next week was "20080531-yourshow-firsthalf.mp2"? That won't work. Remember, the point is that no human at the affiliate station needs to even look at your show...it just all does it automatically. The only way that works is if you provide their computers with exactly what they expect to see. Otherwise it's "GIGO".
http://www.prss.org/training/online/moving_sound/creating.cfm
http://www.prss.org/training/online/moving_sound/file_formats.cfm
I also recommend Transom.org, too:
http://www.transom.org/tools/beginnings/
http://www.transom.org/tools/editing_mixing/
Friday, April 18, 2008
NAB: Back home
I have returned to the land down under...eight feet of snow. Heh, it DID actually snow in Geneva last Sunday, but it's a pleasant 75 degrees and sunny today.
To put a bit of a wrap on the NAB trip, I would say that there were really only three things that were interesting and "additive":
John Kean/NPR Labs' receiver interference report was fascinating but unfortunately short on details...I understand it has to pass through CPB first and will be released in about a month, which is good. It promises to give a FAR better idea of what pubradio stations' coverage really is.
And that really sums up the show in a nutshell: lots of interesting ideas tossed around, and a lot of learning what we don't know ("negative" info)...but not a lot of hard "additive" info to take home and use.
For example, in my case I've got to put in an order for a new transmitter in the next four weeks or so, and I have to decide whether to gamble that the FCC will not authorize IBOC carriers to be increased to -10dB (from -20dB), and thus get a lower-powered transmitter that is much cheaper....or gamble that they WILL authorize it, and thus pay for a much higher-powered transmitter that's much more expensive. The problem is that more digital watts cannot happen in a vacuum; you must also proportionally increase analog wattage, and that proportion is steep. As in, increasing our digital TPO by 10dB will require DOUBLING the analog. Eep!
To put a bit of a wrap on the NAB trip, I would say that there were really only three things that were interesting and "additive":
- Nautel's impressively small - yet high-powered - transmitters. They had a 44kW TPO FM that was perhaps the size of two or three refridgerators.
- Nautel again with their cool peak-smoothing of IBOC carriers. This could be really important if the FCC decides to allow more watts on the digital side.
- iZotope's ANR-B automatic noise reducer, which gets high "coolness" points and is remarkably useful, too.
John Kean/NPR Labs' receiver interference report was fascinating but unfortunately short on details...I understand it has to pass through CPB first and will be released in about a month, which is good. It promises to give a FAR better idea of what pubradio stations' coverage really is.
And that really sums up the show in a nutshell: lots of interesting ideas tossed around, and a lot of learning what we don't know ("negative" info)...but not a lot of hard "additive" info to take home and use.
For example, in my case I've got to put in an order for a new transmitter in the next four weeks or so, and I have to decide whether to gamble that the FCC will not authorize IBOC carriers to be increased to -10dB (from -20dB), and thus get a lower-powered transmitter that is much cheaper....or gamble that they WILL authorize it, and thus pay for a much higher-powered transmitter that's much more expensive. The problem is that more digital watts cannot happen in a vacuum; you must also proportionally increase analog wattage, and that proportion is steep. As in, increasing our digital TPO by 10dB will require DOUBLING the analog. Eep!
Tuesday, March 04, 2008
When 50,000 Watts Isn't Really 50,000 Watts
Caught this story in Current about "Community Wireless" (public radio) in Park City, Utah.
I don't have much to say about the situation in general, but I did want to point out something the article didn't touch on much. Let me set the scene...
The overall story is about how Community Wireless shrewdly sold a transmitter/facility they had in Coalville for a significant profit, and used the proceeds to buy 1010AM in Tooele, UT (a close-in suburb of Salt Lake City) with the idea of getting access to the more lucrative (population dense) Salt Lake City market.
Seems like a good idea in theory, but here's the problem. While 1010 is a nice 50,000 watt AM station during the day. It's still a Class D daytimer with a weak 3,100 watts during Critical Hours (the short time around sunrise/sunset) and a miserable 13 watts (yes, just thirteen watts) at night. Fortunately that 13 watts is right next to downtown SLC, so there's some chance that it's reaching a more densely populated area. But with all the sources of RF interference out there these days (wi-fi, cellphones, lamp dimmers, power lines, computers, etc) that 13 watts might as well be nothing.
The unfortunate reality is that in today's on-demand / instant-gratification age..."super D" AM's, that essentially disappear once the sun goes down, are damn near impossible to make work financially. You can't have your signal go "poof" right in the middle of morning or afternoon drive...or worse, miss it altogether. Well, okay, with some niche/block formats you can do it because listeners tune in for a specific show, regardless of the time of the day. But while public radio is somewhat inherently block-formatted, there's no denying that the two big listener draws are Morning Edition and All Things Considered...otherwise known as when everyone's driving to and from work. During the summer it's not as bad as there's more daylight, but during winter it's a giant bummer when the sun sets at 4pm and your signal disappears.
Even worse, you've got to make enough money to keep that 50,000 watts pumping out during the day; transmitters that big are not cheap to operate. At least it's an non-directional facility. I can't imagine how expensive it'd be to shove 50kW through a directional array.
I wish the article had focused on this more...it'd make the initial shrewdness of Community Wireless's owners seem more foolhardy, but that's kind of the point; CW spent a lot of money to try and make this work, and now the station is struggling financially. It appears the struggling is as much due to fiscal mismanagement (if not outright fraud) by CW's managers, but this transmitter point might be something you could point a finger at, too.
Or maybe not; I don't know enough about the background of the story to really know for sure. But my point still stands about how a lot of these Class D AM stations are in an inherently difficult...if not impossible...situation.
I don't have much to say about the situation in general, but I did want to point out something the article didn't touch on much. Let me set the scene...
The overall story is about how Community Wireless shrewdly sold a transmitter/facility they had in Coalville for a significant profit, and used the proceeds to buy 1010AM in Tooele, UT (a close-in suburb of Salt Lake City) with the idea of getting access to the more lucrative (population dense) Salt Lake City market.
Seems like a good idea in theory, but here's the problem. While 1010 is a nice 50,000 watt AM station during the day. It's still a Class D daytimer with a weak 3,100 watts during Critical Hours (the short time around sunrise/sunset) and a miserable 13 watts (yes, just thirteen watts) at night. Fortunately that 13 watts is right next to downtown SLC, so there's some chance that it's reaching a more densely populated area. But with all the sources of RF interference out there these days (wi-fi, cellphones, lamp dimmers, power lines, computers, etc) that 13 watts might as well be nothing.
The unfortunate reality is that in today's on-demand / instant-gratification age..."super D" AM's, that essentially disappear once the sun goes down, are damn near impossible to make work financially. You can't have your signal go "poof" right in the middle of morning or afternoon drive...or worse, miss it altogether. Well, okay, with some niche/block formats you can do it because listeners tune in for a specific show, regardless of the time of the day. But while public radio is somewhat inherently block-formatted, there's no denying that the two big listener draws are Morning Edition and All Things Considered...otherwise known as when everyone's driving to and from work. During the summer it's not as bad as there's more daylight, but during winter it's a giant bummer when the sun sets at 4pm and your signal disappears.
Even worse, you've got to make enough money to keep that 50,000 watts pumping out during the day; transmitters that big are not cheap to operate. At least it's an non-directional facility. I can't imagine how expensive it'd be to shove 50kW through a directional array.
I wish the article had focused on this more...it'd make the initial shrewdness of Community Wireless's owners seem more foolhardy, but that's kind of the point; CW spent a lot of money to try and make this work, and now the station is struggling financially. It appears the struggling is as much due to fiscal mismanagement (if not outright fraud) by CW's managers, but this transmitter point might be something you could point a finger at, too.
Or maybe not; I don't know enough about the background of the story to really know for sure. But my point still stands about how a lot of these Class D AM stations are in an inherently difficult...if not impossible...situation.
Saturday, July 14, 2007
Handy Tip - Back of Lightswitch Plates
Reading Friday's BostonNOW I spotted a handy little tip on page 13:
Maybe you could hide a lock combination or spare key back there, too. Obviously you'd have to evaluate whether this is worth the inherent security risk (not to mention be careful sticking a conductive key near electricity!) but it's probably more secure than a key hidden under a doormat.
Depending on how public the info needs to be, you might also put a code there that matches a code at the breaker panel...a handy confirmation for what circuit that lightswitch or power outlet is on.
There's a part of me that thinks there's probably a way to expand this concept of "cleverly hidden info that's easy to forget" to other avenues for the expert radio engineer, but at the moment I'm lacking inspiration. When I think of something I'll post here, but if you have an idea by all means please share!
A convenient place to write the name and number of the paint you used in a roomThis got me thinking that the back of a lightswitch plate is a handy place for engineers to jot down all sorts of information. For example, let's say you've got a heavy-duty dimmer switch for two dozen incandescent tracklights. This is a special switch, designed to take a lot more than the usual 600 watt maximum. Ten years from now, the engineer of that day - who's renovating the place - might've lost your documentation and he or she doesn't know what the actual wattage maximum is. Well, there you go - write it on the back of the switchplate.
is on the back of the switch plate.
Maybe you could hide a lock combination or spare key back there, too. Obviously you'd have to evaluate whether this is worth the inherent security risk (not to mention be careful sticking a conductive key near electricity!) but it's probably more secure than a key hidden under a doormat.
Depending on how public the info needs to be, you might also put a code there that matches a code at the breaker panel...a handy confirmation for what circuit that lightswitch or power outlet is on.
There's a part of me that thinks there's probably a way to expand this concept of "cleverly hidden info that's easy to forget" to other avenues for the expert radio engineer, but at the moment I'm lacking inspiration. When I think of something I'll post here, but if you have an idea by all means please share!
Wednesday, May 09, 2007
Welcome Radio World Readers!
Wow - two issues in a row! Yay!! :-)
Welcome all Radio World readers once again, if you're looking for my expanded tale of Toboggans and ISDN over Satellite, the post is right here!
If you're a RW:Workbench reader, too, here's the links about the Digital Day Counter:
Welcome all Radio World readers once again, if you're looking for my expanded tale of Toboggans and ISDN over Satellite, the post is right here!
If you're a RW:Workbench reader, too, here's the links about the Digital Day Counter:
By the way, I noticed that same Workbench mentioned Download.com - which is a great site, indeed. However, there are many, many freeware apps out there that will sync your Windows computer's clock to any time server you want. Why pay for it?!? I use Dimension4 myself. FWIW, I usually set it to sync with tock.usno.navy.mil every six hours. My clock is now rarely more than 0.1 sec off.
Monday, April 16, 2007
BE PREPARED - it's not just for Boy Scouts
We live in a material world, as Madonna so famously sang in 1985. For good or ill, our entire society is based on assigning value (in our case, money) to everything; even things that you don't usually think of in objective terms. September 11th brought this concept home in a stark way for insurance companies that had to calculate the dollar value of a victim's life. Grisly, indeed.
On a less-dark note, though, we have something that runs almost directly counter to this entire concept: college radio. College radio disdains the idea of assigning a material value to both itself as an institution and itself as its programming. Fortunately, most college radio stations have the financial support of a parent university so they don't have to face the dreaded "fiscal reality". But I'd suggest that there's more benefits than just cash when you take a little time to look at your station's objective value.
When you assign value to your programming, it helps you make a wide variety of decisions that your station faces on a daily basis. Let's take a classic example. Most stations have a transmitter. At some point, this transmitter will need to be off the air for some reason. Maybe it's scheduled maintenance, maybe it's an upgrade, but regardless...for some period of time you won't be broadcasting. EEK! The obvious solution is a backup transmitter. But is it really worth that substantial cost?
Of course, it probably is...but how can you tell? And how much backup do you really need? The simple answer is "As much as you can afford," but for a college station, that doesn't work. You're probably already on a shoestring budget, so you need to figure out just how much backup you really need before you can figure out how you're going to pay for it.
How to do this? Well, first you have to calculate what is the dollar value associated with you being on the air at a given time. Commercial stations do this all the time when it comes to their spot load. If they don't air a commercial spot, the cost of the spot they would've charged the advertiser is now charged back to the station...either in the form of a monetary refund or a make-good of some other kind. In addition, being off the air for more than a few seconds usually means lost listeners, which can affect a station's Arbitron ratings. Right now that affect is difficult to quantify, but with the rollout of the hyper-accurate Portable People Meters...the affect of just a single minute of downtime can be measured.
The same concept can be applied to college radio, too. How does being off the air "cost" your station? Do you have to issue make-goods or refunds for underwriting? Do you lose listeners? Do you lose subcarrier rental revenue? Don't forget that you will want to decide that your station is committed to offering a certain level of service to your listeners, so there's a self-imposed cost if you cannot maintain that level of service.
These costs may change across the day and week. For example, being off the air from 3am to 5am on a Wednesday is less likely to cost you listeners than being off the air from 4pm to 6pm on a Saturday. Especially if Saturday is game day for sports coverage, or some other similarly special event.
Balance this against what direct benefit being on the air gains you. In many cases, this will just be the same amount as the cost...simply turned positive instead of negative...but not always. Best to be thorough in these analyses.
Now estimate how much downtime is caused by various scenarioes: transmitter failure, regular maintenance, DJ didn't show up, STL fails, fire in the studio (or transmitter), tower collapses, etc etc etc. It may help to seek professional advice from an engineer and/or broadcast insurance company (or even your campus legal/insurance office) to help you make sure you've thought of as many possible disaster scenarioes as you can. Try and cover everything from the smallest issue (say, one CD player of three croaks unexpectedly) to the biggest (say, a disease quarantine forces your DJ's to not do their shifts).
Don't assume that something is "just too unlikely" to happen to you. You don't have to look any further to Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans, or 9/11 and the World Trade Center, to know that the unthinkable can suddenly become your reality...and by the time it happens it's too late to prepare for it; you've got to be ready ahead of time. Even the relatively mundane can suddenly throw a giant wrench into your operation...a serious but relatively contained fire at the One Broadway building in Cambridge forced The Infinite Mind's entire operation out of their studios for over six weeks. It cost us dearly in time, funds and productivity to set up temporary facilities and rent other studios in the interim.
The aforementioned insurance professional should also be able to help you assign probabilities to each scenario's occurrence, although with anything that can take you off-line for more than 72 hours...you should assume that it can happen anytime and have a plan in place to deal with it.
Okay, now that you've got all this information, it's a relatively simple matter of deciding which problems/disasters are most likely to occur and how much downtime you're willing to accept if one of them does occur. Once you know this, you'll know what you need to have in place to deal with the problem and avoid the downtime.
Mind you, this isn't all doom-and-gloom. With some stations, the cost of downtime just isn't very high...so you don't really need to spend that extra money. But until you actually perform an analysis of the costs and benefits, you're not going to know for sure - and that means you're not prepared.
On a less-dark note, though, we have something that runs almost directly counter to this entire concept: college radio. College radio disdains the idea of assigning a material value to both itself as an institution and itself as its programming. Fortunately, most college radio stations have the financial support of a parent university so they don't have to face the dreaded "fiscal reality". But I'd suggest that there's more benefits than just cash when you take a little time to look at your station's objective value.
When you assign value to your programming, it helps you make a wide variety of decisions that your station faces on a daily basis. Let's take a classic example. Most stations have a transmitter. At some point, this transmitter will need to be off the air for some reason. Maybe it's scheduled maintenance, maybe it's an upgrade, but regardless...for some period of time you won't be broadcasting. EEK! The obvious solution is a backup transmitter. But is it really worth that substantial cost?
Of course, it probably is...but how can you tell? And how much backup do you really need? The simple answer is "As much as you can afford," but for a college station, that doesn't work. You're probably already on a shoestring budget, so you need to figure out just how much backup you really need before you can figure out how you're going to pay for it.
How to do this? Well, first you have to calculate what is the dollar value associated with you being on the air at a given time. Commercial stations do this all the time when it comes to their spot load. If they don't air a commercial spot, the cost of the spot they would've charged the advertiser is now charged back to the station...either in the form of a monetary refund or a make-good of some other kind. In addition, being off the air for more than a few seconds usually means lost listeners, which can affect a station's Arbitron ratings. Right now that affect is difficult to quantify, but with the rollout of the hyper-accurate Portable People Meters...the affect of just a single minute of downtime can be measured.
The same concept can be applied to college radio, too. How does being off the air "cost" your station? Do you have to issue make-goods or refunds for underwriting? Do you lose listeners? Do you lose subcarrier rental revenue? Don't forget that you will want to decide that your station is committed to offering a certain level of service to your listeners, so there's a self-imposed cost if you cannot maintain that level of service.
These costs may change across the day and week. For example, being off the air from 3am to 5am on a Wednesday is less likely to cost you listeners than being off the air from 4pm to 6pm on a Saturday. Especially if Saturday is game day for sports coverage, or some other similarly special event.
Balance this against what direct benefit being on the air gains you. In many cases, this will just be the same amount as the cost...simply turned positive instead of negative...but not always. Best to be thorough in these analyses.
Now estimate how much downtime is caused by various scenarioes: transmitter failure, regular maintenance, DJ didn't show up, STL fails, fire in the studio (or transmitter), tower collapses, etc etc etc. It may help to seek professional advice from an engineer and/or broadcast insurance company (or even your campus legal/insurance office) to help you make sure you've thought of as many possible disaster scenarioes as you can. Try and cover everything from the smallest issue (say, one CD player of three croaks unexpectedly) to the biggest (say, a disease quarantine forces your DJ's to not do their shifts).
Don't assume that something is "just too unlikely" to happen to you. You don't have to look any further to Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans, or 9/11 and the World Trade Center, to know that the unthinkable can suddenly become your reality...and by the time it happens it's too late to prepare for it; you've got to be ready ahead of time. Even the relatively mundane can suddenly throw a giant wrench into your operation...a serious but relatively contained fire at the One Broadway building in Cambridge forced The Infinite Mind's entire operation out of their studios for over six weeks. It cost us dearly in time, funds and productivity to set up temporary facilities and rent other studios in the interim.
The aforementioned insurance professional should also be able to help you assign probabilities to each scenario's occurrence, although with anything that can take you off-line for more than 72 hours...you should assume that it can happen anytime and have a plan in place to deal with it.
Okay, now that you've got all this information, it's a relatively simple matter of deciding which problems/disasters are most likely to occur and how much downtime you're willing to accept if one of them does occur. Once you know this, you'll know what you need to have in place to deal with the problem and avoid the downtime.
Mind you, this isn't all doom-and-gloom. With some stations, the cost of downtime just isn't very high...so you don't really need to spend that extra money. But until you actually perform an analysis of the costs and benefits, you're not going to know for sure - and that means you're not prepared.
Thursday, March 29, 2007
Getting in on the HD bandwagon?
Anyone who knows me knows that I primarily deal with smaller college radio stations in my off hours, and with public radio for my day job. Last week the FCC made a huge announcement that directly affects both camps.
Namely, it's that they're going to formalize multicasting via HD Radio. This means it's no longer an experimental service, and therefore no longer restricted to non-commercial programming. It's not quite official yet - as in, it's not in the Federal Register. But that'll happen within a few weeks, no doubt.
http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-271699A1.pdf
For what it's worth, they also authorized nighttime operation for HD Radio on AM. That's a topic for another post.
So why is this so important? The non-commercial restriction meant no ads. If they can't sell ads, they can't make money on the multicast...which means nobody wanted to put any money into their multicasting. So many (too many) commercial stations' multicasts were little more than iPods on shuffle. Blech.
The removal of that means that some enterprising commercial outlets are going to eventually start doing more interesting things with their multicasts. Not much at first, but it'll grow over time. That means the monopoly that public radio has had on innovative multicasting is about to evaporate. So far public radio hasn't been all that innovative, either...and with the extra competition they're going to need to start thinking outside the box if they want to see ROI on all that money they've poured into HD Radio installations.
Okay, but how's it important to college radio? The removal of the NCE restriction all but guarantees that we will soon see FM multicast channels being rented full-time to other parties. Again, it'll start small...but I'll bet it'll grow faster than innovative programming will. We're already seeing reciprocal-broadcasting deals like WAMU and WTMD and I'm 100% positive that some small and medium AM stations will start renting FM multicast channels to simulcast the AM. This'll be especially true for daytime-only AM and also clusters where there's a popular AM program draw...like sports. Why? HD Radio has barely started to penetrate the receiver market but that's rapidly starting to change with Radio Shack carrying HD Radio receivers. Multicasting will be a fast and easy way to reach dedicated listeners who don't mind paying $200 to hear their favoriate station...and why not? Satellite radio listeners are paying $150/year for the same concept, and with HD Radio you know that you once need to pay it once and you're done.
(prediction: unless their contract with the Sox prevents it somehow...Entercom will simulcast WRKO 680AM's Red Sox games on WMKK 93.7FM and/or WKAF 97.7FM via multicasting to reach the lucrative Metrowest suburbs & drive HD Radio receiver purchases. And they'll do it before the end of the 2007 season)
This means that if your little college station had any hope of renting an HD multicast channel on another station in town (a quite viable strategy to expand your reach) then you best come up with an offer and soon. It won't be long before stations wake up to the huge potential revenue draw this can be and your station gets priced out of the market.
Namely, it's that they're going to formalize multicasting via HD Radio. This means it's no longer an experimental service, and therefore no longer restricted to non-commercial programming. It's not quite official yet - as in, it's not in the Federal Register. But that'll happen within a few weeks, no doubt.
http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-271699A1.pdf
For what it's worth, they also authorized nighttime operation for HD Radio on AM. That's a topic for another post.
So why is this so important? The non-commercial restriction meant no ads. If they can't sell ads, they can't make money on the multicast...which means nobody wanted to put any money into their multicasting. So many (too many) commercial stations' multicasts were little more than iPods on shuffle. Blech.
The removal of that means that some enterprising commercial outlets are going to eventually start doing more interesting things with their multicasts. Not much at first, but it'll grow over time. That means the monopoly that public radio has had on innovative multicasting is about to evaporate. So far public radio hasn't been all that innovative, either...and with the extra competition they're going to need to start thinking outside the box if they want to see ROI on all that money they've poured into HD Radio installations.
Okay, but how's it important to college radio? The removal of the NCE restriction all but guarantees that we will soon see FM multicast channels being rented full-time to other parties. Again, it'll start small...but I'll bet it'll grow faster than innovative programming will. We're already seeing reciprocal-broadcasting deals like WAMU and WTMD and I'm 100% positive that some small and medium AM stations will start renting FM multicast channels to simulcast the AM. This'll be especially true for daytime-only AM and also clusters where there's a popular AM program draw...like sports. Why? HD Radio has barely started to penetrate the receiver market but that's rapidly starting to change with Radio Shack carrying HD Radio receivers. Multicasting will be a fast and easy way to reach dedicated listeners who don't mind paying $200 to hear their favoriate station...and why not? Satellite radio listeners are paying $150/year for the same concept, and with HD Radio you know that you once need to pay it once and you're done.
(prediction: unless their contract with the Sox prevents it somehow...Entercom will simulcast WRKO 680AM's Red Sox games on WMKK 93.7FM and/or WKAF 97.7FM via multicasting to reach the lucrative Metrowest suburbs & drive HD Radio receiver purchases. And they'll do it before the end of the 2007 season)
This means that if your little college station had any hope of renting an HD multicast channel on another station in town (a quite viable strategy to expand your reach) then you best come up with an offer and soon. It won't be long before stations wake up to the huge potential revenue draw this can be and your station gets priced out of the market.
Monday, March 19, 2007
Tough little iPod!
Oops. Left me 4G iPod in my winter parka's pocket on a trip through the washing machine. Three seconds in the dryer quickly made a sound I knew shouldn't be there, and revealed the nestling iPod.
Yeah, I think the neighbors were a bit startled at the string of profanity I let loose. It had been a long day to begin with. :-(
Knowing it wouldn't dry out as it was, I pried open the case, pulled out the hard drive, unscrewed the PCB and propped everything apart a bit to dry out. After leaving it for three days, I cautiously reassembled everything and tried to start it. Not surprisingly, the battery was dead...but after plugging it into the charger...the iPod booted up just like normal!!!
Wow! That's a tough little iPod! Even my cheapass Griffin Earthumps survived; I was pleasantly tapping my shoe to the Squirrel Nut Zippers within seconds. We'll see if I've destroyed the battery's runtime, though, but regardless...Apple's engineering of durability is impressive!
Yeah, I think the neighbors were a bit startled at the string of profanity I let loose. It had been a long day to begin with. :-(
Knowing it wouldn't dry out as it was, I pried open the case, pulled out the hard drive, unscrewed the PCB and propped everything apart a bit to dry out. After leaving it for three days, I cautiously reassembled everything and tried to start it. Not surprisingly, the battery was dead...but after plugging it into the charger...the iPod booted up just like normal!!!
Wow! That's a tough little iPod! Even my cheapass Griffin Earthumps survived; I was pleasantly tapping my shoe to the Squirrel Nut Zippers within seconds. We'll see if I've destroyed the battery's runtime, though, but regardless...Apple's engineering of durability is impressive!
Monday, March 05, 2007
Directed Electronics DHHD1000 Tabletop HD Radio
Editor’s note: this is an expanded version of the article that appears in the April 11, 2007 issue of Radio World, which can be found at http://www.rwonline.com/Correction: the printed article says that you cannot program a preset to an HD2, HD3, etc multicast channel. I realized, too late for press time, that this is not true...you can program a preset to a multicast channel, although there is the expected buffering delay of several seconds when you tune to it.
One big missing component of the HD Radio tuner rollout has been the HD equivalent of ubiquitous alarm clock radios. For a while we’ve had only the Boston Acoustics Receptor HD; now we also have the Directed Electronics DHHD1000 tabletop receiver…and it’s pretty good, overall.
This article will put the DHHD1000 head to head against the Receptor HD, and I’ll also toss in some comparisons to my Sangean HDT-1 component HD tuner.
Unpacking the DHHD1000…
Whoever put this together has been listening to engineers’ early laments about a lack of good antennas; a well-built AM loop and FM dipole antenna were included, as well as two outboard speakers that’re nearly as big as the radio themselves. Rounding things out were a headphone jack and aux input on the back (along with a mysterious “Service Only” s-video jack), a “wall wart” power supply and an instruction manual.
Being a typical engineer, I put aside the manual for the moment; I wanted to see how intuitive everything was. For the basic setup, it was all quite easy to get the unit powered on and listening to HD Radio. There is a menu button, but for most day-to-day functions you’ll be using the other six buttons: power, band, tune up, tune down, preset, memo(ry) and the volume knob. Push in the volume knob to switch to the “Aux” input. Plugging in headphones mutes the speakers. The radio automatically switches to the HD signal if it detects one strong enough to lock onto. Lacking HD, it’ll show RBDS PAD if one is present.
The good stuff
This quickly led to the first treat of this radio, you can set the display to “program guide”. This means that if a multicast channel is detected, it’ll show the PAD from that multicast stream, and the main channel’s PAD at the same time. So you can listen to one channel, and if you spy something you want to hear on the other channel, it’s a simple matter to tune one spot over.
Removing eight screws from the rear reveals a sparse interior. Most of the electronics are packed along the front, bottom and one side; there’s a lot of empty space for something so remarkably small to begin with, although the unit still draws 1.5A at 12VDC…quite a bit.
The not-so-good stuff
So far, I’ve been pretty impressed with this little unit. But now we come to the downsides. First is audio quality; the supplied speakers are fairly small, and despite attempts at bass ports in the back, there’s just not much “oomph” on the low end at all. There’s also no EQ or even bass/treble “tone” controls. I tried hooking up my trusty set of Technics LX-50 home stereo speakers, and the lack of bass was noticeable even on those. Ditto for headphones. Using the aux port with my iPod set to “bass booster” there was better sound, but I had to turn up the gain very high just to get normal listening volume…high enough that some minor distortion was evident. I think there’s just no way to get a silk purse out of this sow’s ear, but hey – it’s a table radio.
While the radio can hold 30 presets, programming them is a somewhat tedious process, although the radio does hold on to your presets (and the clock) during a power outage, though.
I also noticed that receiver sensitivity for FM drops dramatically depending on how the antenna is oriented. Many non-savvy listeners just ball up the antenna wire, and doing that on this radio makes it pretty “deaf”…and there’s no mention of how to properly orient a dipole antenna.
This brings me to a somewhat-damning problem: the documentation. Or should I say, lack of it. There’s a small and sparse booklet that’s filled with confusing yet repetitive info…most of it in badly-translated “Engrish”. Check it out for yourself in this PDF I scanned in. Fortunately, most of the radio is pretty intuitive, but the lack of good documentation could be a deal-killer for non-technical folks.
A call to Directed Electronics took several transfers to get to their technical support department, who reports that there are no "hidden features" sometimes found on early HD Radios...like the ability to force one speaker to analog and the other to digital so as to time-sync them by ear. Or force the radio into analog-only or digital-only. Admittedly, I wasn't really expecting any such features on this unit, however.
My eyes! My eyes!
Another major gripe I have is the display’s ultra-bright blue backlight. It’s comparable to that searingly bright neon from Kramer’s apartment in Seinfeld’s “Chicken Roaster” episode. Even with the ten-stage dimmer at its lowest setting it’s still pretty bright for a dark bedroom. Clearly this radio is designed for bedroom alarm clock use, so the display issue seems a major oversight.
Stacking up against the Boston Acoustics Receptor HD
With the DHHD’s dipole feeding a co-ax antenna splitter to both radios, the real test of the DHHD1000 vs. the Receptor HD was ready; FM signals across the board took a hit with that splitter, and the inherently weaker HD carriers (by definition they are -20dB / 100 times weaker than analog) now became a challenge to receive.
A good test case was WUMB 91.9FM, a 660 watt ERP analog / 6.6 watt ERP digital station approximately 10 miles away. I was just barely inside their protected service contour, so any HD reception would be “on the edge”.
Not surprisingly, HD reception was next to impossible. But with a careful arrangement of the dipole, I was able to find “the edge” of getting an HD signal. I found that both radios would lose or acquire the HD signal from WUMB at about the same point. A similar test with another mid-powered Class A, WKAF 97.7FM, demonstrated similar results. If anything the Receptor HD seemed more able to stay locked on to a medium HD signal, although the DHHD1000 was better at acquiring a weaker HD signal…but the difference was pretty small. With the same antenna, I’d judge both radios to be about the same in FM sensitivity.
However, the Receptor HD comes with a much-maligned “rat tail” wire antenna that is horrible in general…never mind compared to the DHHD1000’s quite-decent dipole. So “out of the box” the Directed Electronics wins the FM sensitivity challenge.
AM is harder to measure with separate loop antennas, but careful placement in the same location yielded fairly similar sensitivity on both radios for both WBZ and WMKI. WXKS, on the other hand, quickly came in on HD with the DHHD1000 but required much fiddling with the antenna to come in on HD with the Recepter HD. Not sure if this is more a function of the Receptor HD or of WXKS.
For all three AM HD Radio stations, the Receptor HD had two major quirks. First, it would often flash the “acquiring HD signal” icon for stations that don’t even have an IBOC transmitter. Obviously it wasn’t getting an HD signal, but this could be confusing to non-technical users.
Second, and more problematic, was an unusual tendency for the Receptor HD to “lose the signal” and dim the audio volume drastically. This would happen for a few seconds at least two or three times per minute on anything but the strongest stations. VERY careful positioning of the AM loop antenna helped mitigate that, but regardless...overall I’d have to give a firm nod to the Directed Electronics for AM sensitivity.
In terms of features, the Receptor HD and DHHD1000 have a similar features list; multiple presets, movable speakers, dimming display, two alarm clocks, headphones out and aux input. Unfortunately, for the DHHD1000, the Receptor HD is better at most of these functions: the Receptor has much more (and adjustable) bass and thus sounds much better. The physical design is more “sexy”. The display’s dimming is a little better since it’s light characters on a dark background (the DHHD1000 is the reverse). The presets are a little easier to set, too.
I got my DHHD1000 through a broadcaster’s special that reduced the total price to under $120, which is a perfectly fair price for it. However, at the MSRP of $250 it just doesn’t stack up as well as the Boston Acoustics Receptor HD considering I can get the Receptor HD for the same price at any Radio Shack. I suspect that like most electronics, the DHHD1000 will come down in price over time…after all, the Receptor HD originally cost $500. So as the price drops the DHHD1000 will become far more competitive.
Let’s bring the Sangean HDT-1 into the mix
I also have a Sangean HDT-1 component home stereo-style HD Radio tuner to compare against. The results were interesting, although not tremendously so. One thing that was immediately apparent was that the Sangean decodes HD audio with a bit more delay. When playing HD, both the DHHD1000 and the Receptor HD were perfectly synchronized…but the Sangean was about a quarter-second behind them. I'm told this is not unusual and that sometimes even two radio s of the same model will have slightly different delays...although the delay ratio between analog and digital will remain consistent within each receiver.
The Sangean also seemed no better than either tabletop radio in the sensitivity department; it was able to receive HD signals about the same when using the same antenna. Interestingly, while the Sangean’s included ribbon dipole antenna looks slightly “fancier” than the DHHD1000’s wire dipole, the wire dipole yielded slightly but noticeably better reception.
I’ll have to put all three units on the bench to really tell if there’s any difference in receiver sensitivity between these tabletop and component tuners…but at first glance they all seem about the same. That is to say: they’re no Onkyo T-9090’s, but they’re pretty decent with a good antenna. This is in marked contrast to many analog radios, where tabletop & clock radios typically are terrible receivers with any antenna, and component tuners are a mixed bag.
One can only hope that this trend of HD Radios being generally decent receivers continues. I also hope that manufacturers get better about including quality antennas with their radios, since it makes such a marked difference.
A bit about the stations I’m hearing
While this has little to do with the radio itself, I did want to comment on the wide variety of quality I hear on the 25+ HD Radio stations you can hear in
There’s a four-station cluster that shares a master antenna with some sort of problem that causes their stations’ HD2 audio to drop out for a second or two at least 3-4 times a minute. I’m told they’re working on it, but the problem has been there for a while. (update 4/21/07: sounds like they've fixed the problem)
I did notice that a handful of stations are running their processing pretty much the same on both analog and digital, but the digital one is perhaps 1 or 2 dB louder. I think this could be a smart idea – it really lets you know you’re hearing the HD signal now, and the added volume gives a psychological boost to the impression that it’s “better”.
However, several stations were obviously running their HD audio much quieter than the analog. I’m torn here; one of HD Radio’s big promises was an end to the “loudness wars” that have done nothing but craze your Program Director while causing widespread listener fatigue. But it’s jarring to hear the volume drop by -3 or -6dB when it blends to HD. Ideally you’d back off the processing on your analog but we all know how well that lead balloon will fly. There’s no simple solution here, but I don’t think simply letting HD sound quieter is the answer. It’s too easy for people to assume that quieter = poorer audio quality.
I’ve heard that the HDC codec inherent to HD Radio handles music better than voice at low bitrates. This would be consistent with what I’m hearing on our local AM stations: WBZ (all news/talk) and WMKI/WXKS (Radio Disney music and Spanish music, respectively). There was a small but discernible increase in audio artifacts on WBZ. I didn’t notice any artifacts on any of the FM stations, but nobody around here is multicasting more than one extra channel so I wasn’t expecting many artifacts, either.
The quality of PAD (Programming-Associated Data) was all over the map. Some stations had some really terrible PAD, with just call letters. One station’s call letters had been replaced by the phrase “iBiquity Digital Corporation” even though the secondary PAD field had artist/title info. At the other extreme, another station had call letters alternating with the station’s catch phrase in the main field, and in the secondary field showed artist/title and then the current Boston temperature. It would also cycle in “next track coming up” info as well. Nicely done!
As of now, no station is really taking full advantage of PAD to offer information that’s timely, useful and beyond what the listener can get just from listening. Info like more comprehensive weather conditions, a running transcript on talk shows, trivia about the artist currently playing and special contest/giveaway codes, etc. etc. etc. The surface has only barely been scratched here. Still, give it time; it took 10 years before stations started really embracing PAD via RBDS.
However, getting back to the audio…it does concern me how I don’t quite see stations taking their multicast channels, or HD in general, quite as seriously as their analog signal. Many of them seem to have the attitude that “It’s important and we’re working on it”, but it’s nowhere near the level of importance of the main analog signal; for example, if your main FM was dropping out for a few seconds every minute…you’d better believe the problem would be fixed within a week at most; not allowed to continue for months.
I confess I understand the lack of urgency…there aren’t that many radios out there yet, and the lack of commercials makes it hard to monetize multicasting. Still, I do hope that stations soon consider their multicast channels as critical as their main channels; after all, the listeners certainly will.
Conclusions
With an MSRP of $250, the DHHD1000 would seem to be in direct competition with the Boston Acoustics “Receptor HD” tabletop clock radio. Unfortunately, the BA sounds better, looks better and has better features, all for the same price. In addition, when using the same antennas, putting the tuners head to head yielded roughly the same receiver sensitivity.
This is not to say the DHHD is a bad radio. Overall it’s pretty good, and out of the box it’s supplied FM dipole is far superior to the BA’s supplied “rat tail”…giving it a distinct edge to the non-technical user. And if the price follows a typical pattern of dropping over time as R&D costs are recouped, then I would consider it a worthy contender in the tabletop radio market.
My typical use for the DHHD has been to listen to WBUR (our local NPR news station) while at work. My office building in the heart of metro
THUMBS UP:
Compact size
Good to excellent sensitivity
Good alarm clock
HD/RBDS PAD display
Aux input and headphones jack
THUMBS DOWN:
Mediocre sound (weak bass)
Poor documentation
Ultra-bright display
No “professional” features
MSRP: $250
Website: http://www.directed.com/Products/MobileAudio/HDRadio.aspx
Getting caught up
Yes I've been remiss in posting, but that's because I've been so damn busy! Well the remission ends now, no matter WHAT the doctor prescribes! Wait, that's not right... :-)Okay, so here's what's been happening...
- Beyond Broadcast conference at MIT; much kudos to the Jake Shapiro, Steve Schultze and the other phine pholks at PRX...including a pic of me with the One Laptop Per Child!
- A review of the Directed Electronics DHHD1000 tabletop HD Radio receiver - with pics!
- WZLY's open house commemorating the (almost) completion of their new studios - with pics!
Tuesday, February 06, 2007
Tobogganing with Satellites, or How Murphy's Law was Thwarted on a Remote Broadcast
Recently I was fortunate enough to be tapped to engineer a live remote in the snowy reaches of Camden, Maine. The folks at American Public Media’s Weekend America wanted to cover the US National Tobogganing Championship, so they sent intrepid reporter Keith O'Brien to cover the fierce, yet admittedly whimsical, competition.
Keith went up a week before the event to get a lay of the land and interview several competitors. He put together a fine pre-recorded piece and sent it off to the This presented something of a problem, as about half the toboggan chute extends out over the frozen expanse of Hosmer Pond. There’s no AC power out there, nor any telecommunications landlines. There was a cellphone tower not far away, with good line of sight…but for a nationally-distributed public radio show, we wanted better audio quality than a regular cellphone would deliver. And there wasn’t time to get a POTS-codec up there for testing. So we needed something that was known to work, and could work completely independent of any existing infrastructure in Camden. That meant satellite! Specifically, ISDN over satellite. With the right satphone, you can establish a 64kbps channel, which is more than sufficient for a decent quality ISDN connection.
Now as you might imagine, there’s about a thousand things that could go wrong with this setup. And go wrong they did! It was a comedy of errors for practically the entire process. But with foresight, planning, backups, testing, more backups, more testing and yet more backups, we kept it a comedy rather than a tragedy.Keith’s initial visit had us pretty confident that we’d have a good view of the sky for the satellite. But first we had to make sure the equipment survived shipping to me in
Our first test was from my apartment in After much fiddling with the satellite dish, I discovered that you must aim the dish very precisely, but you’ll get four or five bars of signal as a reward. The dish has a built-in gimbaled compass that helps, but it’s mostly done by a steady hand and lots of little changes. It was very difficult as the dish isn’t designed to hold anything but a 0, 45 or 90 degree tilt. Anything else required external bracing to hold it steady. Still, once the proper aim was achieved, we got a solid lock on both ends, and our ISDN’s were very happy.
I retired to my hotel room and re-packed all the gear with an eye towards carrying it by hand if I couldn’t get my preferred parking spot. All batteries were topped off and I nodded off for the evening, hoping the weather would clear.
Fortune smiled on us, as day came with beautiful clear skies, a fresh layer of ice on the chute, and plunging temperatures. Good thing I packed extra sweaters and long underwear! I met with Keith and, after some arguing with the parking guards, was able to get my car situated in the same spot where I did my test, and got everything set up. Except I realized that the UPS that had initially provided a perfectly-sufficient 25 minutes of power, was not providing jack squat! I had left it charging for two days, it should’ve been fine…but later tests showed it just refused to take a charge at all. Perhaps the stress test damaged the battery. Regardless, it's good thing we had a spare UPS. And as it turns out, despite valid concerns about an inverter’s “square wave” causing audible noise on the ISDN, there wasn’t any noise and we just ran on the inverter alone.
Then not an hour later, a dogsled team with ten noisy huskies set up shop not 20 feet from us! Trust me, it's still a comedy! A little chat with the owners and they said it'd be no problem to take the dogs on a run across the frozen lake when we were actually live...which actually worked great from an ambient sound perspective.
After both I, and Keith’s wife, remarked how amazing it was that nobody had died on that toboggan chute…Keith took the plunge with the chutemaster during a break in the trials. He says for most of the nine seconds, he didn’t scream because he couldn’t breathe. But when he found his breath...well, I think I heard him from across the lake! And let’s just say his choice in words wasn't FCC-friendly! Afterwards, Keith met up with competitor Andy Hazen, who was to be interviewed live at about 
Feeling a little nervous but nonetheless hopeful,
The ultimate point here is that pretty much everything that could go wrong, did. Even comically so; my polarized sunglasses – ideal for snow glare – made reading all the LCD displays very difficult. Fortunately we figured out most of what could go wrong in advance and had time to prepare backups. In fact, the one thing we didn't test to real-world conditions was the one thing we were nearly bitten by: the battery life of the satphone. Admittedly there was little reason to test it beyond a minute or two; satphone calls run around $5/minute (ouch!) and we had every reason to expect that two batteries would be more than sufficient, or that we could run off charger if we had to. Everything had at least one, if not two levels of backup…but that was one area we needed three.
So what’s the moral? Test, test, test! Always do tests as if they were the real thing; never assume something will work as you expect it to, and always have at least one solid backup to every part of your system (extra UPS’s and the inverter, extra batteries), and a separate backup that’s completely separate and redundant to everything (Keith’s cellphone).
In conclusion, I’m not sure I’d recommend this method for doing remote recordings. It’s got several potential points of failure and is prohibitively expensive. A cynical observer might remark that Keith could've made one trip with a portable flash or minidisc recoder, edited the piece, and filed it for the following week's show.
But at the same time, that's not really what Weekend America is about. I'm told the show strives to have a "live" feel to it and it definitely contributes to its overall "sound" every week. Plus who wants to hear about the toboggan championships that happened last week?? It sounds a lot better when you're talking about something happening this weekend!
So with that kind of mandate in mind, it's good to know that you've got options like ISDN-over-satellite in your toolbox. Plus I got paid to have a fun trip to Maine and watch guys hurtle down a chute on an old couch. Ain't public radio grand?!? :-)
Photo Credits: Weekend America, Keith O'Brien & Aaron Read
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