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! :-)

Radio World Readers - a correction to the VR3 Review

Welcome any readers from my review of the VR3 car HD Radio in Radio World. There was an error in my review that couldn't be corrected before the issue went to print. In reality, the radio CAN be forced to automatically re-tune to a multicast channel after a power loss.

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.

VR3 Add-On Car HD Radio - price slashed to $38 (!!!)

I recently wrote a review of the VR3 add-on auto HD Radio tuner. It wasn't very kind; the radio isn't bad but it's not all that great, either. Between when I first bought it and when I finished writing the review, the price dropped from $150 to just over $100. That lowered price helped make the radio a lot more attractive.

Well, that was two weeks ago (July 13). Today at Target (July 27, 2008) the price was only $38. Yes, thirty-eight bucks! I grabbed the three units on the shelf and bought 'em for WEOS; at that price they'll make decent giveaways.

However, a price cut that steep can only mean that the model's discontinued (either by VR3 or Target) and is about to be superceded by a new model. That new model may or may not be HD Radio-equipped.

For example, I wandered over to home electronics in Target today as well, and found the Sony XDR-S10HDiP HD Radio, a tabletop model that also has a dock for an iPod and supports iTunes tagging (and has a "surround sound" emulator, too). Pretty sexy for $180.

VR3's Add-On Car HD Radio Hits Target with a Miss

Wandering through Target recently I spotted a big “HD Radio” logo on a box in the auto section. This was the first I’d seen of HD Radio in Target, a store that’s known for attracting shoppers that are younger and have higher median household incomes...qualities many stations like in listeners, too! Perhaps the VR3 VRHDUA100 could be a real boon. Sadly, while I found it to be a decent tuner, the radio itself has a clunky user interface and is limited in features as to be problematic.

The VR3 is an “add-on” tuner, designed to be used through your existing car stereo. There’s three parts: a main unit that you tuck away behind the dashboard, a control unit that you attach somewhere in the interior, and a power supply/cord.

The power supply
Unlike most car radios, the VR3 provides a power plug that mates with any 12VDC “cigarette lighter” power jack in a car. There is no other way to provide power unless you cut off the cigarette lighter jack and strip the wires a bit. Perhaps this is no big deal for a radio engineer, but I can't see Joe Average doing it.

However, this does make installation a lot easier. But for me, it also hogs a power source you might need for an iPod or cellphone charger. And in my case, my 2001 Honda Accord also has a lot of engine electrical noise on that jack, and it came through the radio very audibly with a high-frequency whine that would increase in pitch and loudness as the engine RPM's did.

Hmmm…strike one.

The main unit
The main unit is the size of a small paperback book (6.5” W x 3.75” D x 1.2” H) and easily fit behind my existing car radio. However, as with most add-on tuners it’s designed to go in-line of your car’s antenna. The problem here is that the main unit’s cord, designed to go to the existing car radio, is just 18 inches. So the main unit pretty much has to be installed right where your existing car radio is. Not every car has a lot of room back there.

The main unit also has two RCA line-level outputs for the audio, which work fine. But this revealed a glaring omission: there’s no RF modulator in the VR3. So if your existing car radio doesn’t have RCA line-level inputs, you’re outta luck. Or you have to buy a separate add-on FM RF modulator.

Yeesh…strike two.

For the hell of it, I did open up the case and took a look inside. The interior appears pretty densely packed. Although I never noticed an excessive amount of heat being generated during operation. I didn't take any pictures of the underside of the interior - it's just a blank PCB.


The control unit

The control unit is discreetly small (only 5” W x 1.25” H x 0.6” D) and the package includes a handy snap-in cradle that can suction-mount to your windshield. There’s a two-line LCD display (blue-white letters on backlit blue) and eight buttons: POWER, BAND, SCAN and MENU on the left of the display…TUNE UP, TUNE DOWN, ENTER and PRESET on the right. Enter also doubles as a “change display” button, which can be set to show the song title, artist, call letters, frequency, a signal strength bargraph meter, or scrolling text.

The radio will show PAD from RDS/RBDS or, if HD carriers are present, the PSD from the HD station. If neither are present, it just shows the frequency. Usually the top line is reserved for call letters and “FM”, “AM”, “HD FM” or “HD AM”. The bottom line is what’s controlled by the ENTER button, and it’s erratic to say the least. This is more the fault of HD stations not standardizing on what information they’re displaying using the artist/title/etc fields. But it’s frustrating because the VR3 only shows one at a time, and must be manually cycled. The signal strength meter seems to have little usefulness, especially with FM multicast stations; you already know you’ve lost the signal because the HD audio disappears before the meter drops at all.

There’s no brightness or contrast control on the VR3, and it is exceedingly bright for night driving. I “solved” that problem simply by stuffing the control unit in an out-of-direct-sight location…inelegant but I suppose it worked. This also kinda highlights another shortcoming: while the cradle is pretty well designed in terms of holding the control unit, it's not so great for actually attaching to anything. The click-lock suction cup works reasonably well for attaching to a windshield, but unless you want your car to have a giant "steal me" sign on it, you don't want to leave something like that out when you're parked. So it suddenly becomes a real pain in the neck to remove/setup the cradle every time you go out.

The lack of contrast control was also a problem because I usually wear polarized sunglasses during daytime driving, and LCD displays are inherently polarized themselves. Unfortunately, the VR3's display is oriented so that when viewed normally while wearing polarized glasses...the display turns solid black. D'oh! I had to turn it 90 degrees to see anything on the display. Grrr…

And while we're piling on with the annoying quirks: when you shut off your car, the radio doesn’t stay on the last station it was playing. Instead, when you start up the car, the radio goes to whatever the station was when you last turned on the VR3 itself. This isn’t really a big deal, but it’s one more vaguely annoying thing in a radio that has a lot of vaguely annoying things.

Somewhat more seriously, the radio has an annoying tendency to just tune to "static" when you tune up or down. Especially, and inexplicably, if you tune past 87.5 or 107.9 to "loop around" to the other end of the radio dial. Even if you know darn well there's a clear station on a given frequency, sometimes all you hear is static. Tuning one notch away and then back usually clears the problem, but it's disconcerting nonetheless.

However, something that truly is rather damning: the presets are incredibly difficult to use. You must hit PRESET first, then scroll up and down amongst the 20 presets (10 each for AM & FM) using the TUNE UP or TUNE DOWN buttons then hit ENTER to switch to that frequency. This effectively requires you to take your eyes of the road for several seconds at a time to use any one present.

Hoo-boy…that’s strike three.

Arguing with the ump
Now that I’ve kicked the VR3 while it’s down, I should point out some of the positives. The radio is not the most-ever sensitive tuner I’ve ever used, but it’s not bad. I’ve used the Kenwood HR-100 and the JVC KD-HDW10 in this same car, and both are slightly better, but only slightly. You can feel comfortable recommending this tuner to the non-radiophile for signal selectivity.

I was particularly impressed with the AM sensitivity (listed at -87dBm in the manual) which was markedly better than most stock car radios. I couldn’t find a spec on it, but my ears told me the VR3 dynamically adjusts the AM bandwidth to adjust for signal conditions…and when it had a solid signal it must’ve been very wideband because it sounded fabulous. The only catch, if you can call it that, is that often the bandwidth narrowing was VERY audible. On both AM and FM you’d often hear the sound get tinny or rich very quickly as the filter constantly adapted. Ah well, at least when the signal was good, the sound was good, too.

In all fairness, the VR3 seems designed to focus heavily on the “easy to install” part (the box even touts it) and for the non-technical, it does mostly achieve that goal. Even the simple manual does a good job tackling a universal installation concept. The problem comes when you want to actually use it – it’s just not that user-friendly. Worse, there are better options out there that are cheaper: the VR3 retails for $150.

UPDATE July 13th 2008: a visit to Target today revealed they have lowered the price from $150 to $105. Looks like a recent change. I admit this makes the VR3 more competitive with comparable models like the Visteon HD Zoom or Directed Electronics "Car Connect" (see my review of the Directed) both of which retail for about $200. Although the Directed, and the similar-looking Visteon, both seem to offer far better performance and features.

UPDATE July 27th, 2008: another visit to Target and another price cut, this time to just $38 (!!!!!) Either Target or VR3 must be discontinuing selling this model to let 'em go at that price. I grabbed the remaining three radios on the shelf at the Henrietta, NY Target to use as giveaways for WEOS. I also noticed that in the home electronics aisle they now have the Sony XDR-S10HDiP HD Radio ($180) a tabletop model that has an iPod dock and supports iTunes tagging.

What about for in-house monitoring?
Thinking outside the box, what about for radio engineers wanting in-house monitoring? It's tempting...the radio's design that makes it automatically go to whatever frequency it was set to when you turned the power off via the POWER button on the control unit. And if it was powered on when you cut the power, it'll come back on automatically when power is restored. Quirky, but it means you can be assured that'll come back to a specific frequency in the event of a power loss.

Catch is, you can’t force it to power-on to a HD-2 or HD-3 (or HD-n) multicast channel. Alert reader Tom noticed that this is not true on his VR3; when you tune it to a multicast channel, press POWER to power off, then press POWER again to power on...the VR3 will return to the multicast channel every time after a power outage. When I re-tested my VR3 I discovered that mine did that, too...I don't know why it wouldn't during the original testing. Very weird. So it's got some potential as an in-house monitor. Unfortunately, when the carrier signal is lost, the radio switches back to the main frequency quite quickly...10 to 15 seconds. So unfortunately, it's not quite perfect for monitoring since you can't use it with a silence sensor, nor can you force it to tune to digital only. Still, not bad for $38, though.

In conclusion...
Target’s website offers a few other HD Radio options (although, oddly, the website doesn't list the VRHDUA100), but as of June 2008 I haven’t seen any alternatives in the actual stores as of July 27, 2008, Target is now selling the Sony XDR-S10HDiP HD Radio in the home electronics aisle. So for the time being, if your listeners want to walk into a store and walk out with an HD Radio for their car I’d have to recommend you send them elsewhere. If they just want a tabletop model, the Sony is a good one. While the VR3 is indeed fairly easy to set up, it's just too lacking in features and too difficult to use for your non-technical listener that it's not worth it.

The one place I could possibly recommend the VR3 is in a "company car" if your station has one. It's not a bad tuner and, presumably, your company car is mostly going to be listening to your station alone...thus you don't have to worry about changing the channel.


Thumbs Up

• Decent tuner selectivity.
• Small size.
• Fairly easy/simple installation.
  

Thumbs Down

• Very poor user interface.
• Lack of FM RF Modulator.
• Lack of options for power.
• Cheap price reflects few features.
  

Sangean HDT-1X Offers Upgrades

Sangean released the HDT-1 component-style HD Radio receiver to the delight of radio engineers. Many of us had been waiting for a radio we could put in our racks to replace a homebrew car receiver (or similar jury-rigged solution) for our in-house monitoring. The HDT-1 filled that need, and then some, with its stylish design, intuitive controls and large display. Even so, the HDT-1 wasn’t entirely perfect, and Sangean has released an updated version, the HDT-1X, that adds a few nifty features while maintaining the same performance of the original.

Quickly recapping the original and new units, the radio is a component-style tuner. It will easily fit in any 2RU space, although it needs a rack shelf. The front panel controls include a large power button, a numeric keypad for presents or direct entry of a frequency, and three rocker switches for incremental tuning, seek tuning, and seek tuning for HD stations only. There’s also a “band” button to cycle through two sets of FM presets and two sets of AM presents, and an “info” button to cycle through various functions on the display.

The rear panel has an AC power connection, a coaxial FM antenna jack, a twin-lead AM antenna jack, two unbalanced analog RCA audio outputs, and a new addition: an optical digital audio output, also unbalanced. A remote control that duplicates most of the front panel’s controls is also included.

I mentioned the optical digital output, that’s one of the main upgrades in the HDT-1X. Its consumer, not professional, but I imagine you could easily convert the optical TOSlink to balanced AES or whatever format you need. However, in comparing the optical output to the analog, the optical sounds slightly “brighter”, with more high-end treble. It’s possible this is a by-product of my amplifier, but this tended to make over-compressed audio sound more “crunchy”, especially on our local HD-AM stations.

The display is fairly large, 2.75 inches wide and 1.5 inches tall. It can be cycled through showing the time, a graphical EQ, artist/title in large, call letters, and frequency + call letters + artist/title. It can also show “SSI” which presumably means “signal strength indicator”. I’m not sure how useful this meter is, since it seems to vary wildly for no apparent reason. Of course, perceived signal strength does tend to do that. Still, it can be handy to fine-tune your antenna’s orientation.

Another bonus in the HDT-1X’s display is the addition of a stereo indicator. A quick scan of the dial revealed all HD signals from FM stations are in stereo…even stations obviously broadcasting mono content. However, on the AM side I noticed news/talker WBZ 1030 was choosing to transmit their HD signal in mono. It’s been long-suspected that the Sangean HD tuners also decode the old C-QUAM AM Stereo, and listening to the sole Boston source of AM Stereo confirmed it; the stereo icon appeared about 15 seconds after I tuned to WJIB 740.

One oddity carried over from the HDT-1 is that where some other HD Radios show some combination of station information, or artist/title, the Sangean will only show call letters. I have a suspicion that Sangean is actually displaying it “correctly” but other radios might using a more aesthetically sensible method.

A Well-Received Upgrade?

In the end, this is ultimately just a radio – so how good reception does it get? I’d say "Pretty good." It’s not the most sensitive tuner I’ve ever owned, but even in Boston’s packed radio dial, it tuned in most stations that I expected it to. Interestingly, some stations that had pretty poor analog reception…and low numbers on the SSI…would still successfully switch to HD. To compare it to the original HDT-1, I split the stock FM dipole antenna into both my HDT-1 and the HDT-1X, and found that they both seemed to have the same sensitivity. Similarly, the stock AM loops in about the same location yielded comparably sensitivity (and SSI numbers) for both radios.

One thing I couldn’t test was reception of HD3 channels and/or multicasts using the Expanded Bandwidth transmission. Unfortunately nobody in Boston is using either as of this writing. However, HD2 multicasts, when present, came in just fine whenever the HD1 channel successfully buffered.

Sangean seems to want to appeal to radio engineers, and the proof is in the HDT-1X’s signal diagnostics and control. The original HDT-1 had several interesting signal diagnostics, such as Bit Error Rate, carrier-to-noise ratio, FUSE Bit Check, (HD) Transmission Mode, and station ID. But the –1X adds some very broadcaster-friendly tricks: force-analog only, force audio to digital-on-left / analog-on-right (for time-synchronization purposes), and force mono vs. stereo (only in analog mode). Worth noting: even in analog-only mode, the display still shows HD PSD information, and not RBDS, if IBOC carriers are present.

And proving that Sangean really aims to please, even certain whining reviewers of other HD Radios (Directed Electronics DHHD1000 Tabletop HD Radio) :-) they even added a bright/dim control to the backlight! And the backlight shuts off when you power off the unit – yay!

So is the HDT-1X every engineer’s dream? Well, not quite. When the radio loses AC power, it defaults to "off" when power comes back. And if the radio loses the HD signal, it switches back to main analog audio after a minute or so; which could be problematic if you’re using it as a multicast channel’s monitor. I spoke to Sangean a bit about this and there’s talk of a branching a true “broadcasters’ radio” model off from the base HDT-1 design. Such a unit would cost more, but would have all the “professional” features like balanced outputs and even more signal diagnostics.

Conclusions

With the HDT-1X, Sangean has taken a pretty good “prosumer” tuner and made it even better for broadcasters. Could it be more sensitive? I suppose, but it’s hardly “deaf”. Could it have a few more features? Perhaps, but the ones it does have are nice. For the price, these downsides are easily outweighed by the improvements: a digital output to preserve the all-digital chain, and the added analog/digital and forced analog controls are very useful. The stereo indicator rounds out a great package of improvements. If you’ve been desiring a house monitor for HD that won’t break the bank and looks slick, the HDT-1X might be just the ticket.

PROS:
Handy digital/analog audio tools.
Reasonably priced.
Large display / Easy-to-use controls.
Good manual / documentation.

CONS:
No professional audio outputs.
Not ideal for silence-sense monitoring.

PRICE: $249 (MSRP)

ON THE WEB: http://www.sangean.com/product.php?model=HDT-1X&prod_id=41

The FAA and NOTAM's

The FAA has recently moved to begin consolidating and outsourcing the process of issuing NOTAM's into a national office (call 877-487-6867) rather than many local/regional offices. A NOTAM, or NOtice To AirMen, is very relevant to broadcasters since many of them are responsible for the warning beacons on their towers. Whenever a beacon fails, the responsible party has to notify the FAA immediately, who then issues a NOTAM to all the local pilots about the lighting failure, so they know to give said tower a wide berth.

The problem is that many of these local offices have developed personal relationships and "local knowledge" of terrain and towers, that is crucial in ensuing accurate notices reach the right pilots. The national push doesn't seem to be allocating enough resources to compensate for that "local touch"; it's more about saving costs.

A Radio World writer asked me for my thoughts on this issue; below is what I sent him. I don't think they'll reprint my e-mail entirely, but if they do I'll link to them instead. Before you read it, bear in mind that I am not directly responsible for any towers, nor have I ever had to issue (or retract) a NOTAM before. I have no special knowledge of the FAA, I'm just commenting as an intelligent observer who does not have any special insight into the actual reasoning behind this change.

There are some valid reasons for consolidating the collection and
dissemination of NOTAM's...after all, if a plane is flying from, say, Boston to
Miami, and the tower with the lights out is in Delaware, logically the
information of the outage will get to pilots faster via a national office than
via local offices. A national office is probably more capable of updating
with time and technology to better reach pilots using a broader spectrum of
communications: e-mail, txt messaging, websites, blogs, etc.

The problem is that this outsourcing/consolidation seems to be driven by
cost-cutting rather than by efficiency, and as such there aren't sufficient
resources committed to compensate for that crucial "local
knowledge". Knowledge like how a tower might be listed for a certain
latitude and longitude, but in reality it's a few degree-seconds to the
east. That small difference on paper could mean life or death for a pilot
in low-visibility weather, and a local office is more likely to have the
personal connections between the FAA and pilots to ensure that knowledge is
shared.

These issues, that local knowledge and personal relations so easily
compensate for, CAN be duplicated with sufficient resources at the
national. It's not easy, nor is it fast, but it can be done.
Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like that's the goal here. Instead, the
goal seems to be to drive the bottom line as hard as possible. Such a method
inherently compromises safety to some degree. That degree might be quite
small, and thus quite acceptable...after all, at a certain point it becomes
dangerous to fly in bad weather no matter how many NOTAM's are issued.

But I fear it's more likely that the resources will be cut more and
more, and the risk increased more and more, in the pursuit of the fiscal bottom
line. And that the only thing that will stop that drive for profits is a
repeat of the 2004 Black Hawk chopper crash in Waco, Texas. That was not a
failure from corruption or malice (a proper NOTAM was issued) it was just a
system too inefficient to work properly. This recent consolidation
seems to be exacerbating that inefficiency, rather than fixing it.

Directed Electronics drives into the car HD Radio market

The "broadcaster's buy" from iBiquity in early 2007 included a new offering to the HD Radio tuner market: the Directed Electronics DMHD-1000 "car connect" radio. It's an "add on" tuner designed to work with your existing car radio. Overall I'd say it's a mixed bag: it has some good things, and it has some not-so-good things.

First a little description of the radio: the actual tuner/converter box is about the size of a small paperback book, meant to be hidden behind the dash or under a seat. A small, wired, display/control unit is barely bigger than the (mostly redundant) remote control that also comes with the unit.

Rounding out the package are a wiring harness for power (with nice, long wires), some extra fuses, the equipment manual and two RF jumper cables with Motorola plugs so you can install the tuner in-line with your existing antenna. The latter is especially nice as it avoids the growing problem of Part 15 transmitters (for iPods and whatnot) causing interference to licensed stations.

The user interface (UI) is pretty good. There's not much "hidden" in the menus; most every function has a button you can find by touch. The radio has five preset buttons but uses a "bank" button to cycle through four rounds of presets, for twenty total. The display is a black LCD characters with an amber backlight. The dimmer & contrast settings are good – you can run the dimmer from very bright (suitable for daylight) to very dim (or even off). Contrast is flexible enough to handle most any viewing angle.

Like any good engineer, I like to see how intuitive the design is by working without reading the manual. I found I didn't need to check it for anything; the installation was pretty intuitive, save for one big exception I'll come back to. After my tests, I browsed through the manual (PDF) and found it to be reasonably well-written. The last page had a ton of interesting (albeit, somewhat cryptic) specifications, such as “1st adjacent rejection” (SNR=60dB at D/U = -25dB) and “post-detection bandwidth” for DBB (Adjustable from 8kHz down to 3.5kHz). See my blog for the full list of specs. Finally, there’s no visual indication of it, but the DMHD does seem to decode C-QUAM AM Stereo based on my listening tests.

Good morning Mr. Phelps
My greatest challenge (if I chose to accept it) with this review is that I live in the city, so I don't own a car. I had to borrow a friend's car, install the DMHD, drive around listening for the day, and uninstall it…leaving no trace. Ten years ago, the wiring on many car radios would've made this impossible…but today it was no sweat.

The test vehicle was a 2006 Ford Escape SUV that, by chance, also had a similar-styled XM satellite radio tuner. A little struggling with a DIN tool popped out the factory radio, the in-line RF modulator installed in less than a minute, and I jury-rigged the three power wires to a cigarette lighter adapter. In less than 30 minutes I was on the road.

Downtown Boston is notorious for multipath, intermediate-frequency and blanketing interference. As expected, the HD Radio signal really shined here; as soon as HD blended in, all the pops, hiss and clicks just disappeared. The XM satradio's RF modulator also co-existed nicely with the DMHD.

I did notice that for HD listening, the radio isn't quite as sensitive as I'd prefer, but it’s not bad. Large FM stations were no trouble, but smaller Class A FM stations have inherently low HD wattages, and they seem more susceptible to being "lost in the noise floor" on this radio. Analog reception was acceptable; there weren't any places where the Escape's OEM radio was getting noticeably better FM reception than the DMHD. AM listening is tougher since we only have three stations transmitting HD in Boston, but the DMHD didn’t seem to have any particular trouble acquiring a digital signal from any of them.

All-in-all, I wouldn't consider it "dynamite" radio for reception…but it's far from "deaf". Your average listener shouldn’t notice a significant difference in reception between the DMHD and most OEM car radios, nor with your average HD Radio car tuner.

Keep your eyes on the road!
DMHD handles HD Radio PSD (Program Service Data) quite well; the display is not large, but the design & layout of the text makes the most of it. The “status bar” along the bottom edge will always contain critical info like call letters and preset bank.

The rest of the display can be cycled through several modes by the DISP button, and exactly what gets shown depends heavily on what the station is transmitting…in either HD or RBDS. It can be call letters, frequency, a slogan, artist/title, etc. If no HD PSD, or more generic PAD (Program Associated Data), is available the radio defaults to some combination of call letters and/or the frequency. Overall, I found most every mode was useful. A nice touch is the HD "program guide" mode which shows the current artist/title for all the multicast channels at the same time.

However, with RBDS I have one big criticism of PAD on this radio. If there is dynamic PS (Program Service name), as many stations have…each time the PS refreshes it resets the RT (Radio Text) field’s scrolling to the beginning. This means much of the RT field may never get displayed.

Wait, isn’t this supposed to sound better?
Another big gripe immediately appeared when I tried to use the RCA line-level outputs: serious distortion! It sounded badly over-driven, although it got somewhat better as the tuning unit got warmer. A second and third DMHD proved to have the same problem. A call to Directed's tech support said I just return it for an exchange, but a colleague at iBiquity told me the solution he stumbled across: you have to ground the tuning unit's chassis (or in some cases, try grounding one of the RCA's shields). This is in addition to the ground wire on the power connector. I suspect many people will never even notice since they'll bolt the tuning unit to something metal behind the dash. But there's no specific mention of this in the manual, and if you don't ground it – the sound is inexplicably awful on the RCA outputs.


Conclusions
It’s hard to get around the problems with the RCA outputs…and the lack of documentation, or viable tech support about it, is disappointing. This is something I can see the average user immediately demanding a refund for their “broken” radio. The strange behavior of PAD from RBDS was also minor, but annoying and highly visible. And the tuning unit gets quite warm, although at least the documentation warns about this.

In addition, with an MSRP of $200 the DMHD1000 unfortunately has come out right at the same time Walmart announced that they’re selling the JVC KD-HDW10 car radio for $190. Of course, the JVC is a replacement radio; if you want to keep your existing car radio, the DMHD might be a good pick.


THUMBS UP:* Small and well-designed control unit
* Decent signal sensitivity
* In-line RF modulator (instead of free-radiating)
* Easy installation

THUMBS DOWN:
* RCA outputs sound terrible unless grounded & manual doesn't mention it
* RBDS doesn't display properly
* Tuning unit gets quite hot

MSRP: $200
Website: http://www.directed.com/Products/MobileAudio/HDRadio.aspx
Manual: http://www.radiolink.org/blog/dmhd1000manual.pdf
Specifications (from the manual): http://www.radiolink.org/blog/dmhd1000specs.txt
Thanks to David Maxson & Lew Collins of Isotrope, LLC for their assistance!

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:

• Original post on Lifehacker
• Actual company website

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.

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.

The sensitivity of the radio also quickly became apparent when I moved to the NCE band, a place where Boston has over a dozen college stations all crammed next to each other. I live barely 2 miles from 1000 watt WZBC on 90.3, so I tried tuning in WICN – an 8000 watt directional on 90.5 over 30 miles away on roughly the same azimuth. Surprisingly, WICN was there! Admittedly there was a fair amount of static, more than I’d consider “listenable” for any length of time, but there was no crosstalk from WZBC.

Next test is on the AM band. We only have three stations in Boston proper running HD on AM: WBZ 1030, WMKI 1260 and WXKS 1430. All three blended to HD within a few seconds of tuning and the improvement in audio quality is dramatic: much more high end, and all stereo. Some minor audible artifacts, but overall I’d say it’s much better than regular AM. An added treat showed up when I tuned to WJIB – this radio continues the trend of HD tuners decoding C-QUAM AM Stereo! I wouldn’t quite call it as good as HD, but it’s not bad.

Finally, after warning my wife, I cranked up the volume on a few stations to see what the supplied amplifier could do. I wouldn’t say it “goes to eleven”, but it’s more than loud enough for most any domestic situation.

The next morning I got to test the unit’s two alarm clocks. Either can be set to any time, and set to buzz or play the radio. An added bonus: you can even set the volume of the buzzer or radio. Programming it all is a little tricky, but the buzzer sounds disturbingly like a modern fire alarm/klaxon, which really gets ya out of bed, I can assure you! There’s also a snooze/sleep button.

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 Boston. First, I noticed that most of the stations have synchronized the delay of their analog programming to the digital programming. So the blend is not very noticeable. However, about a fifth haven't quite gotten sync'd perfectly (so there's an audible changeover), and two FM stations (as of 4/18/07), which shall remain nameless to protect the guilty, appear to not be delaying their analog signal at all. When those two blend to HD, you hear the last five seconds or so of programming over again…that must be maddening to in-car listeners on the fringe!

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 Boston has metal walls and several sources of electrical interference…so getting static-free reception of WBUR (even with their hefty signal) is usually a crapshoot at best. This is where HD Radio has really shined: once I get an HD signal – the audio blends seamlessly and just plain sounds good. No clicks, no static, no hiss…just clear audio. It’s easy to overlook until it goes away – then suddenly it’s really noticeable. All-in-all, I’m happy to have this little tabletop radio sitting on my desk doing exactly what I need it to.

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

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 Los Angeles studios of Weekend America. But producer Marc Sanchez and technical director Philip Richards weren’t going to settle for only a pre-recorded piece…they wanted Keith to actually take a ride down the official chute. That meant a live interview!

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 Boston. A few days before the live event, I received a Thrane & Thrane M4 TT-3080A portable satellite telephone in a nice flight case, and a Telos Zephyr Xstream ISDN (with built-in mic mixer) in another. The Thrane satellite phone folds into a very portable and lightweight package. Besides the somewhat weighty batteries in the UPS’s, I could’ve carried the ISDN, satphone, dish and assorted gear in one trip by myself! Okay, after some fiddling, both powered up just fine. At first there was some confusion over the lack of SPID’s for the ISDN. Eventually, with the help of Telos tech support, we realized that we didn’t need SPID’s because our satellite’s telco provider is located in France; SPID’s are usually only needed in North America. A quick change of the ISDN’s “telco” setting to ETS-300 and we were in business.

Our first test was from my apartment in Boston. I had a narrow…very narrow…view of the sky from my back porch. After aiming the satphone’s “dish”, I was able to get a single little bar of signal from the Inmarsat AORW floating over the western Atlantic Ocean region. That was enough to start dialing and, success! I connected and locked to Weekend America’s ISDN in Los Angeles, and Phil heard me loud and remarkably clear. However, I couldn’t hear Phil. Odd…no lock on his end. We re-dialed a few times and which end had the lock would change, but we couldn’t get both ends to lock. We had started with the AAC-LD 64 (low delay) codec, and discovered that changing to other codecs, like L3 or L2, made the problem worse. That usually points to data throughput problems, so I theorized that one bar of signal just isn’t enough.

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.

So we’ve proven that we don’t need any local telco connections, now what about the lack of power? I knew that a standard little “brick” UPS/Battery Backup, such as the APC ES350, ought to work for our needs. A stress test demonstrated over 25 minutes of battery life – more than enough. Even so, a second UPS was available and seemed a good idea. Furthermore, I wanted to go for a “belt and suspenders” approach of having a DC-to-AC inverter charging the UPS, and the UPS powering the ISDN and satellite phone. Unfortunately, the vagaries of backup power proved problematic. When you look at AC power coming out of your average household outlet, in theory it looks like a nice 60Hz sine wave. The power coming out of your average inverter, like my $50 Target 400W model, typically looks like a “square wave”. So much so that the UPS didn’t think it was seeing valid AC power, and insisted on “staying on battery”. While there are ways to “clean up” the power, they’re both expensive and we likely couldn’t have gotten them in time. Still, we had two UPS’s and could run off inverter direct if necessary.

The day of reckoning approached, and Friday night I headed out for the four-hour trek from Boston to Camden. Apparently Murphy hopped on board, because this is where the problems started in earnest. To begin, the only real winter storm this season decided to blow through that evening…making a four hour drive into six. Late that evening, I arrived to the toboggan chute and found a good spot at the edge of the frozen lake. Problem is, now there was a “freezing rain/snow” mix steadily falling, and not all this gear is weatherproof! Fortunately, I’d brought a five-foot-wide patio umbrella with me and clamped it to the trunk lid, which kept the sensitive stuff dry. After some aiming of the dish, I had a perfectly successful “real world” test connecting to LA again.

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 12:30pm.

Suddenly, disaster loomed! The morning’s test on the satellite phone had drained the satellite phone’s battery alarmingly fast. I put it on the charger and decided to run the live interview that way. But the satphone’s charger put out so much electrical noise that the ISDN would no longer connect. Fortunately there was a second satphone battery that had been sitting in the nice warm car; these batteries specifically say to keep them above 5 degrees Celsius (about 41F). A quick swap and we re-established the ISDN link. But even the warm battery was quickly running out of juice! Suddenly this 15 minute connection looked mighty tenuous.

Fortunately we had earlier determined that Keith had solid cellphone service at the chute, and that Keith had a Verizon cellphone (as do I). The latter is important since Verizon’s CDMA technology, unlike Cingular & T-Mobile’s GSM, or Nextel’s iDEN, doesn’t cause any audible interference to audio gear. We quickly dialed Keith’s cellphone into Weekend America’s studios and patched it in to their mix board, so we had a hot-standby ready to go.

I outfitted Keith and Andy with Sony 7506 headphones and ElectroVoice RE50B mics with hefty windscreens. After much testing, we got the levels for both Keith and Andy set about right, and confirmed they could talk back and forth with Weekend America just fine. We tried different L3 and L2 codecs but ultimately stayed with the AAC-LD at 64kbps and 48kHz sampling. The quality was quite good, I’d compare it to a solid FM radio station. The Low-Delay part was remarkable…it was no longer than a cellphone’s delay.

Feeling a little nervous but nonetheless hopeful, 12:30 rolled around and we listened to Keith’s pre-recorded piece fed back down the line to us. At the end, host Bill Radke introduced us and we were off to the races. The background noise of dogs, snowmobiles and PA announcements set the scene perfectly. Keith shared his toboggan run story, Andy shared his secret toboggan wax formula of “moose drool”, and I nervously watched the satphone’s battery indicator steadily drop and the satphone start to beep softly. I whispered down my own cellphone to Marc that we might have to go to our cellphone backup, but fortunately the satphone battery held in there long enough to finish the interview. You can hear it at http://weekendamerica.publicradio.org/programs/2007/02/03/toboggan_championshi.html (in the February 3, 2007 archive)

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