Industry News

On July 1, 2020, a management and programming agreement was reached that allowed a Class A Classic Hits station serving the tiny towns of Twisp and Winthrop to greatly expand its reach in Eastern Washington.

Now, the station that has been the simulcast partner is seeing a change in control within its ownership, FCC documents show.

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Manufacturer AEQ has named its distributors of the year.

Tommex is a an integrator in Poland that works in broadcast, corporate and multimedia AV environments. “It has been part of AEQ’s commercial network since 2019, and in the last 12 months its work has resulted in numerous installations of intercom systems in the country, both in production centers and in theaters or sports halls,” AEQ wrote in the announcement.

AEQ Distributors of the Year Tommex of Poland (left) and Jamiro Broadcast of Kenya. Falcon Technologies of India was also honored.

Falcon Technologies in India, broadcast division of the Eagle Group, has been an AEQ distributor for more than 20 years. Among its recent work are two large projects for the national radio television of India, which involved installations in 33 cities.

Jamiro Broadcast in Kenya is a recent addition to the AEQ distribution network. The company focuses on design, installation and launch of radio studios.

AEQ said that the work of its distributors and integrators has been particularly challenging because of the global pandemic. “But radio and television in the world have not stopped, they cannot stop, they are the source of information and entertainment for a very important part of the society.”

The post AEQ Names 2021 Distributors of the Year appeared first on Radio World.

Jeff Winemiller and his Lowcountry 34 Media has been divesting low-power television stations in various locales across the U.S. for more than a year. Among those transactions is the June 2020 sale of W26DT-Din Myrtle Beach, S.C.

Now, Lowcountry 34 Media is engaging in another deal involving the same buyer of that Grand Strand property. This time the locale is Music City USA.

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Updated at 11:30am Eastern

On February 11, 2020, RBR+TVBR offered its first coverage of the COVID-19’s impact on the global broadcast media world. At the time, the report on how the owner of KHTS-FM in Santa Clarita, Calif., Carl Goldman, and his wife and travel companions were among the thousands of quarantined passengers aboard the Diamond Princess in Yokohama, Japan, was questioned by some readers as being too peripheral to the business of broadcast media in the U.S. The pandemic, to these industry figures, was seen as a largely Asian concern.

Nearly two years later, COVID-19 remains a global threat, thanks largely to the Omicron variant. And, with days until CES 2022 commences in Las Vegas, COVID-19 is now placing that mega-conference’s attendees on high alert — especially now that several high-profile companies have withdrawn, including the biggest audio content and distribution company in the U.S.

According to the New York Post, CES 2022 is not in danger of a full-blown cancellation, at least as of Tuesday evening (12/21). The report came just hours after RBR+TVBR reported that NAGRA is adding virtual meetings to its CES 2022 action plan. “As many people are not attending CES, NAGRA is scheduling virtual meetings to share their news,” the portable audio recorder company based in Switzerland said.

By Wednesday morning, the “On The Money” columnists at the newspaper learned that Nvidia, JPMorgan, and PepsiCo are each withdrawing from CES. The cancellation of Nvidia from CES is particularly unsettling, given their traditionally major presence at the technology conference and expo.

For broadcast media, iHeartMedia told the New York Post columnists they, too, will not attend CES 2022.

It is now known that the company’s iHeartRadio “Live @CES” in partnership with Medialink has been scrubbed. In a statement, iHeartRadio said, “We were looking forward to seeing you at our iHeartRadio Live at CES party at Area 15 on Thursday, January 6, 2022 to share a special performance by Swedish House Mafia — but to keep our friends and partners safe during this unpredictable time, we’ve made the decision to cancel the event.”

While unconfirmed, RBR+TVBR hears key iHeartMedia executives will still be in attendance at CES 2022 and that only this event has been cancelled. It marks the second time a radio industry event featuring Swedish House Mafia has been impacted, as it had been the closing performer at the Audacy Beach Festival on December 5 in Fort Lauderdale, only to be removed from the bill less than 24 hours before showtime due to COVID-19 exposure among members of the act or its tour team.

Meanwhile, the “On The Money” team says journalists from CNN, Forbes, TechCrunch, Engadget, MarketWatch, The Verge and The New York Times’ Wirecutter feature are also not planning to attend CES 2022.

The Post report coincides with a CNET story noting that T-Mobile, Twitter and Meta are also withdrawing from CES 2022.

While these high-profile withdrawals are generating headlines, CES 2022 remains a go. As such, the Jacobs Media Strategies “VIP Private Tour” is on schedule for Thursday, January 6 at 2:30pm Pacific at varying costs for clients and non-clients. “Our 90-minute private tours are limited to 15 guests and led by an expert employed by the CTA,” Jacobs Media says.

From 5-7pm Pacific on January 6 is the CES 2022 Radio Reception, located at the Bellagio Las Vegas Resort & Casino. The invitation-only event is co-presented by Radio Ink and Radio + Television Business Report in partnership with Beasley Media Group, QUU, Xperi, Benztown and vCreative.

CES requires proof of vacination.

Kenya’s Communications Authority is beginning the process of reclaiming unused frequencies across the country. CA Director-General Ezra Chioba made the announcement Dec. 22., saying the applicants and license holders have 30 days to bring their operations into compliance or their license would be cancelled.

According to The Standard newspaper in Nairobi, Chioba, who was appointed director-general in September 2021, came into office with an eye towards reforming Kenya’s regulatory framework for broadcasting. As part of this, he said the CA would begin repossessing unused broadcast licenses with the intent of redistributing them to new investors.

“We have in the last few weeks we reviewed and identified those culpable. Accordingly, we have decided to revoke target licenses. This will allow us to re-plan and re-allocate these resources to investors who demonstrate commitment to establish and offer viable broadcasting services,” Chioba said, according to The Standard.

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In the notice posted to the CA website, six groups of revocations are outlined, including the cancellation of license offers and revocation of FM frequencies for 60 broadcasters. That list includes large commercial stations like Capital FM, NRG Radio, and Mbaitu FM.

The frequencies in question, in some cases, are for additional transmitters, so the revocation does not mean that all the stations will leave the airways entirely.

In its report on the revocation, Capital FM’s owners stated: “We wish to assure our loyal listeners, clients and other stakeholders that the Management of Capital Group Limited is seized of the matter for total compliance,” using a legal phrase to say they were looking to ensure compliance.

In addition to the 60 license offers, the CA announced the revocation of four frequency assignments to license holders and 18 FM frequencies assignments to non-permit holders who had yet to apply for broadcasting licenses, as well as the rejection of 24 applications for commercial and community radio services who had yet to comply with licensing requirements including paying regulatory fees. Nineteen television licenses and three subscription-based broadcasting services were also marked for revocation of license offers for failure to act within the CA’s prescribed timeline.

Last year, Kenyan authorities announced plans to crackdown on “absentee” license holders and transfers of licenses without prior regulatory approval.

The post Kenyan Authorities Begin Reclaiming Frequencies appeared first on Radio World.

Gifts to yourself to start a new year right! John Bisset heads over to Ace Hardware with a few bucks in his pocket.

Also in this issue:

The FCC weighs the idea of EAS on the internet.

Buyer’s Guide looks at interesting applications of antennas and RF support products including a custom diplexed AM antenna system for CKSP.

And we feature winners of the Best in Market Awards for 2021.

Read it here.

The post Read the Dec. 22, 2021 Issue of Radio World appeared first on Radio World.

The Dec. 22 issue of Radio World features our Buyer’s Guide for antennas, RF support and power products. Buyer’s Guide features application stories like this one. 

CKNW(AM), a 50 kW station at 980 kHz, is an existing four-tower directional array located near Surrey, to the southeast of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

CKSP, a 600 kHz, 50 kW DA-D, 20 kW DA-N station operated by Sher-E-Punjab, a broadcaster specializing in South Asian news/talk content, was added to the site making use of two of the four towers. It required a diplexed directional antenna system designed and fabricated by Kintronic Labs to facilitate the simultaneous operation of both stations from the CKNW transmitter site.

According to Tom King, president/CEO of Kintronic Labs, project management of the diplexed AM directional antenna system project was conducted by Richard Sondermeyer of G.S.Broadcast Technical Services Ltd. of Mississauga, Ontario. Final commissioning was conducted by Rob Elder, the Kintronic Labs field engineer.

The existing CKNW four-tower array is in the shape of a parallelogram, with two diagonally opposing towers oriented along a north–south line, and the other diagonally opposing towers oriented along a line rotated roughly 50 degrees clockwise from the center of the north–south line.

The NW tower is also the closest to the transmitter building, and its ATU building houses the CKNW power division/phasing networks as well as the tower matching network for this tower. The two towers on the north side of the array are those used for the new 600 kHz system, with the towers on the south side of the array detuned for 600 kHz.

The 600 kHz phasing and matching system was installed in a separate container located south of the CKNW transmitter building. The CKSP matching, filter and detune cabinets were installed in weatherproof housings and mounted on wooden platforms at the base of each of the towers.

The post CKSP Initiates Service via Diplexed AM Directional System appeared first on Radio World.

The following are in response to the Mark Persons article “Alike but Not Alike: Broadcast vs. Ham Radio.”

Well said

Having been an amateur radio operator for more than 67 years (and an occasional contributor to Radio World), I want to compliment Mark Persons on his article in the Oct. 27 issue.

It is the best explanation of the amateur radio hobby that I have ever read. There is nothing more that I could add to describe “hamming” to both the technical and non-technical, and I will rely on it to explain and recruit more hams to our hobby. 73.

John Seibels, K4AXV

 

Remembering the magic

I was a broadcaster first for a number of years and didn’t get licensed in amateur radio until 1990. In the early years, it seemed that many of the engineers I worked with were hams. Maybe not so much anymore. But one of them proved a worthy “Elmer” to me and got me up and running on ham over 30 years ago.

There are indeed many similarities, at least in the technical aspects. When I started in broadcasting, a Third Class License was required. Every person overseeing an air shift needed to take transmitter readings to ensure compliance in power output. Other “off-air” duties included making sure we powered down or up at the appropriate times to sunrise or sunset, check the tower lights and other similar tasks.

As time went on, the Third Class requirement was dropped, as were the requirements of the broadcasters to be knowledgeable of power readings, and such.

They were fun years: two turntables, three cart decks and a microphone staring you in the face. No automation, no computers. Even having time to use the bathroom on a six-hour shift was pretty much limited to the 4½-minute UPI news feed at the top of the hour.

My last years in broadcasting were distilled down to recording cuts and saving them with specified file names.

Of course, ham radio is more recreational. The content is not controlled by a station log but by the person on the other end of the QSO.

But there was still the magic of being on the other side of a microphone. If conditions were good, it was not unusual for me to work a number of QSOs before and after being on the air as a broadcaster.

I am grateful for the broadcast engineers I’ve known over the years, keeping us on the air with our broadcast stations as well as helping me get into ham radio. 73.

Scott McIntire, K7DXT

 

On the same frequency

I live in the Washington area and have been a pro broadcaster since 1979, but I didn’t jump into amateur radio until 2009. When I did it was with both feet. I even changed my ringtone on my cellphone to the Morse characters CQ, which hams use to call out over the air to talk to other hams.

As a frequent commuter bus rider, I often have to transfer at the Pentagon bus depot. Many of my fellow passengers are military folks who disembark there for their day of duties.

One morning my phone rang — “dah-dit-dah-dit, dah-dah-dit dah.”

I heard a loud guffaw went up from the back of the bus. One of the other passengers — either a ham or part of the Signal Corps — recognized the pattern and got my joke.

Broadcast radio and ham radio. Love ’em both.

Alan Peterson, KJ4IVD
National Production Director & Second Engineer
Radio America Network

The post Readers Celebrate Ham Radio appeared first on Radio World.

John Schmidt, P.E., is principal of John Schmidt Audio Video Systems Design in Hempstead, N.Y. For 36 years until retirement, he worked for ABC Television in New York as a senior audio video systems engineer, designing and supervising the installation of audio systems.

After reading a recent Workbench column, John offered a few suggestions to help the uninitiated create more problems than they solve when working with microphone cable shields.

Individuals involved in connecting analog audio equipment should familiarize themselves with two Audio Engineering Society standards: AES 48 and AES 54. These describe best practices in dealing with cable shields.

John’s first suggestion based on the guidelines is that the microphone cable shields need to be connected — typically to Pin 1 of an XLR connector, as seen in Fig. 1 — in a continuous, preferably isolated path from the mic to the input of the mic preamp.

Pin 1 is considered ground on a three-pin XLR.

Keep in mind that mics that utilize phantom power will not work without a shield (Pin 1) connection, as the cable shield provides a return path for the phantom power that operates the electronics inside the microphone.

Even if the mic does not use phantom power, failure to connect the shield may leave the mic circuit subject to hum or buzz due to capacitive coupling to one or the other of the active conductors, or interference due to RF pickup.

Now the issue moves to the line-level interconnects. Here there is a conflict between the practicality of the interconnecting equipment — which may not have been designed with best practice for grounding the shield connection (Pin 1 on the XLR) at the equipment interface — and requirements for RF immunity.

If all equipment was designed with proper termination of the shield connections for both its inputs and outputs, in accordance with AES 48, one would be advised to connect the shields of all input and output cables where they interface with the equipment at both ends. But as many of us have learned, this sometimes creates hum in the form of a ground loop.

At the expense of losing some RF immunity, connect the shield at only one end.

[Check Out More of Workbench Here]

If breaking the shield at one end solves your hum/buzz issue but leaves the equipment RF susceptible, try connecting the unterminated end of the shield to the metal case of the equipment through a small capacitor.

Transformer boxes can be useful, but John recommends specifying transformers with internal shields between the windings. Otherwise the capacitive coupling between the windings can pass interference.

Also keep in mind that some transformers have very poor frequency response when fed from a low-impedance source. If your circuitry is unbalanced, with the shield grounded at both the output and the input, and is carrying the return side of the audio signal, all bets are off, and you may really have a ground loop.

Finally, regarding analog video: Yes, the coax is fed with an unbalanced signal; however, most professional video equipment uses differential receive amplifiers, where the shield of the input is not grounded. The same is true for the unbalanced “composite” input of many FM exciters.

As readers can see, this is not a trivial issue.

John Schmidt’s website is www.john.schmidt.audio/main/.

A better way to model

On Oct. 29, Radio World reported on a proposal by Dielectric and other antenna manufacturers to allow computer modeling of FM directional antennas.

The FCC has opened a notice of proposed rulemaking to take industry comments about this. It says more than 2,000 full-service FM stations, more than 20 percent of them, use directional antennas. The change would allow any of them that replace existing antennas to avoid the expense of field measurements. It would apply not only to applicants for new FM facilities but to FM licensees applying for facility modifications.

An image from the Dielectric presentation to the Broadcasters Clinic about computational modeling of FM directional antennas.

John L. Schadler, a friend and former co-worker of mine when I was at Dielectric, outlined the studies that support this proposal in a presentation for the Broadcasters Clinic in October.

John’s presentation is available online and is fascinating. Of particular interest are the computer simulations John shows of FM coverage. Adjustment of parasitics or spacing yields nearly instantaneous display of the FM coverage pattern. These measurements, done physically on a range or in an anechoic chamber, currently take hours or days. In just a few minutes, patterns can be reliably modeled, modified or adjusted to meet coverage restrictions.

Final thought

Kuala Lumpur engineer Paul Sagi has followed our discussion of converting to LED lighting. He writes that heat is not the only enemy of LEDs; the wrong type of power supply can also shorten their life. LEDs work best on a constant current supply, rather than a constant voltage supply, which can also reduce their service time.

Got a great ideas? Share it! Tips for Workbench qualify for SBE recertification credit. Email johnpbisset@gmail.com.

John Bisset, CPBE, is in his 31st year of sharing reader tips in Workbench. He handles western U.S. radio sales for the Telos Alliance and is a past recipient of the SBE’s Educator of the Year Award.

The post Workbench: The importance of microphone cable shields appeared first on Radio World.

The author is assistant chief engineer for Radio One Dallas.

When our station KSOC became the first in Texas to broadcast in HD Radio, we knew that we needed to be on top of our audio quality in order to best take advantage of the new technology. But like many stations we really had no idea where much of our music came from.

We knew that, although the songs in our playout system were all stored as uncompressed WAV files, at least some had originated as MP3 files. We wanted to find a way to identify those songs so that they could be replaced with pristine, uncompressed audio files.

It’s important to use the best-quality source material for on-air broadcast, but especially so when you are broadcasting in HD. The GIGO principle applies: Garbage In, Garbage Out.

Kirk Harnack, senior solutions consultant at Telos Alliance, had this to say about broadcasting previously compressed source audio on an HD Radio station: “Audio that’s been psychoacoustically encoded and decoded is now missing the ‘low-hanging fruit’ that the original encoder identified and eliminated or modified. If we cascade another psychoacoustic audio encoding algorithm after the first one, the second encoder will not have the benefit of the natural audio’s content that was easy to eliminate.”

So it’s in our interest and that of our listeners to ensure that the audio we broadcast, which will be processed by the HD Radio encoder, hasn’t already been subjected to a lossy compression algorithm. With hard drive space as abundant and affordable as it is today, storage space is no longer a reason to obtain our music in a compressed format such as MP3.

But short of listening to every song in the library with a critical ear in a studio, how could we determine which songs had once been psychoacoustically compressed? All of our songs are now stored as WAV files so just looking at the file extension or the file size gives no hint whatsoever.

It turns out that there are certain clues visible in the spectrogram of an audio file that can help identify the formerly compressed songs. The most obvious one is the cutoff frequency used by the encoder.

When a file is compressed to MP3 format, the algorithm attempts to remove parts of the audio that the designers of the standard felt wouldn’t be missed by the human ear in an attempt to reduce file size.

Part of this is the cutoff of all audio content above a certain frequency. That frequency varies according to the bitrate of the MP3 compression scheme.

From my tests, it seems that a bitrate of 192 kbps results in a cutoff of audio above about 18 kHz. A rate of 128 kbps cuts off above 16–17 kHz. This is easy to see when looking at the spectrogram of an MP3 song.

See Fig. 1. Notice that at 17 kHz, the audio levels of this file are already in the noise floor.

Fig. 1: Spectrogram of “Crystal Ball” by Styx as MP3

Looking at the uncompressed version of the same song in Fig. 2, we don’t get to the –67 dB level until we reach the 21 kHz frequency range.

Fig. 2: The same song, linear uncompressed.

Put on your SoX
This finding allows us an opportunity to examine our library programatically. There is a command-line audio utility called “SoX” (for “sound exchange”) that we can use along with a scripting language to open files and examine their frequency content.

I decided to see if I could figure out how to use this utility to check out all our audio. The hope was that it would identify the songs that may have once been compressed so that we could examine these more closely and replace them if necessary.

I ended up with a Python script that loops through a folder with the audio files, opening each and using SoX to create a temporary file from the song after applying a high-pass filter at, say, 17 kHz. Then a second process takes the RMS amplitude value from this temporary file and compares it to a value previously discovered by experimentation. If below this nominal value, the file is flagged as a potential candidate for replacement.

These files can be examined manually with a program such as Audacity or Adobe Audition that offers a spectrogram view. The spectrogram can be examined and the file can be played in a controlled studio environment so that a determination can be made as to the need for replacement of the audio.

The line that creates the temporary high-pass-filtered audio file (filtered at 17 kHz) looks like this:

sox [original_filename] [output_file_name] sinc 17k

The code that does rest of the heavy lifting (determining the RMS value of the high-pass-filtered audio file) is a little scary looking:

sox output.wav -n stat 2>&1 | sed -n 's|^RMS amplitude:[^0-9]*\([0-9.]*\)$|\\1|p' >>../rms.txt

All this really does is take a look at the temp file (output.wav) and call up the stats of the file. Then the sed program searches the resulting statistical output for the phrase “RMS amplitude” and writes the numerical value of that stat to a file called rms.txt. The rest of the code, not shown here, inserts the name of the song or audio file alongside the RMS value of that file. We end up with a list that looks something like Fig. 3.

Fig. 3

In this case, any song with a value below 0.001 is suspect. Subsequent inspection of those songs’ spectrograms confirmed that they had a “flat top” at about 17 kHz, thus we know that, although they are WAV files now, they have likely been compressed at some point in the past. Those songs should be replaced with known linear audio.

It should be noted that at high bitrates such as 320 kbps, this method won’t work as well because the frequency cutoff is close to 20 kHz.

If you’d like the complete Python script, email me at swalker@radio-one.comand I will send it along.
Comment on this or any story. Email radioworld@futurenet.com.

The post What’s in Your Audio Library? appeared first on Radio World.