Industry News

Should the FCC allow a new FM station to be built in Edgefield, S.C.?

Georgia-Carolina Radiocasting Co. would like that, and it has petitioned the FCC’s Audio Division accordingly. It also submitted an application for a construction permit. The principals for the company are Douglas M. Sutton Jr. and M. Terry Carter, both of whom have interests in several other stations in the region.

According to the company, the relocation of a transmitter by WSBB(FM) in Doraville, Ga., has opened “a small usable area for Channel 238A” in Edgefield County, S.C.

[Read: FCC Proposes Regulatory Fees for 2020 Amid Uncertain Media Marketplace]

Now the FCC engineering staff has found that the coast is clear technically: “Channel 238A can be allotted to Edgefield, S.C., consistent with the minimum distance separation requirements of the commission’s rules, using city reference coordinates.” So the FCC is asking for comments on whether to amend its FM table of allotments and allow the station.

It would be a Class A station at 95.5 MHz. The application was submitted by attorney John Garziglia of Womble Bond Dickinson.

This would be a “first local service” for Edgefield, a county seat of about 4,750 people located about a half-hour’s drive north of Augusta, Ga. “The petitioner asserts that Edgefield is governed by a mayor and six city council members, and has its own library, police and fire departments, weekly newspaper, banks, churches and many other indicators of a bona fide community for allotment purposes,” the FCC wrote in its summary.

Comments are due Aug. 3, reference MB Docket No. 20-155.

The post Georgia-Carolina Radiocasting Seeks New FM in S. Carolina appeared first on Radio World.

When broadcasters begin to discuss building studios using AoIP, the subject turns rather quickly to esoteric engineering topics like switch selection, console specifications and packet redundancy.

But for station managers, these fine details pale in comparison to a bigger question; namely, “Why should I approve this expense?” There are lots of answers to that question, but let’s cut to the bottom-line: AoIP networks save money.

The Bottom Line
New facilities built on an IP backbone cost less than traditional studios because they use the same inexpensive, off-the-shelf Ethernet switches as computer data networks. That means that the tech at the center of your facility is no longer proprietary: it’s a commodity, with all the price advantages that implies.

It’s also future-proof — computer networks are easily scalable and flexible: once audio is turned into data, it can be sent anywhere — across the building, or across the world. Lower cost and more flexibility are two big advantages that have made IP the standard for radio and TV stations across the globe.

Let’s look at some of the specific ways that choosing AoIP for your new studio will benefit your daily operations.

It bears repeating: studios that use AoIP infrastructure are money-savers. How? First of all, the cost of wires and cables are dramatically reduced. In analog or older digital facilities, every audio signal had to travel over its own pair of dedicated cables. By comparison, AoIP carries hundreds of bidirectional stereo channels on one Cat-6 Ethernet cable. And that Cat-6 can also carry data from your traffic and scheduling systems at the same time, further simplifying infrastructure and reducing cost.

Nearly all of today’s radio equipment has an AoIP connection built in, which means one cable is all that’s needed to connect a phone system, satellite receiver — even a transmitter! All of which translates into faster installation with lower costs.

Benefits
AoIP networks also save thanks to their natural affinity with studio computers. Your mixing console can finally talk directly to the PCs used for recording, editing, production and playout — which means that the cost of expensive professional sound cards, line input cards and A-to-D converters is eliminated. Audio signals can also carry metadata for HD Radio and web-stream “now playing” info, or for visual radio channels.

Scalability is a big benefit of IP networks. If you’ve built studios before, you probably remember that as soon as they were finished, an unanticipated need popped up: a new station added to the mix, another production room needed, more capacity for syndicated programs.

In the old days this meant expensive cable bundles, patch bays and punch blocks; with AoIP, adding capacity is as simple as plugging new gear into the network switch. And since Ethernet switches are routers at heart, an IP studio network lets you immediately route audio from any studio to any other studio, instantly.

You’ve probably noticed that TV is embracing IP in a big way. Television stations have been steadily moving to IP production infrastructures, which means an AoIP network in the radio suite can finally share audio seamlessly with the video facilities. Modern mixing engines used in today’s radio consoles can easily extract audio from the SDI and MADI formats used by television, and radio content can be routed to TV master control in an instant.

What’s AES67?
Today, most manufacturers’ AoIP gear interconnects, but it wasn’t always so. In the early days, every console maker used their own proprietary protocol — meaning you were locked into that vendor’s “walled garden” of products. This didn’t always sit well, and for a good reason: you should be able to choose the equipment that best suits your needs, without artificial limitations.

The AES67 AoIP standard, ratified by the industry’s leading technology companies, is the answer. AES67 provides a common tongue that IP products can speak regardless of the manufacturer. Most companies have added it to their products, but not all. Before you sign on the dotted line, be sure that your AoIP equipment is 100% AES67-compliant.

Conclusion
If you’re thinking about going IP, now is a great time. The documented cost savings of this proven technology, coupled with ease of installation and maintenance, expansion-on-demand and the interoperability of AES67-compliant equipment makes AoIP ideal technology upon which to base modern radio studios — an investment that will continue paying off long into the future.

The author is Radio Marketing Specialist for Lawo AG.

The post IP Studios for Managers appeared first on Radio World.

Steve Shultis is chief technology officer of New York Public Radio. He answered questions in May from Editor in Chief Paul McLane in connection with RW’s ebook “Broadcasting From Home Around the Globe.”

N.Y. Public Radio is the home of WNYC(AM/FM), WQXR(FM), The Gothamist, WNYC Studios and the Jerome L. Greene Performance Space.

Radio World: How is your organization’s broadcasting workflow today different that it was before coronavirus?
Steve Shultis: Everything has changed: Approximately 98% of our entire staff is working from home, including talent. The only staff coming into the office on a regular basis are a minimal body of broadcast engineers and broadcast maintenance engineers, facility engineers and some office support staff. All other work groups, including reporters, show producers (including podcast and digital-only stream production), call screeners, membership and development staff, marketing, digital developers, sponsorship, etc. are working and producing from home.

By far the greatest concern for us was to protect the health and safety of our staff: For anyone whom we still require to come into the office/studios, we segregated this staff into three teams such that no one crossed paths with each other; and we perform cleaning between team changeovers.

To form these teams, we scaled back operations, eliminating attended overnights and used that staff, as well as our performance space and remote concert technical staff, to form a skeleton screw for master control operations and anything else that we still needed to perform at the facility.

RW: What technologies are used to enable your new workflows for the major portions of the on-air product?
Shultis: We immediately moved from a running POC of Teradici Zero Client PCoIP — a remote access platform designed for media — to purchased, permanent infrastructure to allow remote access for our newsroom production team for the WFH effort. We had been exploring it prior to the pandemic for general mobility needs for the newsroom reporters/producers so we were positioned to put it into production relatively quickly.

Additionally, Broadcast Bionics offered us an emergency installation of their AudioServer virtual phone PBX and Bionics Studio call screening system, which we migrated to from our legacy, physical PBX/phone hybrids and Bionics PhoneBox call screening system in an effort to move call screeners to their homes.

To complete the installation we had to engineer a new QSIG connection from our separate Business SIP PBX and steal some surplus DIDs from that SIP provider and engineer an AES67 connection to the new Bionics server for use in virtual sound cards and hybrids.

We designed and built 18 home studios based around Comrex NX codecs, Citrix remote access and the Bionics call screening system; and our engineers delivered installed and tested each of them in the talents’ homes. We are currently doing a live on-air fund drive with all of these in use daily.

For our many teams producing shows from home, we are leveraging our enterprise Dropbox infrastructure for sharing audio files between production team members, and worked closely with Avid for providing remote licensing for our many Pro Tools production workstations to allow individuals to work on remote laptops.

Lastly, we are working closely with our console manufacturer SAS, building a soft console and soft switching for full remote control of our audio infrastructure mixing and routing, should we be forced to evacuate the broadcast facility. We are using this now for emergency operations from home during unattended operations.

RW: What was the biggest technical management challenge you had to meet in the first days or weeks of the coronavirus?
Shultis: Early on, we were informed by our newsroom that they had reason to believe that the virus was already present in New York City and strongly recommended that we close our doors to any outside entities — guest talent, sales people, etc. — to protect our staff. We took the recommendation to heart and from that time on performed all live and taped interviews remotely and cancelled all of our many upcoming shows in our public performance space.

These were hard calls to make in the early stages of the pandemic, when many venues and entities around us were still open and doing business as normal.

RW: Was there a particular solution or application that you think your peers would be interested in?
Shultis: Teradici or their competitor VMWare Horizon might be interesting for those wishing to remote into media infrastructure.

RW: How will radio operations for our industry be permanently changed in the long term?
Shultis: There will be many permanent changes to the broadcast industry workplace and workflows.
We are currently running an on-air fund drive with multiple hosts collaborating live on air from their home studios and taking physical cues using Zoom video conferencing in lieu of traditional face-to-face, in-studio collaboration. This workflow for live interviews will be the norm so as to minimize exposure to staff, i.e. leveraging phone and IP technologies for both audio and video feeds.

It will be interesting to see what transpires with “live” music broadcasts; will they be limited to only the smallest of ensembles to fit on a stage with social distancing rules — or will it be relegated to something like Zoom meetings with the musicians performing live but in separate locations …?

We have a densely populated office and newsroom and have enjoyed the ease of collaboration and social interaction this open workspace has afforded us. Now this appears to be a liability, and we will have to rethink what our office and studios look like and function. We are engaging our architect for the effort and have created an internal task force to work with them and our various teams to devise both a physical and personnel scheduling plan that is safe and productive for our staff.

RW: Anything else we should know?
Shultis: I would advise our industry peers to make sure they have PPE at shared transmitter sites. Early on we learned of an individual associated with a general contractor who works extensively for a master antenna site that had to quarantine due to exposure. That drove home the point for us that we had to make sure we had PPE to use at the sites when working with or around other entities.

The post How WNYC Confronted the Pandemic appeared first on Radio World.

Radioplayer said it signed a new agreement with Audi AG to continue its collaboration around radio in connected car dashboards.

“The new agreement will ensure Radioplayer continues to support VW Group

cars already in the market with hybrid radio (including Audis, VWs, Porsches and Lamborghinis), as well as collaborating on future integrations and radio features,” Radioplayer stated.

The not-for-profit organization started as a partnership of the BBC and commercial radio almost a decade ago. It now features some 500 UK radio stations.

Radioplayer Worldwide, in turn, has expanded that effort around Europe and beyond. It is a partnership of Radioplayer and countries that have rolled out its model: Germany, Spain, Canada, Ireland, Austria, Norway, Belgium, Switzerland, Denmark and Italy.

Hybrid radio systems combine over-the-air broadcast functionality — in this case FM and DAB — with two-way internet connectivity, for data collection and for reception beyond the range of the OTA signal.

[Related: “Hybrid Radio Picks Up Momentum”]

Radioplayer will supply broadcaster metadata as well as technical support and input to Audi about the radio user experience. It said it is working on a roadmap to provide visuals to enhance radio on larger dashboard screens; on-demand content like podcasts; and development of more personalized radio experiences.

The agreement is a renewal of a partnership created in 2017. The announcement was made by Radioplayer Managing Director Michael Hill and Audi Head of Development Multimedia Philipp Rabel. Hill was quoted saying that the collaboration “has dramatically increased the coverage of stations now accessed by hybrid radio in Europe, and this new agreement will extend that coverage further.”

The post Radioplayer & Audi/VW Group Update Hybrid Radio Agreement appeared first on Radio World.

From our Who’s Buying What page: Targetspot recently announced that Stingray has chosen it to monetize digital audio advertising on its music services.

Stingray Group is a music, media and technology company that provides “curated direct-to-consumer and B2B services” including audio television channels, radio and other platforms like karaoke products, digital signage, in-store music and music apps. It says it reaches 400 million people in 156 countries.

Among Stingray’s businesses, it operates approximately 100 radio stations in Canada, where the company is headquartered. TargetSpot is a division of AudioValley.

“Through this partnership advertisers and brands will be able to easily purchase Stingray audio inventory and connect with an ever-expanding audience of music aficionados,” the companies announced.

They said that research shows the coronavirus “has had a direct impact on in-home media consumption around the world, with 35 percent having listened to more streaming services due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This increase in audience translates into a golden opportunity for advertisers to connect to even more people who are in a receptive mindset.”

Targetspot calls itself a “global audio sales house” that serves more than a billion audio impressions monthly.

Send news for Who’s Buying What to radioworld@futurenet.com.

The post Stingray Partners With Targetspot appeared first on Radio World.

GatesAir and StreamGuys announced a partnership that they say opens new revenue models and production workflows for radio by bringing traditional “trigger-based” services and events into the cloud.

It involves the automation of “server-side” applications in the cloud for broadcasters who want to move live AM/FM audio over IP networks. “The technical innovation translates GPIO contact closures into in-stream metadata,” they stated in their announcement, “enabling server-side ad breaks, program recordings and other functionality without physical intervention.”

[Check Out More Products at Radio World’s Products Section]

As StreamGuys President Kiriki Delany explained the project, GPIO contact closures have been a radio industry standard for switching hardware and signaling workflows, while live-streaming media uses metadata for that purpose. “These workflows have operated in parallel for too long.” He said the partnership bridges physical and digital domains.

The companies said StreamGuys will receive and interface server-side cloud services as program streams move between send and receive sites. GatesAir Intraplex IP Link codecs provide connectivity and audio transport between locations, adding protection through stream redundancy and network resiliency from Intraplex Dynamic Stream Splicing software.

StreamGuys Director of Technology Eduardo Martinez was quoted saying the companies believe no other broadcast codecs can translate physical GPIO triggers into streaming metadata.

He said potential users include broadcasters who want to support ad triggers or automate content publishing. “It establishes a path to enhance traditional STL and satellite-based workflows in the digital domain. These solutions also provide a simpler yet secure architecture for broadcast networks receiving live feeds direct from a sports team, a remote content producer or an at-home broadcaster.”

IP Link users can configure eight GPIOs for triggered events in the codec’s firmware at a send location. Each contact closure can be mapped with a customized metadata string, and sent in-band with the encoded stream.

According to the announcement, the codec supports Icecast and RTP (Real-Time Transport Protocol) streaming formats with Dynamic Stream Splicing and works with GatesAir’s cloud-based Intraplex Ascent server for more reliability. On the server side, StreamGuys receives the audio and translated metadata flow that identifies an ad break within the live feed, triggering midrolls for dynamic ad insertion applications. Because metadata is used for digital signaling and switching, users can trigger server-side program recordings and air checks.

“Furthermore, a delimiter function supports sending multiple contact closures to more receive locations, including streaming servers that replicate live AM/FM streams online,” the companies stated. They quoted GatesAir VP of Engineering Keyur Parikh saying this provides a foundation for terrestrial broadcasters to launch a simulcast streaming service, podcast or side channel when using StreamGuys’ cloud-based SGrecast platform for content repurposing. A new auto-publishing feature of SGrecast’s Audio Logger can reuse live ad triggers to monetize podcasts, without the need for post-production labor.

Parikh said Intraplex users now can take advantage of cloud-based revenue-enhancing services. “Built-in transcoding and transmuxing capabilities will allow our customers to use the same encoding device to generate multiple streams of the same content with different encoding and stream formats.”

One application would allow radio stations to support IP STL connections and web streaming from the same platform.

The post GatesAir, StreamGuys Translate Closures Into Metadata appeared first on Radio World.

Coronavirus has been a once-in-a-lifetime disruptor. At the height of the pandemic, more than 2 billion people were under some form of lockdown and 7.1 billion people were in countries with border controls or travel restrictions.

The old certainties have been replaced by new realities, and even curiosities. How many fuzzy images and bookshelves have you seen recently on TV? How many radio interviews with dodgy sound — unacceptable, really, a couple of months back — have you listened to in the past 10 weeks? How many times have you conducted private and business meetings sitting in front of your laptop?

Working from home (WFH), IP Team Meeting and even “Zoom fatigue” now part of many people’s vocabulary and reality. The old events calendar has been binned and all the big radio or media events have been turned into webinars. There is a post-CES webinar available, a NAB webinar and so many others announced that your working day could be filled just with webinars.

[Read: Do We Need Community Radio?]

Digital Radio Mondiale (DRM) and its not-for-profit consortium also embraced the format with much enthusiasm. And the results were particularly good; DRM registered more participants in its latest three DRM webinars than in the old face-to-face seminars.

The list of endless webinar topics is endless. We have registered a lot of interest in several aspects of the radio business, from digitization and DRM implementation, to the extra DRM benefits, like data and multimedia availability, emergency warning functionality. The extra capacity and channels available in digital suddenly mean more varied content, possibly even in various languages, or different content for diverse interest groups (e.g. various music genres but also education, chat shows that give solace to many isolated listeners etc.).

The radio business is changing drastically. People are listening while they work (often from home), and so the peak time has become anytime. Travelling by car has gone down for now, but public travelling is not being encouraged, at least in the U.K. So, in the future, private cars will become even more important than before and with them digital radio, too. Office hours are also fluid so radio must be on its toes, come up with new formats and fresh approaches.

Localism, the great attribute of radio, matters more than ever as the coronavirus affects different areas and its people differently. Advertising post-corona needs to be reexamined as well. The old models might not attract many dollars now, and the new good, wide-ranging advertising needs must be nurtured with imagination and flair. So there is much to talk about and create webinars for.

One of the greatest attributes of this new communication platform is its capacity to be a great, open, all-inclusive arena. During a webinar we are all little squares on a screen. And behind their own screens, participants feel freer to ask questions and challenge the presenters with more courage than in a windowless imposing conference hall.

But the subject must be relevant, the presenters engaging and open-minded, with a genuine wish to share their knowledge. Some recent webinars have been openly or covertly product placement opportunities, company advertorials or stale presentations peddling the same old maps, statistics and graphs. The judgement of a webinar is swift. If your webinar is not relevant or informative, the number of participants decreases vertiginously, and you have your instant verdict on the left corner of the screen.

Webinars cannot replace the face-to-face contact, the frank discussion over coffee, the deal struck in a conference break. In time the “webinar or Zoom fatigue” will come to us all, but hopefully only after we have managed to share knowledge and establish a dialogue with peers and newcomers across the world. For now, at least, webinars stimulate us all, keep the old stakeholders and new players in touch with each other and keep our whole industry alive.

After the recent three DRM webinars, I came to the conclusion that a truthfully successful webinar is like a good DRM radio program: It needs good content, engaging speakers, good digital sound, often good, diverse coverage (with participants from different countries and professional areas) targeted messages and the possibility for interactivity.

Long gone are the webinars of the “What is…?” variety. We are focusing on the response and support radio can offer in extreme times like this. Digital radio, DRM in particular, is unique in its robustness and flexibility, able to give you news and music but also to deliver education and information when other platforms are not available  or too expensive and to save lives through its built-in Emergency Warning Functionality.

The coronavirus will fade, but many viruses can still lurk out there, including cyber viruses. As in the words of the World Economic Forum publication on June 1: “During the 2020 Australian bushfires, power outages and damage to mobile phone infrastructure gave citizens a newfound appreciation for battery-operated FM radios. But if cyber-COVID ravaged a country, which radio stations would still operate without digital recording and transmission systems?”

There is the theme of a possible future webinar.

Ruxandra Objreja’s column is a recurring feature. Comment on this or any story. Email radioworld@futurenet.com with “Letter to the Editor” in the subject field.

The post Are Webinars Helpful as Radio Pivots Post-COVID-19? appeared first on Radio World.

Test equipment manufacturer Audio Precision has announced the availability of Version 6 of software for the APx500 audio analyzers.

The new version increases simultaneous input types, enabling the concurrent measurement of up to 16 channels of digital and eight channels of analog audio data. The company says that the “new multi-input capability, paired with the highest channel count and widest range of digital I/O available, provides APx users critical cross-domain insight and the opportunity to reduce testing time.”

[Check Out More Products at Radio World’s Products Section]

It explains, “Multi-input is especially useful for devices with digital microphones — smart speakers, mobile phones, Bluetooth headsets, and other devices — as it allows for the simultaneous measurement of the device’s microphone in conjunction with an analog measurement microphone as a reference.”

For audio devices that can have both analog and digital outputs active simultaneously, the feature enables the simultaneous evaluation of those outputs, whether in a design lab or on a manufacturing line. Concurrent measurement of both signal types also has the potential to reduce test times, which is especially important in manufacturing applications, according to the company.

The multiple-input feature is available for use in both Sequence Mode and Bench Mode and supports all the essential measurements used for the analysis of microphones and microphone arrays.

The post Audio Precision Releases APx500 Update appeared first on Radio World.

“Unfair and likely unlawful” regulatory fees are putting a “stranglehold” on the broadcasting industry. So says the National Association of Broadcasters. Again.

In its comments to the Federal Communications Commission about the proposed 2020 fee schedule, NAB asked “whether the commission will continue to bury its head in the sand and fail to recognize the considerable inequities in its approach, which puts a stranglehold on the broadcasting industry.”

NAB’s arguments are that the commission doesn’t recognize the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on broadcasters; that it fails to provide good explanations for how it reached its conclusions; and that it ignores the considerable commission resources” that other industries use “to the detriment of broadcasters.”

[Related: “New Jersey Broadcasters Push Harder on Fees”]

The association noted that the commission has an obligation to collect $339 million in regulatory fees this year, the same as the year before,  so it asked why, then, “many broadcasters will see their regulatory fees increase for the second consecutive year.” And the commission, it continued, fails to explain why fees are going up, “hindering the ability of stakeholders, including companies responsible for paying the fees, to provide meaningful feedback on the commission’s proposals.” Lack of explanation is a problem the NAB has complained about before.

It added that there is no telling when broadcast operating revenues will return to previous levels, and that President Trump has told regulatory agencies to examine ways they can waive or modify, regulatory burdens. The filing can be read on the NAB website. The comments were filed in MD Docket No. 20-105.

The post NAB Again Fumes Over FCC Regulatory Fees appeared first on Radio World.

Washington, D.C., has a new master FM antenna system looking down on the city from high ground around The American University campus. In addition to a big new panel, the job added new antennas for two other stations. Radio World talked with Rob Bertrand, WAMU’s senior director of technology, about the recently completed project.

Radio World: Where did this take place?
Rob Bertrand: The project took place on the 419-foot broadcast tower on the campus of American University in Washington, D.C. I’ll call this the “AU Tower.”

RW: Make and model of the antenna systems?
Bertrand: The new panel antenna is a four-bay, three-around ERI Cogwheel antenna that serves WAMU, WTOP, WPFW and WETA. There is a new ERI SHPX Rototiller in place for WPGC and a new ERI LPX Rototiller for WMMJ. The combiner is all new; it was designed, built and installed by ERI.

RW: Describe the scope of the job.
Bertrand: The AU Tower has been the home to multiple FM stations since the 1960s. Additional stations were added in the 1970s and ’80s, with a final station in the early ’90s.

It is the primary broadcast home to WAMU, The American University’s NPR station; Hubbard’s WTOP; Urban One’s WMMJ; and Pacifica’s WPFW.

WAMU and WETA also provide reciprocal aux sites for one another, so WETA has an aux presence on the tower. They had been sharing the WAMU backup antenna but will now be part of the combined antenna.

WAMU joined the WETA combined antenna in 2019 in preparation for this project. Finally, WPGC (Entercom) has maintained an aux presence on this tower since the early 1990s.

What is interesting about this group of stations is that WTOP and WPGC are both directional, which meant that not everyone could join the master system. However, ERI devised a method for WTOP to meet its required directional pattern into the left-hand circularly polarized input to the new antenna system, with the master combiner feeding the right-hand CP input.

WPGC is highly directional, as it’s licensed to Prince George’s County in Maryland. Its antenna was upgraded, but it remains separate from the directional system on a mast up above the new antenna.
WMMJ, a Class A station, has had such incredible ratings success from its standalone antenna. In fact, WTOP, WAMU and WMMJ often switch places in the ratings for the #1, #2 and #3 spots in the market. Because they’ve done so well, Urban One leadership was hesitant to join the new antenna system, though they opted to replace their 30-year-old antenna as part of this process.

RW: Why was the new system necessary?
Bertrand: When the current array of antennas on the tower-top pole were erected in the early 1990s, these were fundamentally different stations in terms of community impact. WAMU was a tiny bluegrass station, routinely ranking toward the bottom of the ratings in the market. The station that is WTOP(FM) today was WGMS, a classical station that held its own often around the #15 mark, but was hardly the powerhouse WTOP is today. WTOP and WAMU currently lead the market, locally and nationally, within commercial all-news and public radio, respectively. They are massive stations.

In the legacy build, rather than opt for a costly master antenna, WAMU was built as a six-bay on the tower-top pole. WGMS was a three-bay directional, interleaved with the top three bays of WAMU on one side of the pole. WMMJ’s two bays straddled WAMU’s bottom bay. WPGC towered above all of them with its own directional antenna.

It was a mess. It made sense in the early 1990s given the economic realities for all these stations, but as they evolved into market leaders, they were sorely in need of “getting out of each other’s way” and an upgrade to an antenna system that would maximize audience for each station.

On top of that, these antennas were built on a “stepped” pole with the largest diameter at 16 inches OD and the narrowest at 6 inches. It was just a difficult situation.

Multiple driving measurement tests were performed over the years. We did one in 2017 with WTOP over the span of 900 miles of driving loops around the DC region. The test made clear what we had suspected: Each station was underperforming to the “opposite” side of the tower top pole — which was also the location of the adjacent antennas.

When I moved to the market in 2016 to join WAMU as its technology head, I was so surprised that at my apartment at the time, which was next door to the studios, I had a hard time receiving the station. This is two miles from the tower at that spot, and the ability to receive the station varied widely from one day to the next. Far away from our six-bay antenna, the station performed well to the north; but close-in and to the south we did not do well.

Finally, American University decided that it was time to decide once and for all what to do with this unique non-core asset sitting on its campus. Should they keep it or sell it? And if they kept it, who should run it? We pitched the idea of running it and performing this upgrade, with the goal of achieving full ROI in less than 10 years.

RW: How was the work managed?
Bertrand: WAMU led the project and managed it from concept to final construction. WTOP was a key partner and they were also an equal shareholder in financing the costs directly related to the antenna and its installation. It was unique that these two giant competitors worked so well together on this project, but from top management to the engineering teams, we all knew it was in our mutual interest to build the best facility we could, together.

WAMU has ultimate ownership of the antenna, but WTOP is a major “shareholder” in the system because of their investment. The other antennas are owned by their respective stations and parent companies.

RW: What was the project budget?
Bertrand: The project in total cost $2.8 million, excluding the rototiller antennas and their transmission lines. The project included a new shelter from VFP beneath the tower to house the combiner system as well as massive reinforcement and reconstruction of the tower from top to bottom. It also included replacement of that stepped pole with a uniform-diameter pole with massively thick walls for stability. There were also additional costs local to individual stations related to these changes. All in it probably clocks in just north of $3 million if you tally everyone’s respective investments.

RW: What are the other critical components?
Bertrand: The system has a four-station combiner for WAMU, WPFW, WETA and a unique low-power nondirectional aux for WTOP.

WTOP has the ability to broadcast at full power from its directional input to the system or at lower power via the combiner as a backup, in case anything happens to its directional infrastructure.

The system also includes the requisite bandpass filters for the noncombined stations as well as a versatile patch panel system for lockout/tagout and emergency operation.

RW: What other key players were involved?
Bertrand: Vertical Technology Services of Hagerstown, Md., performed the tower structural modifications and removed the old tower-top mast and installed the new mast. They also installed the custom cogwheel antenna and support structure, as well as the two additional single-station rototiller antennas.

The structural engineer of record was Richard Dyer of Morris Ritchie Associates. James Ruedlinger, who heads the structural division for ERI, designed the tower modifications and the complex rigging plan. Bob Clinton of Cavell, Mertz & Associates was the FCC consulting engineer and contributed to our antenna design process, as well as handling the FCC applications for most of the stations.

The general contractor for ground support was Network Building & Construction services, who primarily supports cellular buildouts and was adept as a permit expediter with the District of Columbia as well as supporting building the temporary roadway and ground support needed for the tower crew. Our new combiner shelter was designed and built by VFP shelters of Salem, Va. Paul Shulins and Dave Wing of Shulins Solutions did the installation of the Burk Arcturus system, which was engineered by Mark Raymond and Chuck Alexander of Burk Technology.

RW: What other technical aspects of the project will Radio World readers be interested to know about?
Bertrand: We have installed the Burk Arcturus system to provide VSWR protection and full monitoring of the system, such as line pressures and temperatures. We were drawn to Arcturus because of our familiarity with the Burk ARC Plus platform and its hardware, as well as the promise of predictive analytics.

We’re monitoring everything from VSWR at all the inputs and outputs of the system, line pressures, every dehydrator parameter including run-time of the redundant pair, line temperatures, to external temperatures and security parameters.

The goal is to be able to develop a complete picture of normal system operation across all seasons and be able to trend anomalies over time before they become major problems. The Arcturus also manages interlocks for the full facility and will automatically disable transmission based on which transmitters are switched to which antennas, depending on where a VSWR condition is detected.

We welcome story suggestions about your own studio, RF or IT project. Email radioworld@futurenet.com.

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