New Blog Host
By bill | December 16, 2008
For new and future blog posts, visit the new site: Tech Notes from the Field
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When Deliveries Go Wrong
By bill | November 23, 2008
As twittered the other day, my Friday was not too good. I ordered a 20-foot piece of 3 1/8″ line for our HD projects. You know, a piece to cut up as needed. Well, the carrier used was UPS Freight. Here is what happened.
First, a week ago they tried to deliver to the studios. Not. I instructed the vendor to deliver to the transmitter site. Unattended, so I required a call in advance to meet the driver. Obviously this was not the case. Delivery refused.
Then came Friday. A fellow engineer calls saying UPS was trying to deliver something. Again, no call in advance, so my assitant and I run up there. When we arrive we see no truck which was not unexpected. It’s what we saw next that blew our minds. The delivery was made. The driver THREW the box over the fence!
20-foot box over the fence
As you can see this was not your normal delivery. The vendor and manufacturer were notified and UPS Freight is going to take it back. As a matter of pricipal I am requesting a new piece thought the damage is minimal.
Right now, UPS Freight is not high on my list of carriers for fragile items.
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It’s Been A While, eh?
By bill | November 12, 2008
I have not posted for some time. I’ve been busy. Very busy. Ever since taking over the CE job here it’s been non-stop fun. Now that my first HD transmitter of three is delayed, my December is looking real busy. So, while I wait to upgrade my second Orban 8500 with a 16 second DSP board, I figured I would touch base with my small, loyal audience.
HD: Hurry up and wait. A Nautel V1-D will ship 11/17. A bit after the 10/31 date I was told, but we will live. Two more Nautels, both NV20’s, will arrive in December. Yes, the new NV series. I am excited and worried as I wonder if I will get serial numbers 1 and 2 or more like 10 and 11. I do not know how many they have on production right now and who may be in front of us.
PPM: Hurry up and wait. I have my racks installed, but now I need equipment. I bet that shows unexpectedly. In the preparation and installation of the racks we discovered that we have no more capacity for all 4 racks, so only 2 racks have power and we must limit them to 5 amps each. Can you say tight? Not physical capacity, load capacity! Then the panel without backup generator is a physical capacity issue. So, it’s time to plan on power system upgrades which will include the undersized backup generator. And, in the state of California, this will be a challenge in itself.
Anyone want to purchase a Continental 816R-3C 25kW transmitter? Date 1998. It is used as an Aux. It is clean and works well. It’s tapped down to around 15kW for a TPO of 10.3kW right now.
And that is what she wrote today. I’ll try and keep you posted on all the fun changes!
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Arbitron: Another Solution?
By bill | October 26, 2008
Without really going into details, I was in a discussion with a friend about this whole monitoring thing with Arbitron. The question that came up is, “Why not use cell sites and CDMA or 3G technologies to monitor radio stations by installing some sort of low level transmitters in radios?” Cell phone technology is pretty much a given today. There are cell sites in almost every major area of this country. It is a valid question.
The general concept is to use cell technology to monitor what a radio is tuned to by using some sort of chip in the radio itself. Basiclly place a cell phone type device in radios. The radio is on, the cell type device is turned on, and can communicate real time data to an Arbitron or whomever monitoring service.
There are many questions and issue like getting radio manufacturers to install this type of device. The same issues that having HD installed in these things, too. The future is the future, so why not.
Any thoughts on this?
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Denon DN-C640 CD Player Updates
By bill | October 26, 2008
If you are not aware of it, Denon released a new firmware version for the DN-C640 CD player. They are now at version 1.24. Along with this is a release of the new drive update placing that one at version 1.003.
In our situation we had a CD that would not for the life of it play. Cue the disk to the track you want, press play and the thing would go to the master index of number of tracks and length. Wacky. Every machine did this. I contacted D&M Professional and they were aware of the issue. I installed the update, training a new guy at the same time, and the disk plays as if nothing were wrong.
I had a question for them about why, as a user and owner of 7 machines, soon to upgrade with 6 more, and that I am a review writer, that I did not know of the update. Tech support says it is listed on their website. I just visted that site and cannot find anything referring to the update. If it is there, it is not obvious. I will do some more digging.
In any case, support sent me the updates ASAP and the update worked. That’s the bottom line, so who can complain, right?
Topics: Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
Upcoming Work Update
By bill | October 18, 2008
Wow. Things have changed. I must concentrate more on my employment than on the outside “contractor” side of life. We have so much to do it seems overwhelming, but I find it quite refreshing. Actually, it should never have become so hectic if things were scheduled/planned throughout the year.
Tonight we have a planned outage by our friends at SDG&E. They are swapping a switch that will affect 252 meters or which 5 are ours. It will be a good time to do some training for our new assistant. He is coming along quite well. Yes, #2 is traing a new person. We decided to get a “fresh” individual in to help bolster the industry’s falling number of engineers.
Next is to get our Studio B up to speed on the microphone chain side. New Aphex 230’s and Neuman BCM-104s.
Our AM tower project is moving along. Gound breaking was last week and the caissons are in. Concrete pouring is going to commence soon. I heard no word from our contractor yesterday so the first inspection must have gone well.
Next is the ordering of the new racks for the PPM. I wonder why the corporate world seems so high on this while the lawsuits build on the East coast. In any case, we will install 4 new equipment racks to house this material.
While this goes on we finalize our plans to install our first of 3 HD transmitters. The first is on our class A station, so it will be a great training tool for the new dude. Most everything is in line. The headache is following throug on the previous Chief’s plans with the Moseley for the LAN capabilities. He never ordered that feature when he bought the system. Go figure. Upgrades will start this week or next.
After all this and during part of this is plans for the final two HD transmitter installs. We will receive the new Nautel NV20 transmitters. I will write a littel review on these as we install them. In preparation I need to place the orders for any peripherals that we need.
All this must be complete by 12/31. The transmitters (NV’s) will not ship until 12/10! Nice, eh? Holidays and all will make this quite an adventure. Similar to last year when the previous Chief dragged his feet and we ended up with 3 studio remodels in one month.
Stay tuned!
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Updates and Responses
By bill | October 4, 2008
For any that made comments and wondered where they went, it has taken some time to catch up Forgive the delay.
Why? I was promoted this week. Now I have all the fun of getting up to speed to make sure all the projects are on track. This includes, sad to say, 3 HD transmitters. At least it is not a big deal and should go pretty good. I’ll announce the winner of the HD contest soon. You may or may not be surprised.
I’ve been involved in antenna installations/replacements and site improvements, but now I get to do a whole tower rebuild. Most of the leg work is done, so it is more keeping it on track. This, again, should be no big deal. I hope we do not have the same issues that KFI in Los Angeles had! BTW, congrats to the for finishing their project, KFI is on the air from their new, top-loaded, main antenna.
That’s all for now. Keep up to date with quick updates on Twitter!
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GRA: Google Radio Automation
By bill | September 25, 2008
We had a presentation from the Google folks and the new GRA. Don’t jump to conclusions until you see this in operation. Yes, there is room for improvements, but that is in areas that are not critical to on-air. The power is in the playback deck, the playlist, the library, the playlist editor, and it’s integration with the music scheduler Music Master.
Our people were somewhat skeptical when they entered the presentation, but when they left, they were impressed. These are old time Prophet/Nextgen users, Enco users, and such. It is now on the list of viable solutions.
If you have a chance check it out. It is also much less expensive than you would expect.
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Twittering anyone?
By bill | September 23, 2008
So here is a “thing” that may be questionable for some companies while not an uncommon thing for many: Twitter. Do you Twitter? Do you like to Twitter? Are you a Twit?
Whoa, last question may be too much information. Anyways, I do. Started my account over the weekend and should be an interesting experiment. I know some folks in the broadcast world twit, but how about them engineers? Show of hands?
Now for my twitter name: dragonbill http://twitter.com/dragonbill
Have fun following!
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Chrome by Google: Initial Thoughts
By bill | September 5, 2008
Well, I’ve finally decided to use it here at work for a bit and though there are some things I like about Google’s Chrome browser, there are more things I do not like. Overall the appearance and use is pretty cool along with their tabbing features. Their “home” page of Most Visited sites is actually a nice touch as it keeps a history of some of the pages you use constantly and gave me a place to go without searching my bookmarks for a site. As opposed to saying “most visited” and think it should become a “favorites” type of page that does not change but is user editable. That said, the overall appearance is good and is pretty easy to use and understand.
Now the one thing that is advertised is its efficiencies or speed. Not for me. It was slow loading some of my common pages. Those cached loaded quicker, but in many cases I had issues with a slow page load. One notable area is my e-mags. I subscribe to a few electronic version of trade magazines and did they ever load slow. “Turning” pages was a bear. And, get this, using Google’s own Gmail was not any better! I would type a sentence and notice that the cursor was 3 or 4 words behind. At times it seemed the application locked up, but then would start working again. The download thing is not very impressive and is a fancy way of listing what you downloaded during that session. Shoot, with Firefox you do not even have to have the pop up window, and if you do, like me, it is configured to close once the download is complete.
These are my first findings. Yes, I like the browser, but as for using it at work, I think I will stick to Firefox for now.
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