Ever have one of those days? Around 8 AM my phone rings as I am having coffee with some friends. Apparently we have lost the feed from National Public Radio and are off the air.

We had just completed the process of completely switching satellite delivery systems from NPR’s old “SOSS” system to the new “Content Depot” system. The new system is an entirely different model for audio delivery.

New satellite receivers for Content Depot

Instead of tuning to individual satellite carriers, the new system selects multicast IP audio streams from a single large satellite carrier. In addition, the system has the ability to deliver audio files directly to us over the satellite instead of the old method of recording everything from the satellite as it is fed to us in real time. The system shows some real promise in terms of increased productivity once it is fully working.

I had been testing the system over a number of months and for the most part the transition has gone smoothly. For some reason this morning, however, the system killed our subscription to the 8 AM hour of Morning Edition. Not good.

My assistant was quickly able to restore audio from a backup source but it still was not a good situation and caused about a 10 minute loss of the national feed. Our news director covered the situation gracefully while Reid worked to restore audio.

The problem turned out to be an error in programming at NPR. Many stations are quickly losing confidence in the new system due to these faults but I guess I have a bit more patience due to the fact that I just went through a very similar transition in our regional network (albeit on a much smaller scale) using equipment from the same manufacturer.

NPR deployed this system to HUNDREDS of stations and developed a lot of custom software on the head end. By comparison, I only had 14 stations to upgrade in our regional network and no custom software…That project was far simpler and still not without its own set of problems.

The second problem of the day was a series of reports that our Rawlins translator was off the air and had been for a couple of days. This was the translator where we had just installed a satellite dish to replace a poor over the air pickup from Laramie.

Rawlins translator

Larry and Reid went to the translator and found that the dish had blown approximately 10 degress off point. They were able to successfully re-point the dish but the high winds were still affecting the signal level. We will likely need to reinforce the pole that the dish is mounted on in order to keep it from moving so much in the wind.

Problem #3 of the day was when the KUWR transmitter decided to drop off the air for no apparent reason. I suspect it may have been a momentary power glitch.

Around 3:40 PM, our administrative assistant forwarded a listener call to me saying that the station was off the air. A moment later, the operator on duty came to tell me that we had no meter readings. Shortly after that my monitoring equipment alerted me to the problem. I was able to quickly call the transmitter and restore it to air. Eventually I will have an automatic process that will try to bring up the auxiliary transmitter in the event that the main transmitter goes down.

The main KUWR transmitter

Just another day in WPR Engineering…Despite all of the issues I have to deal with I still wouldn’t trade it for anything.