Since I happened to be in Minnesota, I hitched a ride with 3 engineering colleagues from the area who were driving to an HD Radio seminar at Harris in Quincy, IL.

Much of the material was review for me but it was a good chance to get together with a number of my engineering peers from various stations and backgrounds.  It was also good to meet up with a number of people from the factory.

Studying hard or hardly studying?
(At lunch time it’s probably the latter!)

The class poses for a picture

Yours truly poses in front of a pair of transmitters.
The rack on the left is an HD transmitter.  WPR owns 4 of these boxes in various configurations.

More HD related equipment.
The rack on the left is a completely self-contained 3000 watt HD transmitter site,
ready to go out the door to a customer.
The next rack contains various monitoring and remote control equipment.

This is a low power transmitter capable of 1000 watts.
WPR owns 8 of these boxes.
The cover is removed to show the class the inner workings.

Back to class…
Terry Cockerill (FM Applications Engineer, Harris Corporation) shows the class how to properly measure the HD signal on a spectrum analyzer.

Standing next to some very LARGE copper coils being assembled for an AM transmitter site.

Once we were done with class for the week, the four of us who had driven to Quincy together took a tour of the other broadcast equipment manufacturing plant in town.

Left to Right:
Mark Persons, Mark Young, Shane Toven and Dan Houg at the Broadcast Electronics factory

Partially assembled 5 kW FM transmitters destined for international use

Dan Houg stands next to a partially assembled 50kw AM transmitter.
This transmitter is completely modular and very small for its power level.

Tim Bealor (VP, RF Systems–Broadcast Electronics) shows Mark Young an HD Radio signal generator in assembly and test.

Mark Persons stands in front of a very large bank of transmitters destined for use overseas.  This particular setup contains 3 transmitters with 1 fully redundant transmitter capable of backing up any of the other 3.

4 tired engineers ready to head back to Minnesota