One Broadcast Engineer's blog…
About a year or so ago we placed a new station on the air in Rawlins. I had not been satisfied with the performance of the remote control that we installed so I decided to try another model.
The road to the site was still somewhat muddy and covered in snow. I was not able to make it all the way in with the truck so I had to walk the last bit up to the tower. You can see it in the upper-right hand corner of this picture. It’s still quite far away from this point but within walking distance…
The Federal Communications Commission recently approved up to a 10 fold increase in the digital power allowed for broadcast stations. This is a big deal, particularly for lower power broadcasters (like many of my stations) where every watt counts. I applied for permission to upgrade our Casper station. The hardware was already capable of the increased power so I just needed to go to the FCC for permission. They approved, so I drove up to Casper to perform the adjustment on the digital power. In our case it went from 5 watts of digital power on a 500 watt station to 50 watts. Quite an improvement!
Your ever present engineer takes a look at the signal on the laptop following the upgrade…
After spending the night in Newcastle, I headed down to my site in Douglas. This site had suffered a UPS failure. It had been bypassed earlier this year but needed to be replaced to protect the equipment. I also had some minor remote control wiring to do at the site.
At the site in Douglas…This site is has a fairly short tower and small building. The telephone pole next to the site with the 950 Mhz microwave dishes is an abandoned energy company radio facility.
I spent last night in Sundance and had arranged to meet someone with a snowmobile this morning to get me into the site. This time of year the last 4 miles of road up to our site turn into a very nice groomed snow trail.
My chariot awaits…
I spent all day yesterday driving to Casper and working on replacing a remote control. Today I drove up to Sundance to prepare to install the remote control I just removed from Casper.
The end result of my work in Casper…A new control and monitoring screen. The new remote controls give me the ability to ‘custom design’ interfaces for managing them and collecting data. Quite nice if I do say so myself…
Some of WPR’s remote control systems are getting a bit old and unreliable. As they have failed, we have upgraded remote controls at other sites and used the old remotes from those sites to repair failures. This time our Sundance site had suffered a remote control failure. Casper is one of our more critical sites and could benefit from a newer and more capable remote control. I would then be able to use the old but still functional remote that I pull from Casper in Sundance.
Casper is generally a beautiful site any time of year…The road to the site is well maintained and plowed in the winter. Occasionally there are heavy snow drifts up against our building but this time it proved to not be an issue.
Wyoming Public Radio’s network infrastructure has expanded at an amazing rate in the past three years. When I started here, the only internal networking was for the automation system. Now, however, virtually every piece of equipment we bring into the plant has an Ethernet port. We have at least five different “virtual” networks running internally now (along with equipment around the state connected via microwave). It totals over 70 different ‘nodes’ in our network.
I decided it was long past time to implement some form of network monitoring for the WPR plant. After a bit of research, I found something called ‘OpenNMS’. This package is an open source piece of software that allows monitoring of networked devices using a variety of methods.
The ‘Dashboard’ view of OpenNMS. This gives me an ‘at a glance’ view of network status. I can group various types of devices together for easier monitoring. The software can E-Mail me to alert me to potential problems.
Day 3…I had spent the first day determining what the problem was and ordering parts for overnight delivery from the manufacturer. Day 2, I received the parts from the manufacturer but one of the parts was not shipped. Today, I waited for the remaining part to arrive and would go back to the site one more time to complete repairs.
I stayed in a neat little cabin in Jackson Hole
I ordered the parts yesterday for overnight delivery and anxiously awaited for their arrival at the hotel. They arrived around 11 AM and I made my way back up to the site to start repairs.
Wow…I didn’t know a transmitter being off the air qualified as a medical emergency!
Once again I found myself in Jackson to investigate an issue at our transmitter site. The transmitter had started to spontaneously drop off the air for some reason. Very odd since this is generally a very reliable transmitter. Fortunately we have an auxiliary transmitter at this site. I went to the site to investigate. The problem appears to be an exciter power supply fault. I was able to order parts and will attempt repairs as soon as the parts arrive tomorrow. In the mean time, I was able to enjoy more beautiful scenery!
Look at the Teton mountains shrouded in clouds!
