One Broadcast Engineer's blog…
The next project on the list was to upgrade our transmitter in Jackson to allow for higher HD Radio power levels. We broadcast Classical Wyoming and Jazz Wyoming on HD Radio from this site as well. The increased HD Radio power levels will allow more reliable reception of these signals.
Ah, that new transmitter smell. Now how do we get this thing out of the crate?
This summer brought a first for WPR–A live broadcast and recording from a music festival. In honor of the 30th anniversary of our Bluegrass show we did the show live from the Big Horn Mountain Festival. It was quite the undertaking but thanks to new technology we were able to pull it off without a hitch. I’m sure this will be the first of many such broadcasts.
A banner promoting WPR is prominently featured next to the stage
Wyoming Public Media has three services; Wyoming Public Radio, Classical Wyoming and Jazz Wyoming. We have been expanding these services around the state wherever possible. There are two ways we can distribute these signals–traditional analog FM signals and HD Radio. Unfortunately it is increasingly difficult to add new analog FM services. HD Radio allows us to add these services as a second and third digital signal to our existing analog FM signals which are broadcasting in HD Radio. The equipment needed at a site already broadcasting HD Radio is relatively simple–just another computer to inject the additional signals into the HD Radio data stream. We received a grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to add these two additional services on HD Radio to our Sheridan transmitter site.
This is our “Banner Ridge” transmitter just outside of Sheridan. Absolutely beautiful scenery!
Our station in Sheridan went off the air…I visited the site and found a locked up exciter most likely caused by a faulty Uninterruptible Power Supply. I ordered a replacement UPS and went back to the site the next day to install it.
Beautiful view of the Big Horn mountains from the access road to the site…Thank goodness I’m not going up there!
I received a call from our Gillette transmitter site that it was well over 100 degrees in the building. I had gone to the site previously, found the issue and made a temporary fix. This dropped the temperatures considerably but it was still much warmer than normal. Parts to make permanent repairs arrived and I went back to the site.
My trusty chariot atop Antelope Butte
I had received several reports that our KUWP transmitter had gone off the air. It came back on its own. I hate intermittent problems…. Our logging confirmed that the satellite signal had gone away and caused the outage. This site had received a significant amount of rain and snow recently which would explain the satellite outages. Still, this had not been a huge issue in the past so I wanted to go check it out. In addition, our remote control was no longer answering the phone line so I went to check that out as well. After a failed attempt to access the site over the weekend (too much rain and mud) I came back today on the ONE good day of weather predicted for the area this week.
The drive to the site actually wasn’t too bad…There was still some snow up on the peak. I had to chain up the tires on the truck to make the steepest part of the road up to the site but I was able to drive all the way in.
For the past three years, I’ve been working on constructing a new station in Eastern Wyoming. Due to various political and financial hurdles, work didn’t really begin in earnest on the station until this past August. The construction permit was due to expire this May, not leaving much time for construction. It is now at long last on the air, site construction is mostly complete and we have the “official” license for the station. I actually had the station on the air over a month ago (see my late February posting) but the ground has finally thawed and the contractors are now able to finish up the final details on the site.
The site…This time complete with fencing!
OK, so I’m finally catching up on some posts from February. I suppose some of you are probably wondering what I’ve been up to this past month…Besides the fact that I’m soon going to be a daddy, I’ve been spending the past three weeks or so working on code for something I’ve coined “DMAC” or “Distributed Monitoring and Control”. This is the new “Master Control” for all of the Wyoming Public Media facilities both here in Laramie and out around the state. From ANY web browser in the world (including my Android phone) I can now monitor and control audio routing, automation and transmitters. VERY cool stuff. There have been ways to do this in the past but I’m not aware of any company that has customized and centralized it as much as I have been able to with DMAC. The cool part is that it is mostly based on PHP and uses SNMP for talking to the equipment. I can talk to equipment that doesn’t speak SNMP as well but it takes a bit more work. For those pieces of equipment, I have written custom “plugins”. This is ultimately going to save me a tremendous amount of work and cut down on travel to sites.
We suffered a power failure on Pilot Hill a few days ago…When power returned unfortunately our transmitter did not come back on the air. We were eventually able to get it back on the air but needed to correct some wiring on the remote control system.
Reid and Ben troubleshoot wiring to the remote control system…
On the way back from Riverton I had to stop by the site again. Apparently I dropped the keys to the equipment rack. On the way into the site I found this little guy…I was able to snap a picture before he popped back into his snow burrow.
