2008 February Newsletter

SB E C H A P T E R 70 - C L E VE L AND/AKRON
SBE 70
88.9/WSTB Radio
Gather at 7pm
Next Meeting
February 2008
Streetsboro High
Meeting at 7:30pm
March 11th
Vol. XVI Number 2
MEETING DETAILS
Transmitter Implications of Elevated
Digital Carrier Levels for FM HD Radio
Presenter: Gary Liebisch of Naute
To improve digital signal penetration, some experiments have been conducted with analog to digital signal ratios at an elevated -10 dB. While it is
still too early to predict when or whether the digital
standard may be modified to accommodate such
operation, stations implementing HD Radio today
are curious as to what the upgrade path options
might be, and how they might best protect their current equipment investments. This paper first reviews how power output is determined in a digital
transmitter, and how that would change with an
elevated ratio. Then we re-examine the most commonly used digital combining methods to illustrate
how the optimum solution could shift depending on
station power and current constraints.
WSTB is located at Streetsboro High School 1900
Annalane Drive, Streetsboro 44241. If you get lost
call General Manager Bob Long at 330-352-3071 .
CHAIRMAN’S CHAT
by Ron Bartlebaugh
Review of Our January 8th Meeting
A good January meeting was held at
WKSU on the campus of Kent State
University with plenty of folks attending to make up for those who
chose not to make the migration
from the Cleveland area. We thank
Ron Caird from VCI Solutions who
gave an excellent presentation entitled “A Checklist for Improving
Automation Efficiency”. The paper was extremely beneficial to
meeting attendees as it offered good information for existing
automation system operators plus a vision for improving automation efficiencies. Thanks to Bill Elkin from Bird Electronics for
bringing along plenty of their nice slide rule calculators, full line
catalogs, and slick to use pens. More of the VSWR slide rule
calculators and catalogs will be available at our February meeting.
About Our February 12th Meeting
Our Program Chairman Blake Thompson and his assistants Bob
Leskovec and Ed Miller are doing a great job for our Chapter.
The February meeting is scheduled for Tuesday evening February
12th at WSTB in Streetsboro where Gary Leibish from Nautel
will be presenting a paper on changing the digital injection levels
on HD radio transmission for better reception. This should be an
(continued on page 2)
Society of Broadcast Engineers Northeast Ohio chapter 70
SB E C H A P T E R 70 - C L E VE L AND/AKRON
Chairman’s Chat (continued from page 1)
Check ‘em out!
Were you there?
Photos of last month’s
meeting are on page 3
interesting meeting – especially for all of us who are facing
HD radio installations in the near future. More details about
the meeting can be found in the meeting announcement section of this newsletter. Please direct any suggestion for future meeting topics and locations to Blake. Please remember - if you have an equipment demo or training session
scheduled for your facility please keep our local Chapter in
mind as we are always looking for additional learning opportunities
Business News from Our Region
We are hearing that Patlin Electronics has chosen to close
business after serving our region so well since its inception
in 1974. The challenges of operating any large business in
our increasingly challenging economic times can be extremely difficult and frustrating at best. We will all miss
Patlin’s wonderful services and certainly wish Earl all the
best in his future endeavors.
If you missed it, check out page 10 of the January 2nd edition of Radio World. There you will find a nice article about
the antenna replacement for radio station WJZL in Lansing,
MI – a job well done by Al Warmus and his team from
Warmus and Associates located in Bath. The project required helicopter antenna lifts on two different days. A note
goes along to remind folks that Thom Mandell who also
owns and operates the Rubber City Radio Group of stations
in Akron (WQMX, WONE, and WAKR) also owns WJZL.
Can You Believe This Stuff?
Finally yet importantly is the news of the WJW-TV8 inprocess sale and a holding company coming up with billions
and billions of dollars to purchase Clear Channel. I also
read where The Weather Channel (a cable channel) may be
sold for as much as five-hundred billion dollars.
And, How Many Readers Know This?
From the bet you didn’t know this category - WJW weatherman Andre Bernier and WKYC’s Bruce Kalinowski (Edwards) were the very first on-camera meteorology team
when The Weather Channel started broadcasting on Sunday,
May 2, 1982 at 8:00 P.M. The Weather Channel was a
speculative start up at that time. Now its worth, apparently,
hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars. How is that
for blowing up a good old-fashioned Texas dust storm?
Take good care and stay well!
Ron Bartlebaugh
Society of Broadcast Engineers Northeast Ohio chapter 70
SB E C H A P T E R 70 - C L E VE L AND/AKRON
PHOTOS OF THE JANUARY MEETING AT WKSU
Courtesy of Robert Leskovec
Society of Broadcast Engineers Northeast Ohio chapter 70
SB E C H A P T E R 70 - C L E VE L AND/AKRON
The NEXT PCARS MEETING will be held Monday, February 11, 2008
Hamfest Calendar
3 Feb 2008
Northern Ohio Amateur Radio Society
http://www.noars.net
Talk-In: 146.70 (open repeater)
Contact: John Schaaf, K8JWS - PO Box 35 - Avon Lake, OH 44012 - Phone: 216-696-5709
Email: [email protected]
10 Feb 2008
Mansfield Mid-Winter Hamfest
InterCity Amateur Radio Club
http://www.iarc.ws
Talk-In: 146.94 (PL 71.9)
Contact: Dean Wrasse, KB8MG
1094 Beal Road - Mansfield, OH 44905 - Phone: 419-589-2415 - Fax: 419-884-6177
Email: [email protected]
20 Apr 2008
54th Annual Hamfest, Electronics, and Computer Show Cuyahoga Falls Amateur Radio Club
http://www.cfarc.org/hamfest2008.htm
Talk-In: 147.27
Contact: Ted Sarah, W8TTS - 239 Bermont Ave. - Munroe Falls, OH 44262 - Phone: 330-688-2013
Email: [email protected]
Society of Broadcast Engineers Northeast Ohio chapter 70
SB E C H A P T E R 70 - C L E VE L AND/AKRON
SBE CERTIFICATION EXAM DATES
2008 Exam Dates
Location Application Deadline
February 8-18
Local Chapters
Closed
April 15
NAB-Las Vegas
Feb 29, 2008
June 6-16
Local Chapters
Apr 18, 2008
August 8-18
Local ChaptersJun 6, 2008
November 7-17
Local Chapters
Sep 19, 2008
Society of Broadcast Engineers Northeast Ohio chapter 70
SB E C H A P T E R 70 - C L E VE L AND/AKRON
affordable, but they cut the next tether,
the one between the base unit and the
By - David Roden, Assistant Program Direc- wall. Air time was tremendously extor and Music Director, WKSU Stations
pensive, but that paid for improved
coverage. However, even with more
A lot of us older folks still think of a
telephone as a receiver and a box wired cellular towers, the sound quality never
got very good. It remained well below
to the wall. Thirty-five years ago,
even the cordless home phone's.
phones actually RANG. And when
they did, you didn't fish around in your
pocket ("One missed call"), you
“Cell phones shrank, went
walked across the room and picked up
the receiver.
digital...but they never
GOOD ENOUGH
sounded as clear as good old
If you were near the phone, that is. If
you were in a restaurant, concert,
Western Electric.”
meeting, or class, or walking or driving
the car, you didn't talk on the phone.
By the same token, you could stand in
line at the bank without listening to
Time went by. Competition drove
two or three disembodied
down the cost of air time. Cell phones
conversations.
shrank, went digital, and shrank some
more until they fit neatly into a shirt
Phones stayed put. Not any more;
pocket. But they never sounded as
that's almost an alien concept for peo- clear as the good old Western Electric.
ple under 40. But what have they lost? Digital service just meant that instead
of a burst of noise and "Wait, I'm losBy 1980,
ing you," the other person's voice got
America
sketchy, then vanished altogether.
had a
highly
All around us are copper wires and
developed
fiber optic cables that deliver some of
telephone
the clearest, most consistent phone
network.
service in the world - and they're falYou could
ling into disuse, as an increasing numhave a
ber of people drop their landlines and
clear conuse cell phones exclusively. Despite
versation with anyone in the world at a years of development, their cell phones
very reasonable cost, as long as you
still can't match landlines for intelligiwere within several feet of a telephone. bility and reliability. But they go
anywhere.
That was the year the cordless phone
Cell phones don't perform like wired
hit the market, cutting the tether bephones, but they're "good enough."
tween the base and the handset. Now
Convenience over quality.
you could wander around the house a
little while you gabbed. The first exThe same thing has happened in
amples were noisy and unreliable, but
audio. We should have known what
as time went on, cordless phones
lay ahead when Advent squeezed
improved. They were never quite as
more or less adequate sound from the
clear or reliable as corded phones,
audio cassette, a hopelessly slow, narthough - and still aren't.
row tape that most of us thought was
only suited to recording Junior's first
Four years later, the analog cellular
words.
phone arrived. The early models
weren't very small nor were they very
Cassettes didn't sound like open reel,
but they were "good enough." Convenience over quality.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s,
Shure, Stanton, and others did miraculous things with those tiny gadgets on
the ends of tonearms. Phono cartridges
traced vinyl grooves at a fraction of a
gram, extracting sound that should
have been impossible with such a
crude mechanical system.
Then, in 1972, Denon's PCM arrived
on the scene, followed by Tom Stockham's Soundstream system in 1977.
That same year, Stockham predicted
that someday records would be pocketsized and digital. The gestation period
wasn't long. Five years later, Sony and
Philips gave birth to the compact disc.
The CD never quite lived up to the
Soundstream example, nor did it ever
sound quite as good as the very best
direct-to-disc LPs played on the very
best analog playback systems. But,
just as Stockham had predicted, it was
small and easy to store. And it raised
the average quality of consumer audio
playback to its highest level ever.
We've been backing down from that
peak ever since. Almost every recent
audio development that's really caught
on with the public hasn't improved fidelity significantly. Like cassette versus open reel - and VHS versus Betamax - the winner is the one that crams
more of a selection into less space.
“Almost every recent audio development that's really caught
on with the public hasn't improved fidelity significantly.”
The beta version of the Mosaic web
browser came out in 1994, launching
the World Wide Web. The first software MPEG-1 Layer 3 encoder,
Fraunhofer's L3ENC, was released the
same year. A hobbled ACM codec ver-
Society of Broadcast Engineers Northeast Ohio chapter 70
SB E C H A P T E R 70 - C L E VE L AND/AKRON
sion (Fraunhofer Advanced), with top
bitrate limited to 96kbps, was included
in Windows 95. Soon the Fraunhofer
Professional codec, which could encode up to 128kbps, was widely (if
illegally) circulated on the fastgrowing web.
A patched version of the Fraunhofer
Pro, known as the Radium codec,
pushed bitrates to 320kbps, as did the
LAME open-source encoder. However, it would be years before these
higher bitrates became popular. Most
users connected to the net through a
dialup, and they wanted the smallest
possible files. The 128kbps rate was
about the lowest that didn't instantly
make the listener's eyes water, and the
die was cast.
of filesharing, copyright, and piracy.)
width is limited. Audible harshness
and other data-compression artifacts
But, as always, there was a price. The show up even with just one stream.
whole purpose of low bit rate percepThe more you split that sliver of bandtual encoding is not to make music
width, the more convenience and
sound as good as it can be, but rather
flexibility you have - and the worse
to discard as much musical information each stream sounds.
as possible without making the tune
unlistenable. A good portion of an en- Convenience over quality. Is HD Ratire generation has now grown up with dio "good enough"?
this mediocrity as their default medium.
The jury's still out on that question and, if HD Radio doesn't catch on with
listeners pretty quickly, it may never
“A good portion of an entire
render a verdict.
generation has now grown
up with this mediocrity (low
bit rate perceptual encoding)
as their default medium.”
Even if the glove fits and they acquit,
is "good enough" really all that we
want to be?
The way things are going, perhaps in
another 20 years, listeners will be able
At 128kbps, MP3 encoders could
to order music on their wrist-phones,
crunch a digital audio (PCM) file to
and we'll deliver it directly to tiny
about one-eleventh of its original size. MP3s didn't sound like CDs, but they
wireless implants in their ears. Will it
That amount of data compression made were "good enough." Convenience
be as clean and clear as what good,
internet distribution possible. Even
over quality.
well-managed FM radio can provide
with a dialup modem, a 3 minute piece
of audio would download in a manage- Now look at radio. Five kHz AM gave today? Will it even be as listenable as
HD Radio, MP3s and cell phones?
able 8 to 15 minutes.
way to 15 kHz FM stereo and, by the
mid 1970s, surprisingly fine broadcast
Or will it just be "good enough"?
sound. Granted, many stations
stomped it with excessive compression
and deliberate distortion ("enhancement"), but at least FM could still deDavid Roden
liver clean sound when thoughtful,
fearless GMs and CEs had their hands Assistant Program Director & Music Director
WKSU/WKRW/WKRJ/WKSV/WNRK/
on the knobs.
W298BA/W239AZ
http://www.wksu.org/
With help from a cooperative Commis- 1613 East Summit Street, Kent OH 44240
Voice +1 330 672-3114
sion and venture capital, big media
Fax +1 330 672-4107
companies bid up station prices, putting additional FM frequencies out of
reach of everyone else. Now the new
kid on the block - IBOC, or HD Radio
The first flash-memory MP3 players
- offers the independent broadcaster
went on sale in 1998, and the first
another way to put more program
hard-disc MP3 player, designed by
streams on the air. It should mean
Compaq, was released the following
more convenience and choice for the
year. The first Ipod, with 5gb of storage, appeared in 2001. Now you could listener, and more revenue streams for
the broadcaster.
carry almost a hundred CDs worth of
music in your pocket. If that wasn't
But, again, at what cost? True, HD
enough, you could just click the computer mouse for more. (I'll stop there, cleans up some kinds of noise and multipath distortion. But its digital bandso as not to get into the thorny issues
Society of Broadcast Engineers Northeast Ohio chapter 70
SB E C H A P T E R 70 - C L E VE L AND/AKRON
Society of Broadcast Engineers Northeast Ohio chapter 70
SB E C H A P T E R 70 - C L E VE L AND/AKRON
Society of Broadcast Engineers Northeast Ohio chapter 70
SB E C H A P T E R 70 - C L E VE L AND/AKRON
Chapter 70 Officers
Chairman
Vice-Chairman
Program Chair
Ron Bartlebaugh
Joe Mate
Blake Thompson
WKSU-FM
[email protected]
WZIP-FM
330.672.3114
330.972.6221
[email protected]
[email protected]
Secretary
Treasurer
Certification
Bob Kruppenbacher
Bill Weisinger, CBRTE
Bill Kozel, CSRE/CBTE
WKSU-FM
Weisinger Engineering Services
WEWS-TV5
330.672.3114
[email protected]
216.431.3730
[email protected]
[email protected]
Frequency Coordinator > 1 GHz
Frequency Coordinator < 1 GHz
Website Services
Mike Szabo
Mark Krieger
Ric Cicchinelli, CBT/CBNT
WKYC-TV3
216.481.1756
330.484.6471 Ext 2822
216.344.3391
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
Newsletter Editor:
Bob Long, 88.9/WSTB-FM
330.626.4906 Ext 8215
[email protected]
Society of Broadcast Engineers Northeast Ohio chapter 70