Radio World

The author is a development engineer for Wheatstone Corp.

This article is based on a paper prepared for the 75th NAB Broadcast Engineering and IT Conference. Conference videos and proceedings are available at https://nabpilot.org/beitc-proceedings/.

(Getty Images/natrot)

The broadcast industry is in a transitional phase, heading toward a world in which a large portion, perhaps even a majority, of listeners will receive the station’s program via an internet stream rather than terrestrial radio broadcast.

Many accomplished engineers and station managers, while experts in traditional radio technology, find themselves feeling like neophytes once again when it comes to internet streaming. This paper aspires to present an instructional overview of what’s involved in this generation of an internet audio stream, as well as a better understanding of where standards and practices are still developing.

Signal flows

Streamed content starts out on the same path as broadcast content, typically originating from the automation system if it’s music or from the studio microphone if it’s voice, or both.

One, however, goes to the broadcast chain and the other goes to the streaming encoder, and that one difference introduces new considerations in both processing and metadata for streaming. To understand these considerations, it helps to get a closer look at the signal flow of each.

Broadcast signal flow

For broadcasting purposes, content is fed into an automation system, which sends its audio output to an FM (or AM) processor, where it is processed and multiplexed, and then passed on to a transmitter that disseminates the program to the public.

As a side channel, the automation system has also been stocked with metadata (artist, title, album, duration, label, ISRC, etc.) for every piece of audio in its playlist; this metadata is also transmitted to the FM processor, where it is turned into an RDS signal that rides as a sideband on the MPX output.

There are, of course, variations in this flow path. For example, the metadata from the automation machine may be routed instead to an “aggregator” that cleans and ensures the accuracy and consistency of the metadata before it is forwarded to the FM processor. Or it might not even go to the processor, but to a separate RDS encoder, the output of which is then mixed with the MPX from the processor.

The exact details may change, but the steps along the path remain essentially the same.

Typical broadcast signal flow.

Stream signal flow

For streaming purposes, content enters the automation system as before, but in this case the output is routed to a stream encoder (also called an “origin server,” for reasons that will be clear later), and from there to a CDN, or Content Distribution Network.

The stream encoder has three jobs:

1. Process and condition the audio signals, optimizing it for the compression algorithms;
2. Encode, packetize and transmit the program over the public internet to the destination server (the CDN);
3. Handle the reformatting and forwarding of metadata from the automation system on to the CDN.

Typical stream signal flow.

CDN streaming and add-ons

Before looking at the inner workings of the stream encoder, let’s examine the Content Distribution Network. The CDN plays the role of the transmitter in the streaming paradigm, but its unique position in the program flow path actually gives it a bigger and more important job.

The main function of the CDN is to serve your stream to thousands or tens of thousands of listeners. But the twin facts that A) your program and all associated metadata passes through the CDN’s servers; and B) they know who is listening, from what location, and for how long — gives them an opportunity to provide a whole suite of add-on services.

A big one is ad replacement, which is usually geographically based but could also be tailored to whatever can be deduced about the individual listener’s tastes and habits.

Geo-blocking, logging, skimming, catch-up recording and playback, access to additional metadata (e.g. album art, fan club URLs), listener statistics and click-throughs, customized players, royalty tracking, redundant stream failover, transcoding from one format to another — these are some of the services that CDNs typically provide.

Thus, the CDN basically controls the distribution of the stream to the listening public. It is the responsibility of the stream encoder — the origin server to the CDN’s ingest and distribution servers — to make sure that the CDN gets the right data at the right time and in the right format.

Especially with regard to metadata, the CDN determines what the format will be. The stream encoder is therefore also a mediator/translator between the automation system and the CDN, as it must be able to transform the format of whatever it ingests into the format that the CDN requires. With that in mind, let’s take a closer look at the stream encoder.

Job 1: Data compression

The stream encoder performs various functions. The central function, which all others are designed in relation to, is to apply data compression to the audio stream, thereby reducing the bandwidth required both to transmit the stream up to the CDN, and for the listener to receive it.

By far, the most widely used compression codec for high-quality audio storage and transmission is AAC, but its predecessor MP3 is still used for legacy streams (to support legacy players). All compression algorithms operate by reducing the information contained in the audio signal to as few bits as possible; you therefore want to maximize the value of those bits by removing extraneous artifacts from the audio signal before it hits the compression codec. That cleansing and conditioning of the raw audio signal is the job of the DSP section at the input.

The encoder’s central function is data compression.

Encoder handoff to CDN

The compression codecs produce periodic output in the form of chunks of data, each of which represents a small segment (typically 5 to 20 milliseconds) of the continuous audio signal. These chunks are wrapped in a transport format and transmitted to the CDN’s ingest server as discrete, time-stamped packets. Common transport protocols include Icecast, RTMP, HLS, MPEG-DASH and RTP.

Metadata is typically received by the stream encoder on a TCP or UDP socket, and most commonly arrives formatted as XML. What happens after that depends on the transport protocol being used.

For Icecast streams, metadata updates (including ad triggers) are sent to the server out-of-band, as separate HTTP messages. For RTMP, the metadata update is embedded in the transport stream itself, as a special INFO type packet. For HLS, metadata may be reformatted as ID3 data and embedded into a separate channel of the underlying MPEG2 Transport stream, and ad triggers can be woven into the manifest file as SCTE-35 “program replacement opportunities.”

[Read More Tech Tips Here]

For all of these methods, the exact details can differ from one CDN to the next since there are no universally accepted standards for handling metadata, so setting up a stream and getting the metadata to update correctly and in sync with the audio stream often requires a short period of trial and error while negotiating protocols with the CDN.

RTP is a special case. RTP is the only stream format that is commonly used to carry uncompressed, full-bandwidth audio (in the form of AES67, for example), although it can be used to carry virtually any kind of data, including AAC, Opus or MP3 audio.

RTP is typically used in a studio-to-studio or studio-to-transmitter link, rather than as an ingest feed to a CDN.

Metadata formatting

The final area we want to examine is the metadata itself. We’ve been talking about transforming it from one format to another, but what does that mean, and why do we need to do it?

To answer, let’s look at some examples of raw metadata received from various automation systems. (Names and numbers have been changed to protect the innocent.)

Some systems export simple tagged text:

artist=Sonny Rollins
title=God Bless the Child
length=00:07:29

More commonly, metadata arrives in XML or XML-like form. Note that many fields may be empty:

<nowplaying><sched_time>220200</sched_time><air_time>402000</air_time><stack_pos></stack_pos><title>TheSkyIsANeighborhood</title><artist>FooFighters</artist><trivia>*</trivia><category>MNJ</category><cart>R585</cart><intro>14000</intro><end></end><station>93.5HD1</station><duration>243300</duration><media_type>SONG</media_type><milliseconds_left></milliseconds_left><Album>ConcreteandGold</Album><Field2></Field2><ISRC>USRW9170028</ISRC><Label>RCA</Label><Tempo></Tempo><Year>2017</Year></nowplaying>

The HTML ampersand entity in this one will require special handling:

<audio ID="id_3155460704_30756200">
<type>Song</type>
<status>Playing</status>
<title>JINGLE BELL ROCK</title>
<artist>Hall &amp; Oates</artist>
<length>00:02:03</length>
<category>Classic</category>
</audio>

Here’s a station ID and a liner from the same source. Some CDNs may want this data, some may not:

<audio>
<type>Link</type>
<status>Playing</status>
<artist></artist>
<title>ROCK91.7 | LEGAL ID2</title>
<number>120002</number>
<length>00:00:11</length>
</audio>

<audio>
<type>VoiceTrack</type>
<status>Playing</status>
<artist></artist>
<title>VT TLA3 - Rock: 2021-03-25 08:37</title>
<number></number>
<length>00:00:06</length>
</audio>

Here’s a sweeper and an ad from another source, below. Notice that the <media_type> tag distinguishes one from the other. The arrival of a SPOT is often used to trigger an ad replacement by the CDN. Durations shown here are in milliseconds.

<nowplaying><sched_time>67199000</sched_time><air_time>67267000</air_time><stack_pos></stack_pos><title>CYQTONEQUICKSWEEP#12DRY</title><artist>201971108:06:28</artist><trivia></trivia><category>IM5</category><cart>BIBE</cart><intro>0</intro><end></end><station>95.7KQED</station><duration>3900</duration><media_type>UNSPECIFIED</media_type><milliseconds_left></milliseconds_left><Album></Album><Field2></Field2><ISRC></ISRC><Label></Label><Tempo></Tempo><Year></Year></nowplaying><nowplaying><sched_time>33716000</sched_time><air_time>33721000</air_time><stack_pos></stack_pos><title>ShopLocalAWestfieldMerchantsFriday</title><artist>WestfieldMerchantsJune</artist><trivia>shoplocalgreencountry</trivia><category>COM</category><cart>4652</cart><intro>0</intro><end></end><station>95.7KQED</station><duration>30000</duration><media_type>SPOT</media_type><milliseconds_left></milliseconds_left><Album></Album><Field2></Field2><ISRC></ISRC><Label></Label><Tempo></Tempo><Year></Year></nowplaying>

None of the metadata messages in these examples can be transmitted to the CDN ingest server in the form they are in. Instead, the relevant data must be stripped out and reformatted into a protocol that the ingest server can understand. This protocol often requires that additional information, which is not available in the original metadata received from the automation system (such as login credentials, the server URL, and query parameters) be woven into the message. For an Icecast stream, that might take a form like this:

http://source:abc123@ice5.streamnet.com/admin/metadata?mount=/BRAVOFM1im&mode=updinfo&song=Foo%20Fighters|The%20Sky%20Is%20A%20Neighborhood|00:04:03|SONG

Likewise, an ad trigger might look like this:

http://source:abc123@ice5.streamnet.com/admin/metadata?mount=/BRAVOFM1im&mode=updinfo&song=|Shop%20LocalA%20%2D%20WestfieldMerchantsFriday|00:00:30|COM

In the stream transmitted by the CDN, the local ad from the origin server might be replaced with another ad targeted to the geographic location of the listener. The CDN may use the duration of the ad (30 seconds in this example) as the queue for switching back to the original program, or it may wait for the next SONG update to switch back.

For RTMP and HLS streams, the metadata is reformatted in a particular manner and “injected” into the stream as in-band data. For example, for RTMP, a “setDataFrame” message is assembled, typically containing an array of three strings: title, artist and “url” (a container for everything else). With the Foo Fighters example from above as our input, the schematic form of the output, ignoring the header bits demarcating the various sections, would look more or less like this:

@setDataFrame
onMetaData
title:The Sky Is A Neighborhood
artist:Foo Fighters
url:http://www.blaze105.com?autoID=R585&autoCat=SONG&cat=MNJ&album=Concreteand Gold&label=RCA&ISRC=USRW9170028

Note that the mapping of the tags in the original message to some of the query parameters in the output “url” string is neither obvious nor predictable, and in this case was in fact determined by the CDN. The underlying implication is that the manufacturer of the stream encoder cannot know ahead of time what format either the incoming or the outgoing metadata will look like.

A common solution for effecting the transformation of arbitrary input to arbitrary output is a programmable, embedded scripting language, such as Lua. Current stream encoders often provide a menu of Lua filters that are able to transform common patterns of metadata input into similarly common output patterns. Usually all that is required to customize the transform filter for the station’s own particular needs are a few tweaks to the script.

In closing, we’ll show an example of one of the pitfalls of relying on metadata for accuracy, and why many stations are now employing metadata cleaners and aggregators in their flow path. This is a real message received from an automation system (which shall remain anonymous):

<audio>
<type>Song</type>
<status>Playing</status>
<artist>Beyonc�</artist>
<title>Crazy in Love</title>
<number></number>
<length>00:03:56</length>
</audio>

Obviously, Beyoncé is the intended artist, but how would a computer know that? The odd character sequence at the end of her name is actually a single character: the Unicode Replacement Character /uFFFD, or one representation of it. (The lozenge-question-mark � is another representation of the same character.) How did it get there? Some automated transcription program back in the day encountered a character it wasn’t designed to handle (in this case the é), and replaced it with a wild card. The problem for any metadata transform filter is that the wild card can refer to anything — there’s actually no way to know except from the context what the original character was supposed to be.

And so there we are, at the interface of data and chaos. Even in the age of digital streaming, keeping entropy at bay is still the constant battle.

Comment on this or any article. Email radioworld@futurenet.com.

The post The Politics and Protocols of Streaming appeared first on Radio World.

For radio stations, streaming of our programming has changed considerably over the past decade.

In the early days, it was a novelty. It represented just another way for listeners to “tune in” to their favorite stations. There was little in the way of value in an internet-delivered stream, but many stations got on the bandwagon for various reasons, including (and perhaps especially) because the competition was doing it.

Those early streaming efforts were … primitive (to put it nicely). Bit rates were often low because bandwidth costs were so high in those days, and the streams sounded, well, not great. They were full of artifacts, and many exhibited that watery sound that was and is so common to low bit rate streams. Most were either unprocessed or poorly processed — wrongly processed is probably a better descriptor, and that didn’t help matters much on the listener’s end.

Special low-bit-rate processing algorithms properly used can make your stream sound great.

As time went on and bandwidth costs came down, bit rates were improved and things stated sounding better. We began to figure out how to monetize our streams to make them pay for themselves at the very least and be somewhat profitable at best. This roughly coincided with reduced costs for mobile data plans, making it possible for listeners to connect to our streams using their mobile devices.

Squeaks and chirps

We started figuring out how to process our streams right, using processing algorithms specifically created for reduced bit rate audio.

This made a big difference in our 32- and 64-kbps MP3 and AAC streams; they became downright pleasant to listen to. Gone were the watery sound and chirpy, squeaky artifacts. And because we weren’t trying to beat the guy(s) across town in a loudness war, our streams could actually have some dynamic range.

With the advent of hybrid radio, the quality of our streams has taken on a whole new level of importance. When the blend to the stream occurs in the listener’s radio, we want to avoid big difference in sound quality. It should be imperceptible, or almost so. The challenge is much the same as it has been for hybrid HD Radio for the past 15+ years: The blend has to sound good.

Streaming encoders have come a long way, too. Most, as far as I can tell, are still software encoders running on the station’s own hardware, but both the encoding software and the hardware are getting better and better.

In addition to traditional sound cards ranging from under $50 to over $1,000, stations with AoIP studio infrastructure have the option to feed their encoders via IP using PC drivers compatible with whatever AOIP system they are using.

Hardware like this Dell Precision rack-mount workstation using an AOIP driver can handle multiple stations with multiple streams each.

In the bigger markets, my company employs Dell Precision rack-mount workstations with some horsepower, dual-port NICs and employing multi-channel AoIP drivers to produce the streams. These machines can easily handle streams for multiple stations with multiple streams for each station. Streaming service for our stations is provided by Triton, and we use their proprietary encoder software on these workstations.

Purpose-built hardware encoders are now available from various manufacturers that will accept a variety of input sources, including AoIP. These encoders will produce multiple streams in different formats and with different data rates. Some include integral audio processing, providing a “one-stop” encoding solution.

Making it pay

As noted, monetizing our streams is important in many stations. Preroll and midroll audio or video ads, ad replacement and programmatic ad sales are elements that we have to deal with in many cases. Some of those things require special triggers from our playout systems, and that can be really tricky.

RIAA reporting for royalties is another important element that we have got to get right. Underreporting or missed reporting can get us in hot water legally; overreporting can cost us in unnecessary royalties. This reporting is a function of metadata export from our playout systems.

Some of the same metadata export is used to provide title/artist display on media players, and even to trigger lookup of album art for player/app displays, another reason to get it right. Listeners get irritated when incorrect information — or no information — is displayed. I know I do.

On a related note, stream listeners who don’t show up in the Nielsen data don’t count, so we’ve got to get our watermark encoding right. Program directors and station managers get really irritated when PPM doesn’t pick up on listeners that we have.

In the current issue of RWEE, Rick Bidlack, a development engineer at Wheatstone Corp., walks us through the building blocks of a stream.

There’s a lot at work here, from the playout system, the encoder, audio processing, metadata aggregation and conversion, and transmission to the masses. There are plenty of places for things to go wrong, but the better our understanding of the signal flow, the better equipped we as broadcast engineers will be to deal with it.

I remember a decade or more ago pulling out my iPhone and describing it to the president of our company that this was the “transistor radio” of the future. In a lot of ways, I missed that prediction by quite a bit; nobody walks around with an iPhone in their shirt pocket audibly playing a radio station stream. But in some ways I was right. There are plenty of folks using their smartphones to stream audio to their Bluetooth earbuds, and there are just as many that play streams through a Bluetooth-connected audio system, in cars, homes, even airplanes. And listeners in cars equipped with hybrid radio will sometimes listen to our streams and don’t even know it.

The bottom line for us is that more than ever, our internet streams have got to be right. They have to be reliable, meaning that someone (or something) has got to monitor them to be sure they are up. They have to sound good, be artifact-free and carry the correct metadata. Ad replacement has to be smooth and seamless, with overlays fitting exactly. And watermark encoding has got to be done right, too.

There is a lot at stake. We can’t afford to be anything but diligent.

Read more about streaming trends and best practices in Radio World’s free ebook “Streaming for Radio in 2021.”

Cris Alexander, CPBE, AMD, DRB, is director of engineering for Crawford Broadcasting and technical editor of Radio World Engineering Extra.

The post A Stream of Thought … on Streaming appeared first on Radio World.

The Dec. 22 issue of Radio World features our Buyer’s Guide for antennas, RF support and power products. Buyer’s Guide features application stories like this one.

Saga Communications station KOEZ(FM) in Iowa, serving the Ames and Des Moines markets, completed installation of a new Dielectric DCR-C ring-style antenna this fall.

The circularly polarized, center-fed antenna replaces an antenna knocked off the air by a partial tower collapse caused by a February ice storm. The station had been operating with a lower-power auxiliary antenna for months; the eight-bay DCR-C was operating below full power at press time, with full commissioning for KOEZ’s 100 kW ERP expected shortly.

KOEZ opted not to replace the top 100 feet of the tower lost to the storm. The side-mounted DCR-C has a center of radiation just short of 900 feet. Joe Farrington, chief engineer of Saga subsidiary Des Moines Radio Group, believes lowering the antenna position and dropping from 10 to eight bays will improve penetration within city limits.

“Downtown Des Moines has always been a challenge,” Farrington told the manufacturer. “There is a very low spot in the center downtown with a surrounding ridge. We believe the DCR-C is properly designed and positioned to actually strengthen our signal through Des Moines instead of somewhat skipping over it.”

Farrington said the tower was erected under old guidelines that didn’t consider icing and windload. “We have lightened the tower load considerably, both with the antenna weight and LED tower lights. Dielectric added radomes to the antenna design, which will protect it from future icing. We expect that the antenna and tower will each last its lifetime without incident.”

Dielectric’s broadband DCR-C antennas can be end-fed or center-fed, offer a power rating of 10kW per bay, and are available in stacked arrays up to 12 bays with an input rating to 40 kW.

Info: https://www.dielectric.com/antenna/dcr-c-hdr-c/

The post KOEZ(FM) De-Ices, Optimizes With Dielectric appeared first on Radio World.

Jeff Welton is Nautel’s regional sales manager for the central U.S., but that job title doesn’t capture his better-known role as “go-to” guy for technical tips, problem-solving and entertaining public presentations.

The industry has caught on. In 2018 he received the Society of Broadcast Engineers James C. Wulliman Educator of the Year Award. In 2019 the Association of Public Radio Engineers handed him the APRE Engineering Achievement Award. And in 2020 he received the NAB Radio Engineering Achievement Award.

This conversation is from the Radio World ebook “Mission-Critical: Maintaining Your Transmitter Site.”

RW: When we’re talking about maintaining a site for broadcast radio operators, you have a philosophy.

Welton: I’m a guy who works for a transmitter company, but it’s a good philosophy for almost any electronic installation. The three principle tenets are: Keep it cool, keep it clean and keep it well grounded.

RW: There are hundreds of things we could talk about to meet those goals. Where do you start?

Welton: My wife likes to say that I can spot a butterfly half a mile away and go chasing it off into the wilderness, totally losing my train of thought. It’s easier for me to pick a specific task and approach that first.

A FLIR infrared camera attachment lets Jeff take quick visual temperature readings.

I might walk into a facility and look at airflow direction and check to make sure that the air is going to the actual intake so the equipment that needs to be cooled. Or I might go in with a temperature meter — a Fluke infrared temperature sensor, or I’ve got one of the FLIR infrared camera attachments for my cellphone, it’s a wonderful tool — and do temperature readings to spot checks throughout the facility to see if there are any hotspots that may need additional air flow.

I may do another trip and just do a look-around and open a panel or two. If you’re seeing piles of dirt building up in your equipment, that’s a hint and a half that something needs to be done with air pressure and filtering. You look for the clues as you go. Obviously lightning protection and grounding are easiest. Stuff’s blowing up? You need to do more of it.

RW: Have you found that having fewer engineers coming into the business and fewer people who understand RF has made this a lot harder?

Welton: It does make it a little more challenging. With younger folks being so oriented toward IT and IP addresses, management [may forget] there’s still a big, heavy piece of equipment out there that generates heat and needs a lot of cooling and some maintenance.

We’ve been doing Tuesday webinars on maintenance and mentoring; you can find the archives on the Nautel website.

In addition to newer engineers who aren’t so intimately familiar with the big, heavy, glowing stuff, a lot of managers are working with lower budgets. When you’re running low on time and money, you’re not going to put as many resources towards maintenance — the oil changes, if you will.

Keep spares of any “mission critical” components. Managers, ask your engineer what they could not do without in an emergency.

But most people wouldn’t think of going 80,000 miles without changing the oil on their car, so why would you let the transmitter, which generates all the revenue or underwriting for your station, go for a full year without any maintenance whatsoever?

Especially in the year of COVID, where every day became a series of remote broadcasts as on-air hosts and DJs got moved to their living rooms, engineering gets stretched really thin, going from a couple of remote broadcasts a week to half a dozen a day. The resources for site maintenance and transmitter maintenance get stretched even thinner.

But you can’t leave the air filters in the transmitter until they’re covered with a half-inch of crud.

RW: Is that the most common problem you’re hearing about?

Welton: It’s a bunch of things. High winds get into ventilation systems because exhaust fans failed and weren’t putting the air out, so the wind blew the rain back into the transmitter.

I’ve had one that got snowed on. Several leaky roofs, several lightning-damaged systems as a result of lack of maintenance on the grounding system.

It’s more from a lack of attention or personal presence at the site to catch these things before they become an issue. Some of it may be purely financial. A new transmitter at a low-power level costs a couple of thousand dollars, an engineer costs tens of thousands, so do the math; it’s cheaper to replace the transmitter every so often. It’s a conscious decision in some cases. In other cases, “We got busy and forgot.”

RW: What is the recommended frequency of visiting a remote site for general inspection?

Welton: If I’ve got a site in a cornfield in Iowa, where I’m dealing with windblown dust on a regular basis, it needs to be visited once a month, especially in the summer. If I’ve got a sealed air-conditioned facility and a company was contracted to come in to clean the heat exchanger coils, I may visit that once a year.

Inspect towers by night, and by day, checking paint as well as lights. Know whom to notify if lights are out.

I’ve done Mississippi in cottonwood season; if you’re running a forced air system, you’re going to be down there every couple of weeks in July and August.

It will depend on your sites; but there needs to be a schedule and you can’t vary from it too much.

RW: Let’s imagine getting ready to go to a site for a monthly inspection. What’s in your kit?

Welton: The number one tool is the two-foot bolt cutters! I call it the skeleton key — for when a power company guy changed locks around my lock at a multi-access site.

Then my infrared camera, which I can attach to my cellphone. I can power it up as I walk in the building, and point it at the power panels and run it over the coax, looking for any hotspots before I’ve even unpacked my gear.

A caveat is that you need to have a non-reflective surface. Especially with laser-guided infrared cameras, reflective paint can skew the readings. (I’m Canadian so I like hockey tape, a cloth-based tape with matte finish that sticks really well; you can stick that on your electrical panel.)

After the temperature sensor, a small kit of hand tools with a knuckle-buster — a crescent wrench or adjustable wrench.

With stuff coming in from overseas, I’m going to want a combination of metric and Imperial tools.

A Leatherman or Gerber [multi-tool], at your preference, so you’ve got Phillips and flathead screwdrivers.

If I knew I’d be looking at air filters, I’d want a full set of air filters and belts for the blowers already at the transmitter site, or in my toolkit.

I carry a first aid kit, rather than putting electrical tape, an old paper towel or shop rag on our finger when we cut it. I am known for sticking my fingers in places I probably shouldn’t have stuck them.

RW: Ideally you would bring someone with you for safety reasons, but that’s probably not practical for a lot of stations.

Welton: The person doesn’t have to be RF-trained. Have somebody there, show them where the circuit breaker is in case you get connected across something you shouldn’t be connected across.

They need to be able to call 911, whether it’s a landline or a cell phone, depending on the service area. A lot of sites tend to be above cell coverage. But have a way to reach emergency services.

Beyond that, they’re there to make sure you don’t do anything foolish. Ideally somebody who doesn’t distract you from what you’re doing.

A lot of engineers take their significant other. Or grab the general manager. It’s good to have the GM go. I still run into GMs who don’t know where their site is.

RW: If time is limited and you’re doing a regular visit rather than responding to a specific problem, what are you checking?

Welton: Anything that handled air — whether it’s a filtered air intake, an open-air intake transmitter, air filters, heat exchanger coils on an air conditioning system. Check the cooling system, whatever it happened to be.

While reliable cooling is important, remember that an air conditioner that is oversized for your space may cause condensation and mold.

Listen for blower belts that might be starting to squeak or getting a little persnickety.

If it’s a generator site, I’d run the generator to make sure it started. On a regular basis, you also need to do a full load test and switch the whole site over to generator.

Check the foliage. Look for carcasses like snakes or other kind of vermin in and out of the building.

If it’s an AM, I’m glancing at the base insulator and taking a quick check on guy wire anchors. Just do a physical once-over. Walk around.

RW: You’ve probably seen things that made you shake your head.

Welton: A few. I walked into one site where I was convinced, by the end of the visit, that the engineer was trying to find a way to commit suicide. It was the scariest thing I’d ever seen. Open panels, bypassed interlocks, the tuning unit had overgrown to the point you were running a risk of tripping or falling just going into the antenna enclosure.

He had been unwell and somebody had been covering; but it was a collection of “This is not really good.”

For the most part, people take pride in their facilities. But there are times when you’ll see pieces of Schedule 90 conduit lying on the floor waiting for somebody to step on them, go for a ride, bang their head on a cabinet and lay there unconscious until somebody finds them.

The safety thing is critical. I don’t go into any site where I’m going to be touching electrical stuff without safety shoes on. It’s just a given. They’re a cheap investment and good insurance.

But if you look at the number of engineers found at transmitter sites, most of the time it wasn’t electricity that killed them. It was a trip and a fall and bang your head on something, or a heart attack, or an intruder.

We get too busy doing things. You put in a full day at the studio or in meetings, and then a transmitter goes down, and you spend the next 12 hours at the transmitter site. Sometimes you need to know when it’s time to pull the plug and say, “I’m too tired to do this coherently, and I’m a danger to myself and my equipment.”

RW: You’re not doing the station any good if you get yourself killed —

Welton: Right.

RW: Or yourself.

Welton: Well —

RW: Go ahead.

Welton: Somebody used to say, “Nobody ever died from a lack of rock ’n’ roll.”

RW: Are there common questions or service issues that come up?

Welton: I get a lot of questions on grounding. If you’re laying on a new site and want a good resource to get started, I refer people to the grounding for transmitter stations paper in the Resources tab of our website. Or Google the Motorola R56 standard. It goes into massive detail. If you follow that, you’re probably going to have the best grounded facility you can have.

Stock your site with emergency supplies like drinking water, paper towers, cleaning wipes and first aid kit, and if the site is remote, consider a survival kit. For ideas, see fivegallonideas.com/emergency-kit. (Getty Images)

One of the biggest questions I get is when somebody is putting a new piece of equipment into a facility that they’ve owned for decades and that has seen several transmitters, several engineers, and things have been laid on top of other things. Sometimes you need to assess whether it’s best to rip it all out and start again or whether you can add without creating loops and more challenges. Just take the time to sit down and assess where you are before you start.

The bulk of what we see in emergency situations? You’re not going to stop an “out-of-a-blue 200,000 amp lightning strike,” but the vast majority of [problems] could have been prevented by scheduled site visits and replacement cycles.

Everybody’s like, “Oh, the transmitter guy’s saying buy a new transmitter.” Well, I’m not saying buy a new transmitter this week. But when you have a piece of gear that’s 40 years old, you probably should be starting to think about the time to get a new one. And the best time is not when it’s got smoke coming out the top of it.

RW: We’ve all heard stories about an engineer finding a bullet hole in a pressurized line. That makes me think about the question of personal safety. Are a lot of clients going up there with a sidearm?

Welton: I’m a Canadian, which is an unarmed American with health insurance. I’m not really qualified to answer that. But I grew up in a farm country with guns, and when we went back in the woods, typically we had a weapon with us of some sort, whether it was for vermin control or because we had bears back there.

The Alaskan folks, you better have a sidearm going up there because running into a Kodiak bear is going to make for a bad day.

Sometimes it’s not the rural sites. Some of the urban locations I’ve been to — I was at a site in Houston where they had double razor wire fencing, and you had to go in through the outer gate, and the inner gate wouldn’t open until the outer gate was closed.

Again, it’s situational. I’ve got sites in Wyoming where I wouldn’t think anything of driving in there at one o’clock in the morning. You might see a bighorn sheep.

If you’re coming to a facility, you’re not familiar with, do it during the day until you get a feel for the area.

RW: There’s so much we could talk about — documentation or stocking the facility with emergency supplies.

Welton: Oh my goodness. Documentation. You said that and my eyes lit up.

So often, things are done with no hint of a note as to what was done or why. Document everything.

The older I get, the less inclined I am to remember why I did whatever I did 20 years ago. Also, for the value of the station — at some point somebody is going to look at this going, “What was he thinking?”

Welton suggests you label everything with serial numbers, service dates, what plugs go where, transmitter TPO etc. Shown is a Sanford RHINO 5200 Label Printer kit.

[At one time] you walked into a site, the first thing you did was sign into the logbook; and before you left, you filled in notes on everything you did. We need to get back to that.

With tools like Evernote, you can do audio transcription or attach photos, put in handwritten notes and have character recognition — tools like that on a cellphone are huge.

Now, doing a full spreadsheet, a list of every wire in the facility, starting from scratch, that’s going to take some time; but it takes a lot less to update it as you go than it does five years from now to have to create it from nothing.

So, document, document, document.

RW: Is there a section of the Nautel website you want people to be aware of?

Welton: When you go to the support page, there are links to “how-to” videos. If the service guys get regular calls on something they’ll create a short how-to video for our YouTube channel.

And there’s the latest software. Things we used to do with bags of resistors, capacitors and a sheet of instructions are done with software updates now, so you can find the latest software, read through the release notes to see if it applies to your situation. And my “Tips and Tricks” articles, the quarterly Waves newsletter that we put out.

RW: Final thoughts, Jeff.

Welton: The laptop is less a luxury item than a necessary tool. Obviously we pioneered this with the AUI back in the early 2000s, but more and more equipment will have features that you can access over an IP connection that you won’t necessarily have access to from the front panel.

For a contract engineer, you almost can’t do your job properly without a station or personal laptop or a tablet anymore. Some sort of electronic device that you can plug into an RJ-45 connection.

A Few More Tips

Here’s a further sampling from Welton’s “Tips and Tricks” presentations:

• Steel wool is an effective barrier to vermin when stuffed in gaps and cracks.
• Keep a full set of spare keys where they are easy to find. You will need them eventually.
• Change default passwords on all equipment.
• Use a VPN. There are free ones listed at techradar.com/vpn/best-free-vpn, but paid ones can be very affordable.
• Keep spare batteries handy and remember they have a shelf life. Change frequently on smoke detectors and any key components where batteries provide backup.
• Provide backups to your STL or other primary link. Is there a redundant method of control?
• Take advantage of the Alternative Broadcast Inspection Program to check yourself and to help keep your staff aware of relevant rules.

The post Keep Your RF Plant Cool, Clean and Well-Grounded appeared first on Radio World.

The Dec. 22 issue of Radio World features our Buyer’s Guide for antennas, RF support and power products. Buyer’s Guide features application stories like this one.

Here’s an example of how Broadcast Devices DPS-100D series RF power monitors are being used in an FM combiner installation.

“Pictured are two DPS-100D-3-1/8 RF power monitors at the input to a two-station FM combiner for WEZN and WEBE in Connecticut,” the company wrote.

“Both meters can report forward and reflected power, temperature and line pressure and also provide positive interlock control to either transmitter. Each transmission line and combiner module is protected against VSWR fault at the combiner input. This was an important feature for customer consideration.”

Cat-5 cables attached provide user monitor/remote control and provides electrical power via passive POE. A third meter not shown monitors the output of the combiner, and all three meters can be connected to an SWP-206D Supervisory chassis for complete monitor and control of the entire system.

BDI said all of its products support SNMP for integration to third-party remote controls and software. DPS-100D series power monitors are available in all EIA line sizes plus others like N, DIN and the popular 4-1/16-inch line size.

The DPS-100D series meter is suitable for monitoring one transmitter or a combined system, particularly for multi-station and digital radio transmission.

The photo was provided by BDI installer Xenirad Broadcast Engineering.

Info: www.broadcast-devices.com or call (914) 737-5032..

The post BDI RF Power Monitors at Work appeared first on Radio World.

The quality of professional broadcast transmitters available today is unquestionably high. That’s good news for radio engineers and managers who are in the market for a new one.

If someone hasn’t purchased a transmitter in a while, what should they know? What are the most important recent developments in how they are designed and manufactured?

In Radio World’s latest free ebook, we asked engineers, managers and our sponsoring manufacturers to comment. We asked how a smart buyer can differentiate among products; what features they value most; and what features or services they’d like to see added.

We asked about the impact of virtualization on transmitters, and what buyers should know about hybrid radio platforms that are coming into the marketplace. And we sought an update on technologies like MDCL and liquid cooling.

Learn from technology veterans Rob Bertrand, Andy Gunn, Mark Persons, Cris Alexander, Mike Cooney, Buc Fitch, Mike Martin, Greg Dahl and Don Stevenson, as well as from manufacturers WorldCast Systems, Broadcast Electronics, GatesAir, Nautel and Rohde & Schwarz.

 

 

The post Trends in Transmitters 2022 appeared first on Radio World.

The author is Chief Technology Officer of 2wcom. This article originally appeared in the ebook “What’s Next for Virtualization?”

Virtualizing software, especially using containers, makes it much easier to run the software on standard server hardware instead of dedicated broadcast devices.

It is a very good exercise to build platform independent software. It definitely was an exercise for us at 2wcom when we migrated our embedded software that was designed for a four-channel audio over IP codec hardware (IP-4c).

But after that was achieved, it helped us to realize a project where approximately 400 height units of equipment could be reduced to just six rack spaces of servers — including redundancy!

As we are diving deeper into the virtual rabbit hole named Kubernetes, it becomes clearer that virtualization was just the beginning.

Why do broadcasters need Kubernetes?

Kubernetes — “K8s” for short — is an open-source platform to manage containers, services, and workloads across multiple physical machines. It is the state-of-the-art platform to manage containers and is used by Netflix, Google, Spotify and many more.

But why do we need this in our broadcast world? — Because it helps a lot to fulfil some of our daily requirements: reliability, scalability, updates and monitoring.

Reliability

Kubernetes is self-healing! This is a major advantage over traditional systems where just backups and redundancy are defined.

Using K8s it is possible to evade entire machines in disaster scenarios. If for example one of your servers is crashing or has a disk pressure condition, the other servers (also known as worker nodes) can take over the service for the machine that is failing.

Even though this process might not be seamless, it is self-healing because K8s tries to maintain the same number of services and containerized apps that you have defined.

Together with a sophisticated redundancy scheme, the broadcaster can achieve seamless switching and zero downtime even while replacing entire machines in the cluster.

Scalability

Let’s say your CPU load requirements for one of your apps increases, because you want to transcode an additional audio/video stream for monitoring purposes.

2wcom’s MoIN orchestration overview hides Kubernetes complexity.

Without Kubernetes, the operator will likely have to install a new server and move some of the app instances from each running computer to this new server. This frees up resources on all machines, enabling the additional monitoring stream. Managing that process can be a high workload and requires extensive planning.

With Kubernetes this is as simple as installing a new server and letting it join the cluster with just one simple command:

kubeadm join [api-server-endpoint]

After that the operator just needs to push the new configuration and its resource requirements into the cluster (in Kubernetes called limits and requests).

Updates

Everybody working in IT knows that updates can be time-consuming and the cause of a lot of troubles. Kubernetes really helps to deploy software updates because it lets you define strategies to do that.

One strategy could be to update 25% of your containerized apps at the same time and roll that update through the cluster. This gives the user time to react and roll back the update in problematic situations.

Additionally, the update can therefore maintain seamless redundancy with no manual switching required. The maximum “surge” that defines how many of your app instances are updated at the same time can be defined by an admin who is deploying the update.

Another update strategy could be to push a new version into your cluster and let the individuals who are controlling and using your software decide when to apply the new version. In our case this was a very nice feature.

An administrator can push the new software version into the cluster whenever it is approved. The operator who configures only his audio streams can simply reboot an instance at any time when it is suitable. The reboot will automatically apply the updated version while keeping the same config.

Monitoring

Operating a huge cluster instead of hundreds of individual hardware boxes can be fearsome. It all relies on a couple of machines instead of hundreds. But Kubernetes can seriously increase the speed of a root-cause analysis and fixing of a bug instead of making it more complex as one might think.

Screenshot of a MoIN Grafana dashboard that monitors audio errors and internal buffer values.

A great advantage is that standardized mechanisms can be used to obtain logs from different parts of the software. These logs can even be used by an indexing search engine (for example Elasticsearch), which lets you search and correlate the log files many times faster. Therefore, one can find common failures across multiple instances easier.

Let’s say you need to find a reason why SNMP connections break down. In that case you could search through all log files of all software parts for an entry of “snmp”. The result will quickly show you the number of found entries and you can explore the relationship and chronological sequence of the errors.

Setting up such systems is time-consuming, but with a Kubernetes installation the vendor can also provide the monitoring stack, like we do it at 2wcom. We are providing Elesticsearch, Kibana and Grafana as a very sophisticated monitoring stack that integrates well with our software.

Conclusion

Although the shift towards virtualization can be scary because it is such a different environment than physical devices, it provides some valuable improvements and streamlined processes to operate a high-quality broadcast system.

The streamlined processes provided by Kubernetes reduce the maintenance overhead of a broadcast system, which leads to lower operational expenses or frees up resources to do what really matters: delivering high-quality broadcast content.

The post Kubernetes Brings Broadcast to Next Level appeared first on Radio World.

As a treat to help get your 2022 off to a good start, I thought it might be fun to spend a Saturday afternoon at a hardware store to identify items useful for any radio engineer.

This year’s visit was to Ace Hardware, but these or similar items can be found at Lowe’s, Home Depot or online. I have tried to stay under $25 to $35.

Let’s start with an economical tool box by Stanley. There are lots of varieties at different price points. The one pictured — a 19-inch, one-latch model — has two snap-lid hinged compartments that will hold your rack screws, washers and other frequently used small hardware. No more removing tools to dig out a little box of hardware at the bottom!

The deep toolbox also has enough room for something anyone over 40 needs to have: AirFlow gel-filled kneepads, shown in Fig. 2. With these gel cushions, made by CLC Work Gear, you could crawl on your knees under consoles all day long. (My alternative before discovering these was bubble wrap!)

Fig. 1: Start with a heavy-duty Stanley toolbox; Fig. 2: The toolbox is big enough to store gel-filled kneepads like these from CLC Work Gear; Fig. 3: A small inspection mirror gets into tight spaces; Fig. 4: This probe set from General is ideal for troubleshooting components.

A small inspection mirror like the one shown in Fig. 3, made by General, will come in handy, especially if you can’t squeeze your smartphone into a tight space to take pictures.

However, if you do a lot of inspections, search online for a smartphone endoscope. The scope has a lighted lens on the end of a three-foot cable that plugs into your smartphone. The camera image is displayed on the phone, and the best part is that it’s under $20.

Speaking of medical/dental instruments, the General probe set shown in Fig. 4 is ideal if you troubleshoot and repair to the component level. Another must-have for your kit is a multi-tool like the one pictured in Fig. 5. This Stanley 12-in-one multi-tool can really come in handy thanks to its many functions.

Some other products that can find uses around the transmitter site are Scott Rags in a Box work towels and GoJo Natural Orange Pumice Hand Cleaner (Figs. 6 and 7). And show me an engineer who doesn’t want a can of WD-40 lubricant around, as pictured in Fig. 8. Don’t forget to spray your transmitter site padlocks to guard against frozen lock mechanisms.

Fig: 5: A Stanley 12-in-one multi-tool takes the place of multiple tools; Fig. 6: More absorbent than paper towels are Scott Rags in a Box; Fig. 7: GoJo Natural Orange Pumice Hand Cleaner really cuts the grease after you work on dirty components; Fig; 8: WD-40 keeps locks lubricated and guards against freezing. Squirt in the keyhole and where the hasp locks, then work the mechanism to coat internal parts.

Fig. 9 certainly won’t fit in that toolbox, but the 5-gallon diesel fuel container by Midwest Can may come in handy if your generator runs low on fuel and access for a fuel truck is blocked. Yes, you’ll be making multiple trips to refill the tank; but that’s better than being off the air.

Speaking of the generator, diesel block heaters are welcome signs for rodents seeking a warm home in the winter. Rodents can’t squeeze through half-inch hardware cloth like the Garden Zone product shown in Fig. 10. Make sure all your vents and ventilation openings are sealed. This size screening should deter rodents while not obstructing air flow.

Fig. 9: A 5-gallon diesel fuel container is great insurance for your generator; Fig. 10: Half-inch-square hardware cloth keeps vermin out of generators or air vents; Fig. 11: For really big rat problems, supersize the glue trap!; Fig. 12: Stay warm in unheated buildings with this small but efficient Honeywell ceramic heater.

And while we’re on the subject of rodents and snakes, we’ve all seen (and maybe used) the little glue traps for mice. The JT Eaton Stick-Em Pro Series comes in dimensions suitable even for king-size city rats and large snakes; the “Elephant Size” ones I saw in the store were a foot square.

As we wrap up the tour, consider investing in a ceramic heater — such as the Honeywell Heat Bud pictured in Fig. 12 — as well as an LED trouble lamp, which gives plenty of light. Plus the bulb doesn’t break when it’s dropped.

John Bisset, CPBE. has more than 50 years in broadcasting and is in his 31st year writing Workbench. He handles western U.S. radio sales for the Telos Alliance and is a past recipient of the SBE’s Educator of the Year Award.

What other useful items should be on an engineer’s New Year shopping list? Email johnpbisset@gmail.com.

The post Gifts to Yourself to Start the New Year Right appeared first on Radio World.

This week we’re featuring highlights of Radio World’s 2021 ebooks.

The online WorldDAB Automotive 2021 Conference in June provided looks at various aspects of digital radio in the car environment. Here’s a sampling of presentations, all viewable on WorldDAB’s YouTube channel. This story originally appeared in the ebook “Trends in Digital Radio 2021.”

Extra displays

“Co-driver” displays — those targeting the front-seat passenger — are among “mega trends” dominating the European automotive industry. Another is Android Automotive.

Martin Koch of Volkswagen CARIAD said the arrival of “co-driver” displays will increase the demand for high-quality visual content in the dash. This image shows a passenger display on the MBUX Hyperscreen, introduced by Mercedes-Benz in January.
MBUX Hyperscreen: Co-driver display

Radio has to act fast to respond to both of these trends, said Martin Koch, head of development entertainment & car functions at Volkswagen CARIAD, during his talk “What’s Driving the Automotive Industry?”

He said such displays are turning up now in high-end cars, and their arrival is spurring a demand for high-quality visuals, which can include sophisticated slideshows, full-motion videos, games and multimedia tied to “browsing through the latest releases of your favorite artists,” he said.

Unfortunately, only about only 20 radio stations in the world currently support online slideshows, he said.

“This is not enough to really talk about providing a brilliant visual experience to drivers and co-drivers. So my recommendation for the broadcast industry is to make use of the technologies we already have in place and to develop concepts for attractive visual content to accompany their audio programming,” Koch said.

“And it’s not only the station logo or weather information: It can be so much more that attracts your customers and keeps them listening to your station and not switching to another media source or other content.”

Further, the presence of Android Automotive apps into the car will compete with DAB+ in the space and could undermine broadcast radio if these apps do not incorporate DAB+ features. Koch’s advice is for radio stations to build their own apps on the Android Automotive platform and “provide them, through the relevant app stores, to the dash of the car.”

Android Automotive

During the presentation “Global, Open and Available: A Broadcaster-Led Initiative for Radio on Android Automotive,” Joe D’Angelo, Xperi’s senior vice president of broadcast radio, asked Guru Nagarajan, Google’s engineering manager with Android Automotive OS, about the progress being made to bring that OS into the world’s cars, and about broadcast radio’s place in it.

“The first cars with the Android Automotive OS were launched this past year, and they were on Volvo Polestars,” Nagarajan said. “We’ve been very pleased with the user feedback and the feedback that we’re getting from our partners.”

Through efforts like the one led by NAB PILOT, radio broadcasters are working to be present in Android Automotive, in order to preserve their traditional prominence in car/truck entertainment systems. Fortunately, Google seems enthusiastic about radio’s place in this new app-driven environment.

“We continue to be very excited about broadcast radio,” said Nagarajan. “We think we can bring in a lot more capabilities for broadcasters and provide a platform that allows partners like Xperi and others to innovate and bring in the best from a user experience perspective.”

He added that Google is developing an Android Automotive application programming interface, or API, that will allow radio stations to localize their content on the app, and to generally enhance the platform to work better for broadcast radio.

“We would like to continue working with the broadcast ecosystem in both developing as well as innovating in the [Android Automotive] platform, and helping you all accelerate what you are really good at, which is providing the best of services to our users,” Nagarajan said.

France moves ahead

At present, about 30% of France’s population can receive DAB+ over the air. By the end of 2022, that should hit 50%, and roadway multiplexes will play a big part in helping them listen in the car.

These points were raised by Jean-Marc Dubreuil during his presentation “France: Automakers and Broadcasters’ Preparations for National DAB+.”

Dubreuil is WorldDAB’s manager for France and a member of the French joint broadcaster/vehicle manufacturer working group.

According to Dubreuil, 25 of France’s national radios services will be available in DAB+ on the country’s roadways by this fall. This is no small feat: “That means almost 12,000 kilometers of highways and a little more than 10,000 kilometers of main roads to cover,” he said. “It’s quite a lot.”

While this work is proceeding, challenges remain in coordinating the DAB+ rollout between broadcasters and car manufacturers. Specifically, carmakers and radios don’t necessarily understand their respective business model, said Dubreuil, nor the need to ensure that the in-car digital radios are kept up to date.

For instance, he said, “Radio stations were surprised not to see their logos on the dashboard of cars because the logos are sometimes burned into the receiver and often obsolete — because those radios were designed in 2014,” he said.

“Since then, life has moved on. The logo has changed.”

Meanwhile, the complexity of the French radio landscape, with its more than 1,000 FM stations and “a few hundreds of DAB+ services,” can make coordinating seamless coverage difficult. This is why it is important for all players in the French DAB+ ecosystem to work together, said Dubreuil.

Radioplayer hybrid app

WorldDAB has produced a set of User Experience guidelines for automotive manufacturers and broadcasters to help them offer provide the best digital radio interfaces for motorists.

An image from Radioplayer’s presentation of its hybrid radio app that combines DAB+ and FM broadcast radio with online streams in the Android Automotive Operating System. It was developed with technology supplier Panasonic Automotive Systems Europe. Radioplayer said the app “has a single, multi-platform station list that hides the platform from the user and allows them to select a radio station from the strongest available signal, prioritizing DAB+, then FM, followed by streaming, and automatically switching between platforms if the car moves out of coverage.”

In the presentation “From Principle to Product: Bringing the WorldDAB UX Guidelines to Life in a Hybrid Radio App,” Radioplayer’s Caroline Grazé and Laurence Harrison described using these guidelines to guide the design and development of their hybrid radio app for the Android Automotive platform.

Grazé is managing director of Radioplayer Germany, Harrison is director of automotive partnerships at Radioplayer Worldwide.

“One of our main aims in building the app was to learn about Android Automotive and work with Google and others to improve the standard radio experience and make sure that it becomes hybrid,” said Harrison. When thinking about the user interface “the foundation of our design principles were taken from the WorldDAB UX guidelines.”

Ease of use is fundamental to the Radioplayer hybrid app design, Grazé said.

“The goal that is the most important one for the listener is ‘What am I listening to?’ I need to know. (And) I need to navigate simply through the UX.’” The app’s tuning database also has to be able to decode listener voice commands, including requests for stations that don’t use official call signs.

At an early stage in the user interface design, Radioplayer tested it on the road with consumers. By doing so, “you learn a huge amount about how intuitive the design is and also about the different positions of certain icons, and the features that people really value,” said Harrison.

The Radioplayer app now provides a “great hybrid radio experience,” he added, and “is being made available to car manufacturers to use on their Android Automotive platforms.”

Swiss DAB+ Retrofits

Switzerland’s plan to turn off FM by 2023 is driving DAB+ car radio retrofits, according to the presentation “Case Study: Switzerland, Getting Ready for FM Switchoff With the Auto Supply Chain.”

Speaking with host Ernst Werder of Weer GmbH, Jeremy Arztmann of Exclusive Car HiFi and Hans-Peter Saar of Robert Bosch AG described strong consumer demand for DAB+ adaptors to work with existing analog radios, as well as full DAB+ system replacements.

To ensure that Swiss motorists are satisfied with their DAB+ radio upgrades, Executive Car HiFi road-tests products before selling them to consumers.

“Since most larger auto importers are our customers, it’s usually very easy for us to get our hands on vehicles where we can test the products in order to ensure that the product is good and fine,” said Arztmann.

“Our company has been focusing on DAB+ for quite a long time, and we offer workshops with our partners so that all this technical know-how has grown continuously.”

Robert Bosch AG has been working with aftermarket partners such as Executive Car HiFi to meet the demand for DAB+ radio retrofits, said Hans-Peter Saar. In Switzerland, this market is geared towards higher-quality vehicles whose drivers don’t want to see adaptors and other devices detracting from original interior decors.

“The end user wants to use the OEM radio like he’s used to, and he wants his buttons on the steering wheel to work as he is used to,” said Saar. At the same time, they want to see song titles and other graphics, “on their regular radio screen and not on the small adaptor screen.”

Finally, some DAB+ equipment upgrades have been tailored for tasteful installations in older vehicles, including those that have achieved “vintage” status, built in 1991 or earlier.

“We have developed a solution where you can mount or install the DAB+ radio in a way that the vehicle doesn’t lose its vintage status or its historic status,” said Arztmann.

Localization and personalization

In the final WorldDAB Automotive 2021 presentation, “In-Vehicle Localization and Personalization: What They Mean for Radio Today and in the Future,” Swedish Radio Head of Digital Partnerships Tomas Granryd spoke with Francis Goffin, special adviser to the CEO of RTBF in Belgium, and Chris Ambrozic, TiVo’s VP of discovery, about using DAB+ to localize and personalize content to improve listener experiences, and to keep them listening longer.

In Belgium, RTBF, the country’s French-speaking public radio-TV broadcaster, is using DAB+’s localization capability to provide enhanced program choice to its VivaCité regional radio audiences.

For instance, this capability allows RTBF to provide seven different radio feeds, historically carried on seven separate FM stations, over four DAB+ regional multiplexes.

“Thanks to DAB+, listeners can choose to listen two different regional morning programs,” said Goffin. “This is impossible in FM, where they can only listen to the morning show that is available in their region.”

Localization is also allowing VivaCité to give listeners choices between live sports and non-sports programming over DAB+, which is not possible on FM.

RTBF and the private radio networks in the Belgian French-speaking digital radio alliance maRadio.be are looking at offering personalized radio programs to listeners using IP feeds triggered by inaudible tones in over-the-air DAB+ broadcasts. This platform could include “addressable radio advertising, just like the addressable TV advertising that started in Belgium last year,” Goffin said. It would do so using some kind of DAB+/IP hybrid platform that has yet to be developed by a new working group of RadioDNS, the hybrid radio open standard proponent.

TiVo’s Chris Ambrozic spoke about applying the TiVo TV “carousel” model of program choice, using titled images of actual TV programs, to in-car DAB+ to boost listener engagement and loyalty.

Picking up on the personalization thread, TiVo’s Chris Ambrozic spoke about applying the TiVo TV “carousel” model of program choice, using titled images of actual TV programs, to in-car DAB+ to boost listener engagement and loyalty.

“When personalization is utilized, we see very significant changes in viewer behavior,” Ambrozic said. “We see people watching about 25% more content on the video side. We see people churning away from their suppliers of content to the tune of about three times less.”

TiVo hopes to achieve the same results on DAB+ vehicle displays. “We’re taking that concept over into the car and to deliver a series of carousels, algorithmically driven with an understanding of what the person enjoys listening to,” he said.

A DAB+ content provider who takes this approach to in-car listening “is going to be able to monetize and deliver the right type of experience, not only from what to listen to, but also from an advertisement point of view.”

The post Passenger Displays, Apps and FM Switchoffs appeared first on Radio World.

The PreSonus PD-70 dynamic broadcast microphone is specifically designed for capturing the human voice and improving intelligibility, even in acoustically unfriendly spaces. The cardioid pickup pattern reduces the amount of extraneous and unwanted background noise entering the mic’s sides and back while focusing on voices in front of it—just what you want for podcasts or radio broadcasts.

The all-metal PD-70 is an end-address dynamic mic with an integrated (yet removable) foam windscreen and a simple, compact mechanical design that will fit and look great on the smallest of desktops.

PreSonus PD-70 Dynamic Broadcast Microphone

You can thread the mount onto a standard mic desk stand or boom, and connect a cable to any preamp using its gold-pinned XLR output jack. It comes ready to use with a gimbal-style integrated yoke mount that allows tilting the mic up or down to aim it precisely. Once in position, it has a single knob to lock it down. It does not get any simpler than this!

I tried the PD-70 in my studio as a vocal mic feeding a Retro Instruments 500PRE preamp; I also put it up for a Zoom meeting into an SSL 2 USB Audio Interface.

[Check Out More Products at Radio World’s Products Section]

The PD-70 has a frequency response of 20 Hz to 20 kHz with a shelving boost starting at about 1.5 kHz and extending out to 10. I can hear that little boost in the midrange — especially on small computer speakers — and it does impart a certain gravitas and authority to speaking voices. I found it helpful for somber-sounding online speakers, as long as they stayed close in front of the mic to maintain a fat-sounding “lift in the bass” due to the cardioid proximity effect.

At the same time, the PD-70 suppresses p-pops better than some other dynamic mic I have, with or without a pop filter. Removing the foam windscreen, you can see a resemblance to the internal mechanical design of the Shure SM7B dynamic mic.

Paired with the 500PRE (tube-based preamp), the sound was rich and noise-free, and I would have no issues using the PD-70 for a loud lead vocal track — provided the singer could stay aimed at the mic. The SSL 2 USB preamp worked well except for very quiet singing, when that unit starts to run out of available mic gain.

The PreSonus PD-70 wins as a workhorse of a mic that will improve the sound of anyone doing online podcasting, internet radio or hosting/participating in Zoom meetings.

This article originally appeared in our sister publication Mix. Radio World invites both users and suppliers to tell us about recently installed new or notable equipment. Email radioworld@futurenet.com.

The post PreSonus PD-70 Designed to Improve Intelligibility appeared first on Radio World.

For a bit of holiday fun, Ken Deutsch, former jingle magnate and longtime Radio World contributor, has unleashed the latest in his series of airchecks of “Wonderful WORM,” a 1960s radio station that exists in his head.

Featuring the misadventures of DJ Johnny Lizard, the parody series is available for your listening pleasure.

Get ready for radio news item groaners like “A giant fly was seen attacking the Pomona Police Station. This morning the SWAT team had to be called in.” But it’s also an audio treat for those who loved the sound of AM radio in the 1950s and ’60s. Sound effects and audio drop-ins were sourced from films and records in his collection, and custom jingles for Wonderful WORM were again recorded.

Deutsch, aka Ken R., is former owner of recording studio in Ohio that for 20 years produced “re-sings” of PAMS jingles. He grew up a self-described jingle freak who started collecting jingles in 1964 and later lucked into the purchase of more than 3,000 reels of PAMS jingles, including the instrumental backing tracks.

The website JingleSamplers.com has more on that history and numerous jingle samplers.

 

The post Wonderful WORM Is Back appeared first on Radio World.

For streamers the big concern is latency. You may ask what is it? Simply defined, latency is the time it takes to get from here to there.

Now to put it in the context for streaming, it is the time content leaves the source and is played out by the intended audience. For sports, low latency is desirable and necessary. Nobody wants someone knowing about a sports play before anybody else, even if we are talking minutes.

An example of very bad latency was in the 1973 film The Sting. The gambling house knew the results of the horse race before the bets were placed. Yes, that is not good nor desirable.

For streamers, latency develops as the content passes through devices on its transport to the audience.

Let’s consider a simple audio file. First, it is played out, then the audio is processed, and next it is encoded with metadata. Then the file is sent through the network switches and routers out to the internet.

Depending on your connection, the packets may make some additional stops before reaching the CDN, which then transcodes the packets and streams them to the audience’s network connection and finally to your audience.

Yes, this takes time!

[Related: “Loudness Recommendations Honored by AES”]

Because of this time, the audience can hear a delay. It is noticeable, especially if they are comparing the stream to over-the-air content. The trick is to get the amount of latency down to the point of acceptance.

To try to lessen the inherent delay, you can use the Softvelum Low Delay Protocol (SLDP). This is a last-mile delivery protocol.

Whether you are encoding an RTMP, SRT, RTSP, NDI, MPEG-TS, HLS, Icecast or SHOUTcast stream, the SLDP protocol at the player side will pass the content to the audience with sub-second delay. SLDP is supported by modern browsers that support Media Source Extensions (MSE).

SLDP is proprietary and must be decoded with a free HTML5 player and dedicated mobile application. A custom mobile app experience can be created by subscribing to a mobile specific SDK.

The SLDP protocol also allows for synchronized playback across devices, ensuring that all members of your audience are viewing the same media at the same time. This can be incredibly important for second screen usage at live events or for any kind of real-time broadcast that both low-latency and consistent experience are important.

With sports as a key example again, imagine two viewers in a room together watching on their own devices, both getting 1- to 2-second delays, but with one about half a second ahead of the other. Each exciting play or devastating mistake spoiled for the other viewer as the quicker of the two reacts first.

Synchronized low-latency not only gives your audience a great experience compared to traditional over-the-air broadcast, but also ensures you maintain the shared experience that would otherwise be lost when viewing streamed content.

Another way is to use WebRTC, which stands for Web-based Real Time Communications. WebRTC operates very similarly to SLDP, but the issue with this Google-developed open-source solution is there is not a standard implementation. Different services are not deploying it in the same way.

WebRTC is fast. A real-time latency could be below 500 milliseconds. WebRTC is also supported by many browsers and is native to iOS.

According to StreamGuys the advantage of SLDP is the standardization of deployment.

According to Eduardo Martinez, director of technology for StreamGuys, “When you use a purpose-built protocol for ultra-low latency streaming you can significantly cut down on the delay inherent in traditional segmented streaming protocols.”

When it comes to streaming of events, mainly sports and breaking news, the audience will not tolerate high latency. In this world of multiple streams, the streamer does not want to be slower than an over-the-air broadcast. To quote Tom Petty, the waiting is the hardest part.

The author is a consultant who has held technical broadcast and streaming positions for companies like Entercom and CBS Radio. He is co-chair of the AES Technical Committee for Broadcast and Online Delivery and chair of the Metadata Usage Working Group of the National Radio Systems Committee. Contact him at dkbialik@erols.com or 845-634-6595. His commentaries are a recurring feature at radioworld.com.

The post Tips to Help Diminish Streaming Delay appeared first on Radio World.

This week Radio World is featuring highlights of our 2021 ebooks. This article appeared in “Mission-Critical: Maintaining Your Transmitter Site.”

One hundred years is an impressive lifespan not just for any human but for any American industry.

The modern radio business has crossed that demarcation and, for us broadcast technocrats, it’s a moment of self-celebration, as our industry remains dependent on the technology that we supply.

In its first years, radio was so novel that it needed an understandable simile. Radio was like a newspaper without paper. It was like a town crier, delivering an abundance of useful information, interesting voices and sounds through the ether to everyone, everywhere.

To continue the romantic analogy, the voice of that crier is our transmitter, arguably the most important element in any station’s success story.

Like a lover, we want our transmitter to be reliable, durable and faithful.

But little useful or good happens in life by accident. Achieving high performance and trouble-free transmitter operation takes a thoughtful, attentive design and maintenance program.

Good engineering practice (GEP) in any discipline usually is a function of refinement. A century allows a long journey of refinement, inculcating a plethora of detailed methodology and techniques, culminating in a distilled corpus of best practices.

[Check Out More of Radio World’s Ebooks Here]

Let’s start at the beginning.

What does a transmitter do but take electric power and turn it into radio? Like baking a cake, bad components usually make a bad cake. Similarly, poor electric power makes for bad transmissions.

Let’s discuss power and best practices to achieve the goal of “perfect” power utilization.

Power to any broadcast installation can be divided into two universes, hard and soft. The former is supplied by a commercial utility, usually regulated by the government; the latter is generated locally and can come from a variety of sources.

Hard power

Gather and have ready access to all details concerning your electric supply. If power is lost, having information at hand will help you get your power back much more quickly.

The list includes direct phone numbers to the trouble section of your utility; your account numbers; whose name is on the account; the exact service address; your meter number; the format of your supply (e.g. 480 volt 3 phase in wye); who else might be on your supply (e.g. the two cell operators on your tower) and on common poles and transformer; the pole numbers; your priority position for restoration; the phone numbers of other site users so you can coordinate your complaints and requests, etc.

• Be aware of your power system. Inspect and review it routinely. Remove temporary connections and attachments soonest. Address points of failure and eliminate potential safety issues.
• One of my confreres tells a story of arriving to work on a hop system at a large common tower site. Looking around for a place to plug in his drill, he was told not to unplug a particular extension cord that ran from his hop equipment closet, out the door, through the hallway, into another station’s transmitter room, where STL equipment was plugged into this line.
• Seems they’d run out of outlets and this was the most convenient location to plug in — a point of failure for both users.
• Maintain your power system. Since your transmitter system will be on hard power 99.9% of the time, check at least annually for hot spots, especially around suspect locations including terminations in circuit breaker panels, on the CBs as well as on neutral and ground bar screws.
• Review grounding. Whenever you are inside your electrical system, review the wiring arrangements and take amprobe measurements such that the separation of neutral and ground paths are maintained.
• Our mantra is that current should flow in the neutral, no current should be flowing on the grounding paths. The last place where ground and neutral are common is most often in the main breaker panel or main metering where neutral is firmly bonded to (earth) ground. After this selected point, they must be kept separate.
• At least three ground systems should exist at every transmitter site, for power, signal and lightning grounding; we want them to function as separate entities. If these systems become intertwined, current flow becomes unpredictable and can be downright dangerous. Interconnections of these grounding systems, if necessary, should always be at just one point.
• Make certain in original installation as well as retrofits that your conductor and fusing sizes are appropriate. Remember that the National Electric Code addresses minimums to achieve a threshold of safety. More capacious systems are encouraged to accommodate your continuous and critical needs.
• Surge and lighting protection. Utility power is perfect as it leaves the power plant. It’s the haphazard distribution and ugly user loads in the real world that make for the noise, sag, phase imbalance and unattractive sine wave that we have to live with or correct.

Reactive loads (usually operated by others) on your supply system, especially if nearby, can produce horrible surges and sags that can be highly destructive to your plant.

Protection from these power energy extremes, like most electrical system design, is progressive: You have a main circuit breaker to protect the overall system, a panel board main circuit breaker to protect appliance branches fed from that panel, individual circuit breakers for each significant device, and then usually small current fuses on each piece of gear.

The best surge protection is similar in design, where a main surge suppressor to protect the site system is followed by panel board units and internally on critical individual items. Any piece of powered gear in the main stream of your signal should have surge protection.

Soft power

Your standby power source uses the same distribution system discussed in hard power, so we’ll focus on the actual power source.

Choose your source of supply carefully. Remember that a soft supply system may be overwhelmed by factors that a commercial electric supply, with its copious energy reservoir, can manage easily.

The issues most often overlooked are power factor, waveform and load variation.

Power factor usually is expressed as the ratio difference between the apparent power passing through the consumption system and the actual power consumed. The cause of the peak power which appears to be consumed is reactive components in the system.

An expressed number of 0.9 would let us know that about 10% more power appears to be consumed that actually is consumed for the operation of your transmitter site or some specific device like the transmitter.

This power is not lost, it is essentially returned to the generator. In commercial power, it goes all the way back to the hydro or nuclear plant’s generator that made the power; in your station, running on soft/standby power, this “reactive power” is returned to your UPS supply or engine-driven generator.

Although not consumed, this power still needs to be generated.

The prevalence of switching power supplies makes waveform purity a critical item.

A tremendous variation in this quality exists among soft power sources, and manufacturers now carefully annotate this as a separate performance specification. If it is not listed on the generator or UPS supply sheet, insist on having this data. Many UPS and switching supplies will not operate with dirty waveforms.

Just as critical to the selection process is the character of the load’s consumption.

Let’s take a simple example. Many years ago on a due diligence trip, we got to the transmitter at night, and in the course of the inspection we asked to see this station’s operation on their generator. With a 250 watt night signal, the notable varying load of two sets of beacon flashing caused the generator to gun every time the 2400 watts of beacon bulbs were brought online.

Although the generator ostensibly could handle the power demand on a nameplate basis, the varying load caused a hysteresis effect as the engine was stimulated to produce more horsepower to then produce more current and still maintain voltage.

Obviously this rhythmic up and down was not helpful to the plant’s overall performance and ultimately changes were made.

Today many FM stations still have Class A transmitter loads, where the transmitter draws essentially the same current all the time. However, many stations use transmitters (an abundance of AMs particularly) with amplifier classes going to digital Class D (or even E) where the power demand can go from nothing to max at a megahertz rate with even that extreme pulsing varying a time basis.

Between the factors delineated above, you should identify the capacity for handling power factor and complex loads carefully.

Broadcast operations are specialized. Even with the best outside professional help, sample the experiences of your peers and equipment manufacturer before you design, purchase or install any significant soft system.

Exercise and test your soft/standby system regularly on a disciplined periodic basis. As we learned from the space program, if you want the rocket to work perfectly one time, you need to design and build it to work a thousand times.

An important key to this is regular exercise under the total loads that will need to be supported if you lose commercial power.

At least annually but better quarterly, shut off commercial power and observe the entire procedure. How long does it take for the control system to recognize the power loss, for the engine to come to speed and acceptable voltage, for the station to stabilize and go through the steps to bring the station back on?

Support systems are an equally important part of the operation. Observe and inspect them at the same time. Do the louvers open properly and fully? Does the day tank pump bring up fuel correctly?

A long run of at least an hour in hot weather is appropriate to see if cooling and lubrication are functioning correctly.

Needless to say, but we’ll say it: Change oil and coolants on an annual basis. Test or change gasoline or oil annually.

A generator that does not run when needed is a monumental capital waste.

UPS batteries have a finite life.

Sealed, wet dielectric batteries have an optimal charging pattern. Because of the limited charge and deep discharge demands, they usually have a limited life.

To ensure reliability, there is no substitute for an actual deep discharge test where the batteries are taken to the voltage point where the UPS disconnects. Note the time time this takes under the expected loads and compare with the previous exercise. The battery and/or the UPS manufacturer should be able to supply performance data that will guide you in creating your replacement plan.

Change all batteries in an UPS at the same time.

Clearly mark all components.

The National Electric Code requires that all commercial outlets be identified as to panel and overcurrent device (fuse or circuit breaker).

In addition, clearly identify your various system components and their source of supply, especially when you make changes.

A quick if imperfect example of this came during the fast change-out of an FM transmitter. The main supply breaker (marked “FM transmitter”) was turned off and conductors in the conduit were being pulled out. For a few seconds, a scary shower of sparks flew out of the ceiling.

The first transmitter in the space had a separate circuit for its crystal heaters. This circuit was never removed and never turned off as it was not marked in the panel or rig.

Luckily no one was hurt.

Charles S. Fitch, P.E., is a longtime contributor whose articles about engineering concepts, DIY projects and radio history are a popular recurring feature in Radio World.

The post Your Power, Your Transmitter and You appeared first on Radio World.

The Dec. 22 issue of Radio World features our Buyer’s Guide for antennas, RF support and power products. Buyer’s Guide features application stories like this one.

Information Station Specialists says its newly available HPR.0990 Antenna is a temporary, auxiliary or emergency solution for AM broadcasters that need an affordable means of remaining on the air when a situation demands it. That might be because of loss of primary site, tower rebuild/failure, maintenance of translator authorization or a tower site move.

Pictured is the antenna in temporary use by KNBI(AM) in Monterey, Calif.

The station, which is branded as KMBY, was silenced due to reduced revenues during COVID and was donated to a nonprofit that then was unable to renegotiate the tower lease. So a temporary antenna solution was required. ISS says the 1240 signal is back on air from a commercial building’s roof in Monterey.

The HPR.0990 can transmit with up to 270 watts (carrier) with no ATU requirement due to its 50-ohm resonant design. A generous loading coil and capacitive top hat allow the antenna to be shorter (32 feet) and more efficient than antennas of similar design.

Its efficiency rating is up to 170 mV/m/km/1 kW. A 25-foot radius ground plane provides the required counterpoise. The antenna is tunable across a frequency range.

Local engineer and installer Mark Carbonaro said the antenna is relatively lightweight at 30 pounds and has durable, stainless steel assembly parts, important in a marine environment. The anodized finish is designed for harsh conditions. The sustained wind rating exceeds 100 mph. KNBI’s antenna survived 65-mph gusts from recent coastal windstorms.

The antenna is in stock at common frequencies for fast shipment. ISS said Carbonaro offers to answer questions about the antenna at markcarbonaro1@gmail.com.

Info: theRADIOsource.com, 616-772-2300 ext. 102, or email bill@theradiosource.com.

The post ISS HPR.0990 AM Antenna Does a Quick Stand-In appeared first on Radio World.

Here’s your 2022 Radio World Source Book & Directory.

Each year the Radio World editorial team compiles a directory of companies that offer products and services to support radio broadcast professionals.

Here is your 2022 edition. It includes an alphabetical company listing as well as a cross-index by types of product or service. The companies you’ll find here are your source for audio processors, remote control systems, transmitters, microphones, air lights, contracting, integration services, the list goes on.

We hope you find this a helpful resource. Thank you for being a Radio World reader!

Read it here.

The post Radio World’s 2022 Source Book & Directory appeared first on Radio World.

The Dec. 22 issue of Radio World features our Buyer’s Guide for antennas, RF support and power products. Buyer’s Guide features application stories like this one.

Northern Community Radio is an independent non-profit organization that operates two full-service FM radio stations and one translator that serve north central and northeastern Minnesota.

NCR built a full-service Class C2 FM station, KBXE, licensed to Bagley, Minn., in 2012. KBXE has a 488-foot guyed tower and directional Rototiller FM antenna made and installed by ERI. The station rebroadcasts KAXE and airs local programming from studios in Bemidji.

In 2019 NCR was granted a CP to increase KAXE’s height above average terrain from 459 to 673 feet while maintaining 100 kW effective radiated power. These new facilities required a taller 499-foot tower.

Chief Engineer Dan Houg proposed a new tower, antenna, transmission line and installation services, and ERI won the contract. Shown is KAXE’s 10-Bay High-Power Model SHPX-10AC Rototiller FM Antenna. ERI also was awarded a contract that included destacking the existing 315-foot tower after the new system was operational.

David Baes, executive director of Northern Community Radio, told ERI, “Now, with the new, improved signal, we are reaching out further than ever and bringing in a new group of listeners into the KAXE/KBXE family. I am excited about the future, to see where it leads us next.”

When the construction and commissioning of the new transmission facilities, were complete, the station website announced, “After YEARS of fundraising and planning, the construction of the KAXE tower and transmitter is complete. Finally, the 91.7 signal is back bigger and stronger than ever before.”

Info: eriinc.com, 812-925-6000 or email sales@eriinc.com

The post Northern Community Radio Goes Higher with ERI appeared first on Radio World.

This week we’re featuring highlights of 2021’s ebooks. 

Pierre Bouvard is chief insights officer at Cumulus Media and its national-facing arm Westwood One. This interview is from “Streaming for Radio in 2021.”

Radio World: How do you think broadcasters are doing at leveraging streaming?

Pierre Bouvard: The real accelerator for streaming has been the smart speaker. Years have gone by since stations started streaming, and it was always maybe 5% of total tuning; the arrival of the smart speaker caused radio stations to really wake up to the fact that the smart speaker brings radio back into the home.

Increasingly, homes do not own a radio, but a third now have smart speakers. Radio stations have been aggressively promoting that “You can listen to our station on your Alexa or Google Home.”

Now 15% of 25-to-54 listening in America occurs through the stream. That’s a substantial number. I think an advertiser needs to understand that if you’re going to spend a dollar on radio, 85 cents can be for the over-the-air and 15 cents should be for the stream.

By the way, we did a study. If you ask the average American, “Do you know how to listen to a radio station on a smart speaker,” there’s still a fair chunk who say no. We need to do a more forceful job of explaining how somebody can use a smart speaker to listen to a radio station.

The TechSurvey from Jacobs Media asks AM/FM radio listeners how much time they spent listening to their most preferred station via traditional platforms (AM/FM radios at home, at school, at work or in a vehicle) versus digital platforms (via computer, mobile, smart speaker or podcast). The convergence of the trend lines is apparent over time.

RW: Your Cumulus colleague Doug Hyde blogged recently about some substantial research on streaming. 

Bouvard: That is a study done quarterly called “Share of Ear,” conducted by Edison Research. It’s the gold standard study on how Americans consume audio. They have been showing over the last couple of years a steady and persistent increase in the share of listening that’s going to the audio stream.

The second part of this has been Nielsen. Since the Portable People Meter launched in 2010, broadcasters have asked Nielsen, “The PPM does a great job of picking up listening in an ambient fashion in the room, but if I put my headphones in for streaming, how can the PPM pick it up?”

A headphone listening adjustment for streaming went in place October of last year. In essence, streaming listening doubled from 5% to about 10% of 12+ listening.

Broadcasters now have the confidence that Nielsen is picking up streaming; so it can be monetized.

You’ve seen a number of stations doing Total Line Reporting, combining the over-the-air and the stream. The ratings increases when you combine those have been significant; in some markets, especially sports and spoken-word stations, they’re seeing significant increases with the combination of the stream, over-the-air signal and the new headphone adjustment from Nielsen.

Bouvard said Nielsen’s recent PPM adjustment for headphone listening revealed a doubling of 12+ listening. “Broadcasters now have the confidence that Nielsen is picking up streaming; so it can be monetized,” he said.

RW: There’s been this common comment that radio managers have struggled to monetize streaming. Has that changed?

Bouvard: When streaming was 5% of radio listening, yes, it seemed like a rounding error. But now that streaming is 15% of adults 25–54, it’s substantial. That is something we’re seeing across the Cumulus platform: Advertisers are seeing the value of the stream.

There’s something else: Streaming is the soundtrack of the American worker.

If you look at the hour-by-hour data, when is streaming strongest? Nine-to-five. This is a workplace audience. It’s one of the most valuable qualitative targets for an advertiser. They have a job. They have incomes.

What you have is a huge amount of audience that’s between the very desirable younger 20s all the way up to the 60s. The audience skews female, which is important for advertisers, since women either control or basically are responsible for most American consumption; and the profile is nicely upscale.

And the majority of the people are from that market. The local advertiser can buy ads in the stream with the confidence that the majority of the people reached are from that town.

RW: Which organizations do you think are incorporating streaming well into their strategies?

Bouvard: Spoken-word radio stations by nature, especially sports stations, have done an extraordinary job. I might have grown up in San Francisco, have allegiances to the San Francisco team; now I’m living somewhere else. Sports has done an amazing job of bringing those out-of-town people back to their hometown teams.

There are certain top personalities who aren’t in every market; streaming is also a way to reach them. We have a podcaster, Dan Bongino. He launched his radio show about two weeks ago. In the press release, we indicated a couple of the stations that would be carrying the show and their stream; the amount of traffic and interest basically crushed our websites and the streaming.

What radio does well is have compelling, funny and entertaining personalities. Streaming is a way for listeners to get to talents that they love even if they’re somewhere where they don’t have access to a radio. When we ask listeners, “What do you like about streaming,” that’s the answer: “It gives me the ability to listen to my favorite radio station, no matter where I am. I like that flexibility.”

That’s the voice of the customer saying, “Give me my station so that I can enjoy it more frequently.” That’s what streaming can do.

RW: What have we learned about analytics, measuring audience and verifying that people are actually hearing this content?

Bouvard: That’s the benefit radio has that Pandora and Spotify don’t. Pandora can tell you, “I delivered a thousand impressions” but you actually don’t know. The ad could have been playing to the empty room. Or the Spotify app could have been played so softly that nobody ever heard it.

The Nielsen Portable People Meter is tuned to the ear; that PPM is only capturing audible signals. We know if the ad was playing at a level that the person could hear.

The other big opportunity is that, by putting the audio stream in a digital format, we can append data to that stream. We can do a study to see: Did the people who heard the radio ad go to the advertiser website? Did the people who heard the radio ad go to the advertiser’s store? Did we grow awareness and interest for the advertiser?

Streaming opens up a whole new world of accountability and measurement.

RW: Sometimes we hear about audio quality and loudness problems, or ads that don’t run, or that you listen to a stream and can tell that no one is paying attention to it. Do you think that remains a problem? 

Bouvard: If 15% of radio listening is occurring via the stream, that’s bigger than the entire AM band, which is about 10% of radio listening. That’s significant. When it gets that big, you start paying attention.

It’s like another radio station — we have to give it just as much love and attention. The ads have to run as scheduled. The volume has to be consistent and pleasurable. If we’re going to substitute music, we’re going to need to do that elegantly.

[Check Out More of Radio World’s Ebooks Here]

RW: Do you think our industry has gotten its message to potential advertisers that there’s a benefit over the Pandoras and Spotifys? 

Bouvard: Interestingly if you look at the “Share of Ear” data, AM/FM streaming is bigger than Pandora and AM/FM streaming is bigger than Spotify. That speaks for itself.

RW: But is that message getting to the advertising community?

Bouvard: Yes I think it is — thanks to folks like Audacy, who have rebranded and are going to market with a consistent offering. Thanks to iHeart. There are a lot more feet on the streets telling the story of AM/FM streaming.

RW: How you see the role of streaming continuing to evolve?

Bouvard: Jacobs Media runs an annual study called the Techsurvey. Every year they ask listeners, “How do you listen to your favorite radio station? Do you listen over the air, or do you listen with a device like a smart speaker, cell phone, laptop?” If you trend those lines, it has been going up consistently for streaming at the expense of over-the-air. That’s a nine-year trend.

If you keep extrapolating that, there’s going to be a point in time, maybe five years from now, maybe 10, where those lines are going to cross — where half of all American radio listening will be occurring through the stream.

I’m reminded of AM radio. At the beginning of the ’70s, AM dominated and FM was this experimental hippie thing. FM wasn’t in the car. But by 1980, half of all American listening was on FM.

Well, streaming is the new FM. It’s growing, and it’s something to be taken seriously.

Every radio salesperson should be saying, “Every buy on my radio station should have streaming, because it is now getting to be so significant. The audiences are growing so much.”

Every proposal and every buy should have streaming.

The post Streaming Is the New FM appeared first on Radio World.

This week we’re featuring highlights from Radio World’s 2021 ebooks. This article appeared in “After the Masks Come Off.”

Scott Foster is senior VP of engineering at Salem Media Group.

Scott Foster has been with Salem Media Group for 22 years. He remembers learning early on that when it comes to new facility projects, the company’s mission is more important than the money.

So where another company that bills $25 million a year in a market may have the luxury of spending $3 million to build a studio cluster, Salem’s team typically must plan around significantly smaller numbers.

Salem owns about a hundred stations in roughly 35 markets, including most of the largest cities. Some carry teaching and talk programs that are purchased by Christian ministries; much of this content is delivered to Salem via IP using XDS receivers from ATX.

Other stations carry Salem’s conservative talk format, distributed through Westwood One to XDS satellite receivers. And in major markets, Salem FM stations carry the company’s Fish format.

Efficiency was already a byword. “We have found that when we get several stations together, we can leverage the same salesforce, the same production force and board ops. Where another company with a three-station market might build 10 or 12 studios, we probably have five or six.”

In the long term, the company wants to downsize space further (though regional NOCs are not in its plans). And while remote work will grow, at least some in-person work will continue. For example, engineers and operations managers generally need to work on site. And sales teams benefit from the camaraderie and competition of working together.

But Foster expects that more air talent will work remotely and that future facilities will involve fewer studios, fewer seats and more “flex” space.

Even 20 years ago, before virtualization was a thing, Salem was thinking about operating lean. It would install a “station in a rack,” with Broadcast Tools switchers stacked on one another.

“We started it in Seattle; we had four radio stations there using five or six studios, all of which showed up on the switcher. When a studio went live, it was brought up on the switcher; when we didn’t need it, it was a satellite-driven.”

Those stacks of switchers, of course, are gone now. Foster recently managed a buildout in Washington and says, “I have one 25-pair Cat-5 and four punchblocks in that entire facility. Everything else is patch blocks, a biscuit box with network connections in it.”

Efficiency also means careful management of how rooms are used. Salem has many clients who come in and record half-hour shows on various topics, so even before the pandemic, scheduling was important, and only more so now.

“Nothing is worse than having [company executives] Dave Santrella or Ed Atsinger walk through a facility and see seven studios but four of them are dark with nobody in them. You’re wasting rent, you’re wasting capital. So we’re on a drive to shrink and push staffs to optimize the usage of their facilities.”

Exploring virtualization

Thinking centrally has been a long-term trend.

Until the early 2000s IT functions were managed locally at each Salem cluster, but this left the company vulnerable to security issues, so it began standardizing and consolidating back-office functions such as sales and management computers, traffic and VoIP phone systems.

“I watched the IT closet in our corporate office go from seven racks to one rack as they took all this stuff and they dropped it in our data centers,” Foster said.

[Check Out More of Radio World’s Ebooks Here]

Then about six years ago Foster read about the BBC project exploring centralized local virtual radio, called ViLOR, and was inspired.

“Our stations run the same content in 35 markets. Why do I have 35 markets running these things, 35 people babysitting them and 35 facilities to keep up — 35, 35, 35? Why couldn’t I do it with two or three and distribute it across all of them?”

He approached Telos Alliance and a project integrator in Great Britain, both of which were involved in ViLOR, to learn more. As a result, Salem has performed some tests of virtualization in a “sandbox” project that involves a console engine, automation and codecs in Dallas that are run virtually through a data center and can be controlled from Seattle.

While this is a beta concept right now, Foster expects that Salem will continue to move in that direction.

“We are starting to transport a lot of content between studios and transmitter sites via IP; having that infrastructure already in place is one of our stepping stones.”

Standardizing on automation is another step. Salem was using systems from four vendors, but with virtualization in mind, it settled on WideOrbit.

“We’ve virtualized in our own facilities; the machines in the rack are where the audio takes place. Machines in the studios are just a GUI interface — a Wyse terminal interface back to the rack to give feedback, to see and manipulate the log.” Most stations, he said, will use Livewire infrastructure in support of the virtualization of the automation.

“The biggest fight is the microphone delay, right? Everybody is so used to hearing themselves in the microphone. You have a half-second delay and it drives them nuts.”

But giving a flavor of what’s to come, Salem has one local talk host who lives far from his market and manipulates WideOrbit automation remotely. “He could voice track in real time if he wanted to. It’s like the studio has been extended to his office halfway across the country.”

But for now, automation resides on servers in each facility, rather than moving it to remote data centers.

“Your troubleshooting changes then because you can’t just clip leads on a wire and hear the audio; you’ve got to be able to track packets and delay.” But once the technical staff has become accustomed to working with virtualization, Foster suspects Salem will make that jump.

Workforce issues

Some broadcasters have said that the pandemic accelerated radio’s move toward workflows being built around service agreements rather than one-time capital equipment purchases. Is Salem seeing that trend?

“On the software side of things, our Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Audition are annual pay. But the automation we’re buying outright.

“But yes I’m being asked to analyze it, and generally if we can show that it’s cheaper to do something as op-ex over four or five years, we’ll do it. But it has to pay off quickly.

“I’m not seeing it in transmitters or console systems — though if somebody like a Telos or a Wheatstone offered service via a centralized data center, it could be an interesting model. A station that reaches 10,000 people probably isn’t going to drop $15,000 on an audio over IP system, but a manufacturer might be able to get them signed up for a hundred dollars a month.”

Interestingly, Foster hears from vendors that even offer tower lighting as a service — “‘Hey, for $6,000 a month, we’ll put the lights on the tower, we’ll monitor it, we’ll do all the filings and fix them when they go bad. We just ask that you sign up for five or 10 years.’”

He says this idea might be appealing if a station is looking at a 1,200-foot tower in Omaha that needs new LED lighting, in which case the engineer may have to weigh whether it would be better to pay someone a monthly fee for a predetermined number of years, or spend $140,000 up front and bet that he can keep those new lights operational for longer than that.

One other unexpected impact of the pandemic is the difficulty in sourcing good tradespeople and working with utilities.

“I’m having a hard time finding electricians who will come wire up generators or do concrete pads. Likewise, I’ve got a major power project in Philadelphia, and PECO wouldn’t even come to the facility for a walkthrough because of COVID until just last week.”

Whether it’s for landscaping or paving a parking lot, tradespeople may just be too busy or are dealing with COVID issues of their own. Foster said it’s hard enough to locate one good vendor, much less three to all quote on a job.

The post At Salem, Learning to Think Virtually appeared first on Radio World.

(Getty Images)

Broadcasters are expressing concerns about the notion of changing the Emergency Alert system to add or expand alerting via the internet, including via streaming.

Congress instructed the FCC to examine the feasibility of such changes and of improving alerts that are already delivered online. A notice of inquiry from the commission invited public feedback.

Feedback from broadcasters and other interested parties reflect a general wariness of modifying EAS in this way.

The majority of commenters told the FCC they worry about the practicality of enabling online alerts via streaming services. Proponents of the established system say it is proven and that alerts are available via radio and TV broadcast stations, analog and digital cable, satellite radio, cell phones and other mobile wireless devices.

In addition, some broadcasters worry that any lessening of the FCC’s regulatory jurisdiction over EAS could create enforcement issues while overseeing streaming platforms.

“Expanding emergency alerts through non-FCC regulated streaming services not only presents technological challenges, but also fundamental regulatory and compliance challenges,” iHeartMedia and Cumulus Media wrote in joint comments to the FCC.

The broadcasters expressed concerns that internet-based services such as Netflix, Spotify and Hulu operate from centralized platforms, which if enabled with emergency alert capabilities could leave them susceptible to hackers.

“An intentional hack into one of these platforms by an actor with the malicious intent to cause public panic through false emergency alerts could have very broad national impact, all outside the regulatory control of the FCC,” iHeartMedia and Cumulus wrote.

It’s also not clear how a national streaming service could receive and then geographically-target locally generated alert messages in a timely manner, they said, thus undermining the current alerting system.

“Complicated if not infeasible”

The National Association of Broadcasters expressed similar concerns in reply comments: “Extending EAS obligations to internet streaming services would be complicated, if not infeasible.”

NAB sees maintaining a “reliable EAS” as a crucial calling of all broadcasters. Reliability of alerting was one of the issues cited by Congress when it told the FCC to explore ways to coordinate multiple technologies for advanced alerting.

The NAB said the only online audio outlets that currently may retransmit EAS messages are websites and apps that simulcast radio stations.

“As a general matter, the streaming feeds at the broadcast station are originated upstream of the EAS encoder/decoder in the programming chain, meaning that an EAS alert is typically relayed only if it occurs while a station’s own programming is broadcast on-air. If an alert occurs during a commercial break in the on-air programming, when different content is inserted into the online stream, the EAS alert is not usually retransmitted to the listener or viewer,” NAB wrote.

[See Our Business and Law Page]

In addition, pure-play online content streamers are not “well-positioned to participate in the existing EAS ecosystem” for live streaming feeds or on-demand content, according to NAB. “In general, online streamers lack the infrastructure to geographically localize any alert,” it wrote.

And the association theorizes that using IP addresses to geofence the dissemination of alerts could raise even more issues.

NAB concludes: “It remains unclear how the FCC could extend the EAS rules to largely unregulated internet streamers or ensure the reliability and security of EAS over the internet. Therefore, NAB respectfully submits that the commission should report to Congress that enabling EAS alerts to consumers provided through the internet would be too complex and likely infeasible at this time.”

National Public Radio agreed with the overwhelming majority of comments in saying that streaming services should not be required to provide EAS alerts.

“NPR also asks the commission to be mindful of imposing any potential costs that would result when adopting new requirements, especially for under-resourced public broadcasting entities,” NPR wrote. “Requiring public radio stations to provide EAS alerts through internet streams could introduce cost and possibly significant complexity.”

Further, stations do not completely control the end-user player experience with their streams, and some streams have sponsorship message insertion, which can interrupt an alert, NPR pointed out.

“It would be almost impossible for a station to monitor and verify that EAS alerts air on all of the different streaming players and aggregators, so measuring and logging compliance would be difficult,” NPR said.

NPR said the NOI’s definition of “streaming services” is quite broad and included websites, applications and services that are nationally focused and stream on-demand content.

NPR did suggest that current EAS participants should be encouraged to furnish EAS alerts over the internet on a voluntary basis when feasible.

REC Networks, a low-power FM advocate, made the following observation in its comments: “As many people listen to audio streaming services through a wireless device, they already have a tool, a much more reliable tool on their phone (Wireless Emergency Alerts) that can do the same thing — if not better — than what the inquiry suggests should be imposed on small and large streaming services.”

Other views

However, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Weather Service supports the efforts to extend alerts to the internet and streaming services. Specifically, it believes the use of streaming services for emergency alert information will expand message dissemination, particularly to younger audiences.

“According to the Pew Research Center, 61% of U.S. consumers aged between 18 and 29 say an online streaming service is the primary way they watch television now,” NOAA officials wrote in reply comments to the FCC.

Technology licensing company Xperi Corp. believes the nation’s digital alerting ecosystem does need “reimagining,” but rather than adopting internet capabilities, it believes the FCC should make its HD Radio technology an integral component of the digital emergency alerting fabric.

“Not only can HD Radio broadcasting serve as a model for how to integrate EAS notifications with other digital technologies, but HD Radio technology should play a central role in any efforts to modernize the EAS, providing important resiliency and redundancy,” Xperi wrote.

Xperi said HD Radio would allow for the use of Common Alerting Protocol elements that can be leveraged to render message text, graphics and audio that maximize the accessibility and effectiveness of emergency alert information.

And what about streamers?

The Digital Media Association (DiMA), whose members include pure-play online content streamers like Pandora and Spotify, believes it may be it may be feasible to complete some, but not all, steps required for end-to-end transmission of EAS alerts through the internet, specifically, via the music pure-play streaming services offered by DiMA member companies.

“While receiving and processing EAS alerts may be technically possible, however, the national and global nature of these streaming services, which operate as apps on hardware devices or through websites relying on networks these services have no control over to transmit data, makes monitoring for, retransmitting, and delivering EAS alerts to end users infeasible, if not impossible,” DiMA told the FCC.

Therefore, “rather than increasing the reach of EAS, streaming services’ involvement will duplicate and possibly interfere with activities of existing participants, including broadcasters, cable systems and telecommunications providers, and others who remain better positioned to deliver clear, targeted and relevant alerts to local communities,” DiMA wrote in its comments.

Comment on this or any article. Email radioworld@futurenet.com.

The FCC Inquiry

The commission noted in March that Congress had instructed it to conduct an inquiry to examine the feasibility of updating the Emergency Alert System to enable or improve alerts to consumers provided through the internet, including through streaming services.

“Accordingly, in this Notice of Inquiry, we seek comment on the definition of ‘streaming services’ and whether it would be technically feasible for streaming services to complete each step that EAS participants complete under the commission’s rules in ensuring the end-to-end transmission of EAS alerts, including monitoring for relevant EAS alerts, receiving and processing EAS alerts, retransmitting EAS alerts, presenting EAS alerts in an accessible manner to relevant consumers, and testing.”

Congress also told it to look into the feasibility of improving alerts to consumers that are already delivered over the internet. “Accordingly we seek to establish whether it is feasible for EAS participants to leverage the internet to offer the full feature suite of the Common Alerting Protocol to the public.”

The NOI included many specific questions and issues that these concepts raise. You can read it in a PDF here. The discussion starts on page 26, paragraph 57.

The post The FCC Studies Internet EAS Alerting appeared first on Radio World.

The author is director, RF engineering at Shively Labs.

Just about anything can happen to cause failure in an RF system.

Antenna damage from wind, falling ice, lightning, tower work, vandalism, loose connections and aging components are just a few. When an engineer has multiple systems to take care of, something always seems to be in need of attention.

One way we have some control over such failures is regular system maintenance.

Caption:
Burns are visible where wire had been used to secure a flexible 3-inch line.

Have you ever checked site parameters after a significant weather event and found that some parameter had changed — not to the point of failure, but enough to prompt an investigation? Then upon a closer look you found damage that needed repair?

Or perhaps on a routine site visit, you discovered excessive heat on one or more components, and upon further investigation found an elbow that was nearly kaput — it would have failed catastrophically within weeks or days.

This is proactive maintenance and repair. If these near-misses haven’t happened to you, they likely will.

Had you been unable to check those readings after that storm and thus could not notice increasing VSWR, or had you not visited that site and noticed the hot elbow, the condition would have persisted, worsened and eventually failed, taking your station off the air.

That call usually comes at midnight on Super Bowl weekend.

These damaged components are an example of the “outside in” sort of burn that can occur when lines pass too close or touch other coax or tower members.

Checking sites that have suffered through extreme weather events is a prudent practice. So are regular visits, even to sites that may be considered trouble-free. The periodicity will vary — more frequent for trouble sites, perhaps quarterly or even semiannually for more reliable sites.

Annual tower climbs are great if it’s in the budget, but when they are not possible, we come back to intimate knowledge of system performance and those baselines, and running history logs that allow us to review for any indication that a problem has started and at what rate it is changing.

This can be useful information when determining if you need to scramble to make a maintenance visit immediately or can schedule for a later date.

Sample issues

Some things to look for when inspecting for damage in an antenna:

• Loss of dry air pressure, whether entirely or through a slow leak.
• Missing or damaged radiators. Pay close attention to the ends of the radiator and the feed points.
• Kinked, compressed or burned cables.
• Broken or unsealed radomes and/or plugged drains that cause water to collect.

In more complex systems, the power dividers and coaxial lines should be installed without undue mechanical stress on the components.

The coax should have the appropriate hangers and fasteners where they cross tower members or other antenna feed components. Consult the manufacturer for specific recommendations and best practices.

Antennas that have deicers systems usually have an external wiring harness to distribute AC power to each heating element within each radiator. The manufacturer will have the resistive values for each element and current draw to expect.

An ammeter measurement of each leg of the circuit, including the neutral, will give the first clues to the condition of the deicer system.

If the wiring harness was not installed correctly or fasteners have fallen away over time, the harness can hang in the high RF environment. This can cause reflected power issues at the transmitter and changes in coverage; it can cause currents to be induced into the wiring harness, and voltages large enough to cause arcing between the conductors of the wiring harness and tower members or other cables that pass in close proximity.

This is an excerpt of an article “Tips for RF System Installation and Maintenance” you can read in full in Radio World’s “Mission-Critical: Maintaining Your Transmitter Site” ebook.

The post Tips for RF System Installation and Maintenance appeared first on Radio World.