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The author is a former engineer at WCRB(AM/FM), WSSH and WFGL/WFMP. He has also been a contract engineer and a manufacturer of SCA receivers and EAS equipment for television.
I am opposed to the digitization of the AM broadcast band and believe it would be a mistake. I have six reasons.
The first is personal. In the 1950s when I was a boy, I built my first radio. It was a very simple crystal set. It consisted of a coil which I hand-wound, a cat-whisker galena detector and a headphone. There were no capacitors. Living 10 miles from the nearest station, which was only 1,000 watts, no single station was very strong so I picked up a number of stations. One night, I even picked up Radio Moscow and the BBC. This was the beginning of my lifelong interest in radio.
When I was in high-school, I got my amateur license and built a number of AM receivers and transmitters for the ham bands. Had it not been for that crystal radio, which would not have worked with digital, I might never have had a career in radio.
The second reason is the simplicity of making both receivers and transmitter. AM radio can never die, just as long as there are books that explain the technology. Anybody, with a little knowledge and a few tools, can make a decent AM radio with readily available discreet components. With a little more knowledge it is easy to build a low-power AM transmitter. AM radio will always be there and the parts are readily available.
[Letter to the Editor: AM Stereo Is Still an Option]
Despite my lifelong work, both in receivers and transmitters, I could not build a digital receiver or transmitter with discreet parts. I doubt that the proponents of digital radio could either. It is just too complicated. In order to make either, you need sophisticated microprocessors and there are only a few companies that make them, most of which are in Asia. If the supply from Asia were cut off, it might be five to 10 years before new consumer digital receivers could be built with processors made in the USA.
Our technology is becoming too complex. When I was a teenager and had my first car, I could repair just about anything. I could diagnose ignition problems, adjust the carburetor, check the timing, you name it! Today, if a car fails, it must be taken to a garage with sophisticated diagnostic tools, and the sensors cost a fortune to replace. Do we want the same with our AM radios?
The third reason why we should not go digital is because of the remarkable advancements in receiver technology. New receivers use digital signal processing (DSP) for all functions from antenna coil to recovered audio. Basically, DSP receivers heterodyne the incoming signal to a low frequency using an image-rejecting mixer. The signal is digitized and then demodulated by a virtual receiver that is mathematically ideal. The recovered audio in digital form is applied to a digital to analog converter, then amplified, and to the speaker. Within this ideal receiver is software to remove most unwanted impulse noise.
I tried Silicon Labs Si4770 AM/FM receiver chip and the reception is spectacular! Adjacent channel rejection is 57 dB. Signal to noise ratio for 30% modulation is 60 dB. Total harmonic distortion at 90% modulation is 0.2%. Receiver bandwidth adjustable is 100 Hz to 15 kHz in 100 Hz steps or automatic, based upon strength of desired and adjacent channels. Since the passband is nearly flat, that translates to an audio bandwidth up to 7,500 Hz. One surprise is that during periods of selective fading, there is no distortion.
[Read More Guest Commentaries Here]
If you want to hear what DSP sounds like, get into a fairly new car and listen to the AM radio because most new cars use DSP. A number of Asian companies are making DSP integrated circuits for AM/FM radio. They are cheap and the radios use only the loop antenna and no other coils or filters. There is consistent performance from receiver to receiver and no alignment. To select the frequency, the radios can use a microcontroller or a potentiometer attached to a ruler dial. Within a few years, all radios will use DSP and the problem of poor quality radios will cease to exist. Most important, the AM band will still be compatible with existing radios and technology.
The fourth reason for rejecting digital is the poor recovered audio quality of digital radio. I tried a trial version of professional DRM transmitter software. The software provider included a bug that causes the software to fail after three minutes use, and then it has to be reset. I downloaded the “Dream Receiver,” a PC computer based receiver, to evaluate reception. Thus, I could compare DRM to AM. The DRM was very clean. No noise could be heard at any usable signal level. But the audio did not sound as good as AM.
The fifth reason for rejecting digital is that the listener would lose some listening options. If you have two stations, one AM and the other digital, they will both be noise-free near the transmitters. As you move away from the transmitters, the AM signal will become noisy, but the digital will remain clear. At some point the digital will disappear, but the AM signal will still be usable, albeit noisy.
I do not listen to a station because it is close or because it is strong, but because it has a program that I want to hear. I will tolerate some noise to listen to that program, but with digital, I will be forced to listen only to local stations whether I like the program or not, or I will not listen at all. Furthermore, sometimes stations fade in and out, partly because of propagation, but sometimes because of co-channel interference. If the station is AM, there will be a period of noise during the fade, but if it is digital, the station will cut out for the duration.
Finally, most car radios will need to be replaced to permit digital reception. I intend to keep my car for at least ten years. Will I have to buy a new car just to get traffic reports and possible emergency information? Or will I have to purchase an expensive replacement radio and go through the misery of disassembling the dashboard to make the change?
I can find no valid reason to replace the AM band with digital. For most people, it will provide no significant improvement in quality. It will greatly reduce the range of many stations, especially clear-channel stations. The listeners will have fewer choices because they will be limited only to local stations.
Radio World invites industry-oriented commentaries and responses. Send to Radio World.
The post No to Digital AM appeared first on Radio World.
In this issue, Frank McCoy helps you build a GPS-referenced time server to issue commands with contact closures as the interface. Cris Alexander ponders what radio engineers have learned during the coronavirus crisis. Frank Elias likes his new Aston Origin. And lots more.
Prefer to do your reading offline? No problem! Simply click on the link above, go to the left corner and choose the download button to get a PDF version.
BEST PRACTICES
AM Notes From the Field
Mike Pappas has visited a ton of transmitter sites and he comes away with some lessons that may help your station sound better and operate more efficiently.
WHITE PAPER
Headphone and Earbud Testing
The folks at Audio Precision lay out everything you always wanted to know about in-ear monitoring but were afraid to ask.
Also In This Issue:
The post Inside the June 17 Issue of Radio World Engineering Extra appeared first on Radio World.
Wow. What huge changes we have seen in just a few short months, and not just in our industry or nation, but the entire world!
My guess is that for most readers, as it has been for me, the past 2-1/2 months have been sort of surreal, almost like some kind of sensory deprivation because we have lost so many of our points of reference. During the height of the lockdown, much of the time, I would find I had lost track of what day of the week it was and even the date. Things all sort of ran together. It’s getting better now that things are beginning to open up, but it’s still weird.
During the lockdown, a lot of studios were unmanned, but the hits kept on playing.I’ve heard it said, usually by pols and pundits, “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” In the political sense, there is in my view some shame in that kind of attitude. But out here in the real world, there is some wisdom.
Restated in a more positive way, “Don’t fail to learn some things from this crisis.” And we haven’t. We have, in fact, learned a great deal, and I think that is going to change our industry — hopefully for the better — going forward. So what have we learned?
NECESSARY SIMPLIFICATION
At the top of my list is, we have learned what is truly important and what is not. That goes for equipment, processes, procedures, even the programming we broadcast.
A time of crisis, whether the COVID-19 lockdown, a terrorist attack, a hurricane or some other natural disaster or some other national, regional or local crisis, forces us to make decisions as to what is essential and what we can live without. It distills what is otherwise very likely a rather cluttered situation into the essence of what we actually need, and that’s a good thing. It’s so easy to get lost in the minutia in our workaday world.
Any broadcast engineer who has been through a crisis, especially one that has physically impacted the station’s facilities or infrastructure, knows what I’m talking about here. Boil it all down and it takes very little to be on the air: a microphone, some sort of mixer, some sort of playout device (even a laptop computer with Groove or Media Player), an audio processor, an exciter, an RF amplifier, transmission line and antenna supported on something with some elevation.
While the instant crisis has not, in most cases, affected facilities or infrastructure, it has forced broadcasters to do a whole lot more with a whole lot less, quite often by VNC, TeamViewer or other remote desktop software, using VPNs and other tunnels across the public internet.
A pandemic does not stop severe weather. Lightning hit the tower and set a guy wire fiberglass insulator on fire. This is what was left on the end of the severed guy.In many of the clusters in my company, stations operated for a month or more using virtual mixers on such platforms, even doing live talk with hosts and guests at their homes connecting to the (unmanned) studios with remote codecs or smartphone apps that talk to our studio codecs — and it worked very well! The quality was so good that listeners were hard pressed to know the difference.
GOOD SPORTS, MOSTLY
I have watched, at first with some amusement but then with growing irritation, our local television outlets doing essentially the same thing, with anchors, reporters and weather people doing their thing from their “home studios.” Except for the acoustics, which were often hollow and echoey, the quality was acceptable, but the delay was really irritating.
As a broadcast engineer, I get it — there are encoding, transmission and decoding delays that have to be lived with in both directions, and those add up to several seconds of the on-camera person staring at the camera and nodding long after the other person has quit talking.
Thankfully, in radio, unless we are dealing with a bidirectional satellite link with its space-segment transmission delays in each direction, the amount of latency or delay in our codecs is short enough that listeners don’t notice it. That gives radio a real leg up on other segments of the industry.
Except for the largest operations with their separate IT departments, broadcast engineers have been tasked to equip station staffers to work from home. This includes operations people of course, but also managers, account executives, office managers, traffic people, administrative personnel, writers and producers. Some operations were, to some degree, already set up for this, but in a lot of cases, engineers had to scramble to get things configured and people trained.
Part of that training was to explain to people that in a crisis, we have to expect a certain amount of inconvenience. In my company, most folks were good sports about it, grasping that we simply could not recreate their office conveniences for them at home, but I have heard tell of some situations elsewhere … well, we’ll leave it at that.
Needless to say, there were undoubtedly some challenges of a non-technical nature for a lot of engineers, especially in the early days of the lockout. For both engineers and others in stations or clusters, it was a learning experience unlike any other, but we adapted and people got their work done from home and other remote locations.
REBUILDING
Somehow, during the height of the lockout, the weather didn’t get the word that the weather was supposed to be calm and clear. Spring thunderstorms and even tornadoes came through a lot of markets, especially in the south, right about that time, adding to the workloads of engineers.
In our company, we took a lightning hit on the FM tower at one of our midwestern market studios at the end of March. While there was very little in the way of direct damage, the H-field from that strike ate a lot of NICs and op-amps. Precious resources had to be diverted to deal with the results of that strike.
In Alabama in mid-April, thunderstorms and tornadoes chewed up trees, power lines and yes, even a guy wire on one of our towers. It wasn’t easy, but our engineering crew managed to maintain social distancing while addressing those issues and keeping the operations, sales and admin staffs working from home.
One final thing that we have learned, in addition to the above and countless other lessons, is that things are going to be different from here on out. We will do radio in a different way, both on the technical/operations and administrative sides. What that will look like is anyone’s guess at this point, but it will be different. Much of what we implemented during the crisis will carry over into the day-to-day post-crisis.
I think we’re looking at a lengthy period of rebuilding, both in terms of the local and national economies in general and in terms of the broadcast business specifically.
We’re going to have to hunker down for a time, keep things running as economically as possible, and focus on rebuilding our business. Capital budgets likely won’t be what they were in years past. Repair and maintenance will be the name of the game. Many equipment manufacturers will divert resources from manufacturing to support to keep their customers running. Radio engineers will have to be creative as never before to keep their stations on the air and operating at peak efficiency with less budget to work with.
For many, that means that right now, we need to be taking a hard look at our facilities, searching out weak spots and having frank discussions with owners and managers. If we are already crippled going into a lean period, we could find ourselves in dire straits not too far down the road. Our tanks need to be full now so we don’t run out of gas a few months or a year down the road.
Finally, this is a grand opportunity for radio engineers in markets and operations of every size to shine, to show their stuff, to make themselves indispensable. It will be the engineers who hold the facilities together. I’ve already heard one corporate executive say to one engineer, “You’re saving our company.” That was true for many during the crisis, and it will remain true going forward. Don’t miss your chance to be the hero of your station or cluster.
Cris Alexander, CPBE, AMD, DRB, is director of engineering of Crawford Broadcasting Co. and technical editor of RW Engineering Extra. Email him at rweetech@gmail.com.
The post Don’t Let a Crisis Go to Waste appeared first on Radio World.
An Arkansas man must pay $10,000 for alleged illegal broadcasting, according to the Federal Communications Commission.
Gerald Sutton has been directed to pay within 30 days, after which the FCC says his case may be referred to the Justice Department.
The investigation began in summer of 2018 when the FCC says it received a complaint about an unauthorized FM station in Alma, Ark. It says an agent subsequently observed a signal on 103.1 MHz, traced it to an address in Alma and found that it exceeded allowable limits under Part 15 of the rules. An agent identified Gerald Sutton as the operator, said he refused an inspection, and said the signal disappeared after the agent’s arrival but was turned on again later.
According to the commission summary, Sutton subsequently wrote to the FCC at the end of 2018 to say that the federal Communications Act did not apply to him.
The Enforcement Bureau issued a notice of apparent liability against Sutton in August 2019, and now says he never replied to it.
“Pirate radio stations undermine the commission’s primary mission to manage radio spectrum,” wrote Ronald Ramage, acting field director of the Enforcement Bureau, summarizing the commission’s longstanding stance on this issue.
“Such illegal operations can interfere with licensed communications, including authorized broadcasts and communications by public safety entities. Moreover, such illegal operations pose a danger to the public because they interfere with licensed stations that inform their listeners of important public safety messages, including Emergency Alert System transmissions that provide vital information regarding weather and other dangers to the public.”
[Related: “It’s Official: PIRATE Act Signed Into Law”]
The post FCC Issues $10,000 Fine in Arkansas Pirate Case appeared first on Radio World.
With podcasters, voice actors and others now working from home during the pandemic, GIK Acoustics has released its VISO Booth vocal shield (Vocal ISOlation Booth).
The VISO Booth aims to provide temporary vocal isolation for broadcasters, recordists, voice actors, podcasters and others who need portable or stowable acoustic treatment.
Vocal shields on the whole are intended to serve as a buffer between a recording microphone and potential nearby sound sources and artifacts from the surrounding room. Employing one helps the microphone capture a cleaner, more immediate vocal. While a full-fledged vocal booth provides an ideal environment for vocal recording, a vocal shield is a lower-cost option that can still provide audible improvements in situations where budgets, portability and production space are significant concerns.
[Check Out More Products at Radio World’s Products Section]
The VISO Booth uses the same ECOSE technology found in the company’s patented room treatments, reportedly helping to control the low-mid frequencies to reduce boominess or muddiness in recordings. The unit is available worldwide sporting an aesthetic pattern similar to the company’s Alpha 1D in blonde wood veneer, with GIK’s standard black fabric underneath.
Designed with portability in mind, the VISO Booth can be installed on a standard 5/8-inch straight microphone stand or simply placed on a desktop for use without a stand. Weighing 10 pounds, GIK Acoustic’s VISO Booth consists of two 16.5 inches x 11.5 inches x 1.5 inches panels joined to form a large, 162-inch triangular area, creating a shielded working space for performers to move within that the company claims is larger than most sizes attainable with other vocal shields.
Info: www.gikacoustics.com
The post VISO Booth Vocal Shield Debuts from GIK Acoustics appeared first on Radio World.
A pirate operator in Pennsylvania admitted he had been running an unauthorized radio station and entered into a consent decree with the Federal Communications Commission to resolve any further investigation into his activities.
[Read: O’Rielly Seeks Funding to Implement PIRATE Act]
The Enforcement Bureau resolved its investigation of Anthony M. Edwards, who was said to have operated an unauthorized radio station on 90.7 MHz and 91.5 MHz in Stroudsburg, Pa. To settle the matter, Edwards admitted he operated the station. He also agreed not to operate an unauthorized radio station in the future. As part of the settlement, Edwards agreed to pay a $1,500 civil penalty.
If Edwards reneges on his agreement, the FCC said it will hand down an additional civil penalty. This means that if the commission finds that he was involved with operating an unauthorized radio station at any time over the next 20 years, Edwards will be responsible for an additional $23,000 penalty.
The FCC noted that Edwards’ actions took place before the heavy-hitting PIRATE Act, which was enacted in January 2020. That legislation gives the commission the authority to levy much higher fines — up to $100,000 per violation and $2 million in total.
The post Pirate Operator Agrees to Consent Decree With FCC appeared first on Radio World.
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