All posts by Gary Stigall

Local News

Entravision Wins Channel 25

The FCC last week granted KTCD channel 25 for a low power digital TV service. The twist is that this UHF construction permit puts the facility on the KGTV tower on Mt. Soledad.

In order to gain the CP, Entravision settled with Civic Light, the former license holder of K63EN in Hillcrest, for a competing application. Matt Lunati of Civic Light says they decided to pull out of the channel 25 competition without compensation. The company maintains KZTC-LP channel 7 on Mt. Woodson that they plan to flash to digital.

Entravision buys a great deal of flexibility with the new installation. They operate English-language network affiliate MyNetwork TV, and Spanish language affiliates for networks Univision, Telefutura, and Telemundo. They will be able to multicast any combination of those signals from Mt. Soledad.

They currently operate KBNT-LD 51 digital at Mt. San Miguel, KTCD-CA 17 analog downtown at the KNSN 1240 AM tower, XHDTV 47 digital and 49 analog at Cerro Bola near Tecate, KHAX-LP 49 analog in Vista, and XHAS 33 analog and 34 digital at Mt. San Antonio in Tijuana.

Local News

Verizon Fires Off First Emergency Alerts in San Diego

I was working in my office yesterday when I heard the familiar emergency alert dual tones coming from another room. It didn’t fully register with my conscious mind until it happened again. I found on my Verizon Droid X2 device notification of potential flash floods in the desert and mountain areas. An app called Emergency Alerts had been triggered.

Media sources reported 700 lightning flashes, and the rains did fall by the inch in the desert east of San Diego County, creating dangerous driving conditions and flash flood danger in desert gullies.

Of course, the problem is that the information wasn’t properly regionalized. This is a great step toward enlarging the alert system beyond broadcasting to personal communication devices and desktop computers, but users are likely to block notifications if are irrelevant. That crying wolf thing.

Verizon says it knows of the problem and will work to do a better job of matching location of the emergency to the location of its customers.

The National Weather Service provides the alerts and maintains an information page on the subject. They don’t detail how they are handling CAP location data.

National

SBE National Elections Go Electronic

Voting for candidates to serve on the 2012-13 SBE Board of Directors is ongoing. Members of SBE are able to vote online for the first time in society history.

Voting members should have an email from Intelliscan, the company conducting the election, sent the morning of July 26. The email contains a unique link to the member’s ballot. To vote, open that email and click on the link.

Two reminder emails will be sent to members in August who have not yet voted. Each of those messages will also contain the unique link to the member’s ballot.

Members who opted out of electronic voting are receiving ballots in the mail. All electronic ballots must be cast by the deadline of 4:30 p.m. EST on Tuesday, August 28. Paper ballots must be received at the SBE National Office by that same date and time.

The SBE Board of Directors consists of volunteers that govern the society. All four officer positions and six of the 12 director seats are being contested this year.

Meetings

August 2012 Meeting – ATCi’s LiveStreamPac

Broadcasters looking to save money continue to seek creative solutions to bringing remote event audio and video back to the studio. In order to bypass expensive ENG microwave or satellite systems, TV stations are exploring technology bonding several 3G or LTE mobile wireless feeds for their HD video uplinks. But there are challenges: How bulky will it be? Will it work in a busy breaking news environment? Will it work in the desert where towers are far away?
Arizona’s ATCi will bring its LiveStreamPac to San Diego for a technology presentation and demo. While several bonding systems have appeared in the past couple of years, this solution weighs only 2.5 pounds and works in a mobile wireless environment where sufficient bandwidth availability is increasingly realistic. This might just work.
Join us Wednesday, August 15, at noon at TV Magic, 8112 Engineer Road in Kearny Mesa, San Diego. ATCi buys a light lunch. Members and guests welcome, as always. We expect to be finished with the presentation by 1:30PM.
Commentary

Making Waves: What’s Ahead for the SBE?

We met Saturday, June 23rd in a nondescript room in the Indianapolis downtown Hilton Hotel from 9 AM till 9 PM. 36 members and national staff attended the SBE Strategic Planning Conference, and I’ll spoil the ending somewhat by saying that there is much consensus on at least what are the most effective and least effective parts of the SBE now.

Attendees seemed to agree that certification and education should remain core reasons for existence. They serve our membership directly, fill niches typically not duplicated by colleges, and are relatively efficient to administer. And I believe the SBE can take a bow at how we are rapidly changing to meet these needs through webinars, education conferences, and challenging new certifications.

The group got sidetracked for a period of time by what I would offer was needless talk about re-branding. Why, some asked, are we called the Society of Broadcast Engineers if so many members now are from alternative allied industries such as fiber and satellite distribution or from nearly pure information technology backgrounds? I don’t see this as a real change. Our members nearly all serve broadcasting. “Broadcast” doesn’t mean that you own a tower; it means “one-to-many.” Cable, fiber, satellite, and web distribution are still legitimate forms of taking a single message and distributing to multiple listeners and viewers.

One discussion that seemed to mute itself was about the relevance of having legal counsel lobbying for technical broadcast issues. Our attorney Chris Imlay, I will tell you, is deserving of love and praise within the society and really knows his stuff with regard to FCC rules. He’s approachable and you can tell he really is interested and cares about injustice in ruling of the airwaves, both in broadcasting and amateur radio (he’s counsel for the ARRL, too). He spends enormous amounts of time studying, advising, and lobbying for the interests of…broadcasters. Not you, the engineer, but for your employer. And that’s the rub with me. He should be billing the National Association of Broadcasters for these activities. When someone new on broadcast spectrum causes interference to broadcasters, it is broadcasters that they are harming, not broadcast engineers directly. I would like to see either NAB taking over that legal bill directly, or hiring the SBE to help look out for their interests as owners.

The challenging part of the meeting came when we began discussing how to attract a broader base to local meetings. Our meetings are central to an involved membership, but they are attended by only a fraction of our membership, and many of those attending are not members. If you pick a program related to radio broadcasting, will your TV engineers attend? If you have highly technical IT presentations, will your traditional broadcast engineers feel left out? How can we best train members to best administer chapters? No hard answers or brilliant suggestions came out of this meeting, but we need to work toward some solutions.

Got ideas? Feel free to respond with your comments.

(Commentary by Gary Stigall, Chapter 36 Program and Certification Chair, and member of the SBE National Board of Directors)