All posts by Gary Stigall

Local News

Lee McGowan of CBS Radio Passes

CBS Radio San Diego GM Bob Bollinger announced that long time Chief Engineer Lee McGowan passed away Monday, November 11 “battling cancer and cardiac issues.”

“Lee meant so much to so many in a successful career that spanned two decades here and stops at KCBQ, San Francisco, Las Vegas and other western markets. His selfless spirit, integrity, huge heart, dry humor and mostly Lee just being Lee will be sorely missed by us all.”

Lee had worked as Chief Engineer at KYXY under various owners since the mid-1980s. I had first met him when he was a staff engineer at KABC/KLOS in Los Angeles in 1984. He had even been on-the-air in the early 1970s at KDES Palm Springs. At SBE meetings, he was always the inquisitive guy who asked multiple follow-up questions of presenters. He was known for his attention to detail and straightforward interaction with his coworkers.

A memorial for Lee will be held at Lindbergh Park on 11/25 at 2pm. Lindbergh Park is at 4101 Ashford St. San Diego, CA 92111.

Local News

XETV US Chief Leaves for Sneaker Net

Paul Redfield resigned his position as Director of Technology at XETV Channel 6’s US operations center in August. Next week, he begins a new career as Senior Systems Administrator at the corporate headquarters for Road Runner Sports in Kearny Mesa.

Paul was a news photographer at XETV Fox 6 until 2005, when he moved to IT management. He was instrumental in the station’s upgrading to a binational data fiber link and HD commercial and syndication playout. He took over as Director of Technology in 2010 and moved the station to HD studio news origination.

As of this writing, the station was advertising for a replacement, but Mark Goodman is currently acting as department manager.

Local News

Translator Apps Finally Get the Nod

The FCC this week issued a Public Notice announcing that they had cleared a large number of proposed translator applications filed in 2003 for construction permit filing. The hold-up was apparently due to processing of associated Auction 83 processing, which has been completed. Included in those filings were a number of San Diego County apps:

City Location MHz Watts Pri Sta Licensee File Number
Carlsbad Deer Springs 104.9 200 KPRZ Gold Coast 20030317MUE
Fallbrook Red Mtn 106.7 1 KSDW Penfold Comm 20030311ARX
Oceanside Benet Hill 96.1 5 KWVE-FM Calvary Chapel of Costa Mesa 20030314AVT
San Diego I-805 at I-8 106.9 10 KSDW Penfold Comm 20030311ARS
San Marcos Hwy 78 @ Barham Dr 104.5 50 KGB Clear Channel 20030317AQW
San Marcos San Elijo Hills 107.9 41 KHTS Clear Channel 20030314BOV
Spring Valley Sweetwater Village 94.3 13 KMYI Educational Media Foundation 20030317LML
West San Diego 925 Loring St. 92.9 55 KLVJ Educational Media Foundation 20030314ABW

Interesting applications by Educational Media Foundation have them rebroadcasting adjacent channel Clear Channel station KMYI from Sweetwater Village, and locating a translator on a residential street in Pacific Beach.

Applicants have until August 30th to file.

Local News

KPBS-FM Licenses Old Site as Aux

KPBS-FM 89.5 in San Diego can now fire up its legacy site on Mt. San Miguel in the event of some failure or maintenance needs at Mt. Soledad. The FCC issued the license this week. You might remember that the San Diego State University NPR affiliate moved to La Jolla last year, increasing power and overall increasing service to its strong donor base to the north and west. It only made sense to maintain the equipment at Miguel for backup purposes since the TV transmitter remains there anyway, and that’s what they’ve done.

Best of Site, Tips

Stubs for Fun and Profit

A year ago I was helping out temporarily at Bext with technical service and a number of interesting challenges came up. One was from a customer whose low power FM transmitter shared a site with a mobile carrier. The carrier’s technician was complaining about the transmitter’s 8th harmonic getting into his  radios. The FM transmitter in question was clean far beyond FCC requirements of -80dB below assigned carrier level (as I remember, about -96dB) but on a spectrum analyzer, you could see a tiny bump down near the noise floor in the 800 MHz band. I used the analyzer and its tracking generator to trim a hunk of coax and knock down the 8th harmonic of the offending FM transmitter about 20 dB. That’s a pretty short piece of coax, by the way. Problem solved and nobody had to build a Faraday cage.

A June article in the BDR mentions this conflict between the very sensitive LTE mobile site receive inputs and their FM transmitter neighbors. These radios are attempting to discriminate data at -120 dBm and lower from distant tiny transmitters inside metal cars and buildings.

I first ran into an application for a stub with a TV translator site in the Oregon high desert in the early 80’s, where I was receiving a faint UHF signal beyond line-of-sight and picking up some birdy from my channel 5 output. With an N-connector “T” adapter and a quarter-wave length of RG-213, I fashioned an open-ended stub that resonated at the mixer product, attenuating it enough to remove the problem from the visual band of my UHF input.

Another recent article in Radio World magazine, this by Mark Persons, suggests putting a bandpass filter in the form of a quarter-wave shorted (not open) stub after a solid-state amplifier feeding a tube amplifier. This is brilliant. It serves to attenuate voltage spikes that might enter since only the resonant frequency passes without great loss–DC and pulses slow and fast are shorted out. By the way, this won’t work with TV or other broadband applications due to the high-Q of the stub.

Check out articles on construction of these stubs online.