All posts by Gary Stigall

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)

Commentary

SBE36.ORG v4.0

Welcome to the new website! Our previous version, written with the Mambo content management system, was getting long in the tooth. It was inelegant to work with, and it got so that only Internet Explorer would edit the posts, and that won’t do.

The e-mail newsletter interface and appearance was less than optimal, and it would add random exclamation points to the output.

All that, and the host moved from San Diego to somewhere in Florida, and sometimes the latency would give you sufficient time to go to the restroom waiting for a page load.

I have wanted to play with WordPress, and true to its reputation, it’s elegant and well-documented. When I discover a new feature, I tend to think, “Damn, this is good.”

So I made some new banners in Photoshop, deleted a line of CSS code that made the spacing too high at the top, transferred stories going back to 2005, imported the newsletter subscribers, and added some new posts. The old news transfer was laborious, but it was my own fault for misplacing the password for the database administration, which kept me from doing a text dump.

It’s come a long way from the first edition in 1997 that I edited manually on Netscape Navigator. But the content loaded fast, photos were often added, and hey–the news got out.

I hope to add some very useful new features, including comments from members on our stories and the ability for sponsors to sign-up and renew online. The site is already simple enough to operate that any of you could add a story easily.

I still have to create and post the sponsor banners and move additional old posts.

There’s never enough time.