Category Archives: Meetings

October 2012 Meeting: Digital Broadcast Archiving

Our speaker at the October 17 meeting, Arnold Taylor of Digital Broadcast, will discuss the three levels of archiving—online, near line and off line. What purpose does each serve and how are they intelligently managed in a newsroom or master control environment?

Arnold has been with Digital Broadcast for nearly 10 years, first as an Area Manager for the Southwest based in Plano, TX and now a VP of the Western Area including the Southwest and Western Regions. He was a radio CE with a First Class Radiotelephone license, a TV engineer, worked for Ampex for over 13  years as a field service engineer, and later in technical sales for Sony, RCA, and Compact Video. He served as CEO at Quanta and later Rank Cintel.

A New Venue

Join us October 17 at noon at Sizzler restaurant, 3755 Murphy Canyon Road at Aero Drive, I-15 freeway convenient from the Aero Drive exit. This will be conducted in the tradition of Portland, San Francisco, and Los Angeles chapters as you buy your own lunch. We have the banquet room in the back. Get in line as you come in, ordering a steak or sandwich, or a plate for their enormous salad bar (recommended). They will serve you in the banquet room if you didn’t buy the salad bar.

Making this a regular venue will depend on high attendance, so we would appreciate your making a special effort to join us this month. As always, members and guests are invited.

We should be finished by 1:30PM.

September 2012 Meeting: Harris Studio Design Show

A great meeting September 12 at KPBS as Nick Van Haaster of Harris showed off some photos of recent studio rebuild projects foreign and domestic. Many thanks to Ron Lane of Harris for lunch and Leon Messenie for his tour of recently remodeled studios on the SDSU campus.

Nick gave us a primer on project management for broadcasters and demonstrated some highly professional examples of planning documents and studio sketches.

In chapter business, Chairman Doug Alman told us about the upcoming election, encouraged members to sign up for offices, and mentioned that we will try electronic voting this time.

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.