Category Archives: National

SBE at the NAB Show

Every year I look forward to the NAB Show. It’s this great change from the daily grind where I get to see old friends and new technologies, often in the booths at the very back of the exhibit halls. And the parties. Did you see Kool and the Gang at the CNN party a few years ago? Wow.

My first was in 1983, when the big exhibitors were RCA and Ampex, both showing off their amazing new 1″ tape machines, their commercial playing robotics systems, and Plumbicon low definition cameras with $30 – $100K price tags.

This year will be #30, after having missed a couple of years in the middle.

The SBE has some great stuff planned for this year. If you have time for nothing else, please make time for the 50th Anniversary Open House Tuesday. And did I mention certification points for attendance?

2014 Ennes Program at the NAB Show  

The annual Ennes Program opens the NAB Broadcast Engineering Conference at 8 am on Saturday, April 5, and runs until 5 pm. The program theme is “Best Engineering Practices,” and includes a diverse list of topics and subject matter experts.

SBE Meetings and Events at the 2014 NAB Show Saturday, April 5
SBE National Frequency Coordination Committee Meeting
3:00pm – 5:00pm, Conference Room 8, Las Vegas Hotel

 

Sunday, April 6
SBE Board of Directors Meeting*
8:30 am-12:00 pm, Conference Rooms 8-9, Las Vegas Hotel 

Tuesday, April 8
SBE Certification Exams
Must be pre-registered
9:00 am-12:00 pm, Conference Rooms 9-10, Las Vegas Hotel

SBE Frequency Coordinators Meeting
8:30-10:30 am, Conference Rooms 13-14, Las Vegas Hotel

SBE Membership Meeting
5:30-6:30 pm, Room S225, LVCC

SBE 50th Anniversary Reception
6:30-8:30 pm, Room S219, LVCC

Register Your 7 or 13 GHz ENG Receive Site

February 5, 2013 -The FCC today released a public notice announcing the April 1 effective date of the requirement to register 7 and 13 GHz TV Pickup stationary receive sites in ULS. The public notice also announces the grant of a fee exemption to TV Pickup licensees in the 7 and 13 GHz bands who modify their licenses between now and April 1 for the sole purpose of adding their receive sites. The public notice also provides detailed filing instructions.

Here is the complete text of the Public Notice.

Here Comes H.265

The International Telecommunications Union, ITU announced January 25th the new High Efficiency Video Codec (HEVC) to be known also as H.265. The new codec is expected to use about 50% of the data bandwidth of its predecessor H.264, which itself uses about 50% of the bandwidth of its predecessor MPEG-2.

The savings in bandwidth comes at the cost of processing power. It’s said to take 4 to 5 times the CPU power to compress and decompress, so it could take years for wide adoption, during which time another technology could leapfrog the standard.

But potential economic benefits are profound. If H.265 is adopted by transmission media like cable, satellite, and broadcasters, as many as twice the number of channels could fit into available bandwidth.

 

Steve Church Dies

Steve Church, founder of Telos-Omnia-Axia in Cleveland, passed away September 28 of brain cancer at the age of 57. An obituary in Radio World Magazine tells of Steve’s pioneering work with digital signal processing (DSP) in the development of telephone hybrids for broadcasting. He also introduced MP3 digital compression to broadcasting with his development of codecs that could extend audio spectrum for use over ISDN and voice telephone circuits.

Church was born and went to high school in San Diego, and he presented his digital hybrid and ISDN concepts at chapter 36 meetings in the mid-1980s and 1990s.

Members Re-elect Officer Slate

SBE headquarters announced national election results that continue the current slate of officers, with some new directors.

New to the board as directors are Andrea Cummis, CBT, CTO, senior director of engineering 
and operations, WNET in New York, N.Y.; John Heimerl, CPBE, vice president of strategic technologies, WHRO-TV, WHRO-FM, WHRV-FM in Norfolk, Va.; and Wayne M. Pecena, CPBE, 8-VSB AMD, DRB, CBNE, director of engineering, Texas A&M University-Educational Broadcast Services in College Station, Texas.

2012 was the first year the society offered online voting, which saw a 64% increase in ballots cast from the previous year. The total number of ballots cast was 1,313, which were 511 more ballots than in 2011.