Past San Diego market Director of Engineering for Lincoln Financial Media, Eric Schecter was voted into a seat on the SBE Board of Directors last month. He’ll serve two years. Eric served as Chairman in San Diego in 2006 and later in Phoenix, where he’s Director of Engineering for the CBS radio cluster.
Re-elected to second terms in office were President Joe Snelson, CPBE, of Las Vegas; Vice President, CPBE, of Greenville, SC; Secretary Jim Leifer, CPBE, of Boynton Beach, FL; and Treasurer Andrea Cummis, CBT/CTO of Roseland, NJ.
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
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.
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, 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.
