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.

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.

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.

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.

Society of Broadcast Engineers