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Broadcasters are expressing concerns about the notion of changing the Emergency Alert system to add or expand alerting via the internet, including via streaming.

Congress instructed the FCC to examine the feasibility of such changes and of improving alerts that are already delivered online. A notice of inquiry from the commission invited public feedback.

Feedback from broadcasters and other interested parties reflect a general wariness of modifying EAS in this way.

The majority of commenters told the FCC they worry about the practicality of enabling online alerts via streaming services. Proponents of the established system say it is proven and that alerts are available via radio and TV broadcast stations, analog and digital cable, satellite radio, cell phones and other mobile wireless devices.

In addition, some broadcasters worry that any lessening of the FCC’s regulatory jurisdiction over EAS could create enforcement issues while overseeing streaming platforms.

“Expanding emergency alerts through non-FCC regulated streaming services not only presents technological challenges, but also fundamental regulatory and compliance challenges,” iHeartMedia and Cumulus Media wrote in joint comments to the FCC.

The broadcasters expressed concerns that internet-based services such as Netflix, Spotify and Hulu operate from centralized platforms, which if enabled with emergency alert capabilities could leave them susceptible to hackers.

“An intentional hack into one of these platforms by an actor with the malicious intent to cause public panic through false emergency alerts could have very broad national impact, all outside the regulatory control of the FCC,” iHeartMedia and Cumulus wrote.

It’s also not clear how a national streaming service could receive and then geographically-target locally generated alert messages in a timely manner, they said, thus undermining the current alerting system.

“Complicated if not infeasible”

The National Association of Broadcasters expressed similar concerns in reply comments: “Extending EAS obligations to internet streaming services would be complicated, if not infeasible.”

NAB sees maintaining a “reliable EAS” as a crucial calling of all broadcasters. Reliability of alerting was one of the issues cited by Congress when it told the FCC to explore ways to coordinate multiple technologies for advanced alerting.

The NAB said the only online audio outlets that currently may retransmit EAS messages are websites and apps that simulcast radio stations.

“As a general matter, the streaming feeds at the broadcast station are originated upstream of the EAS encoder/decoder in the programming chain, meaning that an EAS alert is typically relayed only if it occurs while a station’s own programming is broadcast on-air. If an alert occurs during a commercial break in the on-air programming, when different content is inserted into the online stream, the EAS alert is not usually retransmitted to the listener or viewer,” NAB wrote.

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In addition, pure-play online content streamers are not “well-positioned to participate in the existing EAS ecosystem” for live streaming feeds or on-demand content, according to NAB. “In general, online streamers lack the infrastructure to geographically localize any alert,” it wrote.

And the association theorizes that using IP addresses to geofence the dissemination of alerts could raise even more issues.

NAB concludes: “It remains unclear how the FCC could extend the EAS rules to largely unregulated internet streamers or ensure the reliability and security of EAS over the internet. Therefore, NAB respectfully submits that the commission should report to Congress that enabling EAS alerts to consumers provided through the internet would be too complex and likely infeasible at this time.”

National Public Radio agreed with the overwhelming majority of comments in saying that streaming services should not be required to provide EAS alerts.

“NPR also asks the commission to be mindful of imposing any potential costs that would result when adopting new requirements, especially for under-resourced public broadcasting entities,” NPR wrote. “Requiring public radio stations to provide EAS alerts through internet streams could introduce cost and possibly significant complexity.”

Further, stations do not completely control the end-user player experience with their streams, and some streams have sponsorship message insertion, which can interrupt an alert, NPR pointed out.

“It would be almost impossible for a station to monitor and verify that EAS alerts air on all of the different streaming players and aggregators, so measuring and logging compliance would be difficult,” NPR said.

NPR said the NOI’s definition of “streaming services” is quite broad and included websites, applications and services that are nationally focused and stream on-demand content.

NPR did suggest that current EAS participants should be encouraged to furnish EAS alerts over the internet on a voluntary basis when feasible.

REC Networks, a low-power FM advocate, made the following observation in its comments: “As many people listen to audio streaming services through a wireless device, they already have a tool, a much more reliable tool on their phone (Wireless Emergency Alerts) that can do the same thing — if not better — than what the inquiry suggests should be imposed on small and large streaming services.”

Other views

However, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Weather Service supports the efforts to extend alerts to the internet and streaming services. Specifically, it believes the use of streaming services for emergency alert information will expand message dissemination, particularly to younger audiences.

“According to the Pew Research Center, 61% of U.S. consumers aged between 18 and 29 say an online streaming service is the primary way they watch television now,” NOAA officials wrote in reply comments to the FCC.

Technology licensing company Xperi Corp. believes the nation’s digital alerting ecosystem does need “reimagining,” but rather than adopting internet capabilities, it believes the FCC should make its HD Radio technology an integral component of the digital emergency alerting fabric.

“Not only can HD Radio broadcasting serve as a model for how to integrate EAS notifications with other digital technologies, but HD Radio technology should play a central role in any efforts to modernize the EAS, providing important resiliency and redundancy,” Xperi wrote.

Xperi said HD Radio would allow for the use of Common Alerting Protocol elements that can be leveraged to render message text, graphics and audio that maximize the accessibility and effectiveness of emergency alert information.

And what about streamers?

The Digital Media Association (DiMA), whose members include pure-play online content streamers like Pandora and Spotify, believes it may be it may be feasible to complete some, but not all, steps required for end-to-end transmission of EAS alerts through the internet, specifically, via the music pure-play streaming services offered by DiMA member companies.

“While receiving and processing EAS alerts may be technically possible, however, the national and global nature of these streaming services, which operate as apps on hardware devices or through websites relying on networks these services have no control over to transmit data, makes monitoring for, retransmitting, and delivering EAS alerts to end users infeasible, if not impossible,” DiMA told the FCC.

Therefore, “rather than increasing the reach of EAS, streaming services’ involvement will duplicate and possibly interfere with activities of existing participants, including broadcasters, cable systems and telecommunications providers, and others who remain better positioned to deliver clear, targeted and relevant alerts to local communities,” DiMA wrote in its comments.

Comment on this or any article. Email radioworld@futurenet.com.

The FCC Inquiry

The commission noted in March that Congress had instructed it to conduct an inquiry to examine the feasibility of updating the Emergency Alert System to enable or improve alerts to consumers provided through the internet, including through streaming services.

“Accordingly, in this Notice of Inquiry, we seek comment on the definition of ‘streaming services’ and whether it would be technically feasible for streaming services to complete each step that EAS participants complete under the commission’s rules in ensuring the end-to-end transmission of EAS alerts, including monitoring for relevant EAS alerts, receiving and processing EAS alerts, retransmitting EAS alerts, presenting EAS alerts in an accessible manner to relevant consumers, and testing.”

Congress also told it to look into the feasibility of improving alerts to consumers that are already delivered over the internet. “Accordingly we seek to establish whether it is feasible for EAS participants to leverage the internet to offer the full feature suite of the Common Alerting Protocol to the public.”

The NOI included many specific questions and issues that these concepts raise. You can read it in a PDF here. The discussion starts on page 26, paragraph 57.

The post The FCC Studies Internet EAS Alerting appeared first on Radio World.

The author is director, RF engineering at Shively Labs.

Just about anything can happen to cause failure in an RF system.

Antenna damage from wind, falling ice, lightning, tower work, vandalism, loose connections and aging components are just a few. When an engineer has multiple systems to take care of, something always seems to be in need of attention.

One way we have some control over such failures is regular system maintenance.

Caption:
Burns are visible where wire had been used to secure a flexible 3-inch line.

Have you ever checked site parameters after a significant weather event and found that some parameter had changed — not to the point of failure, but enough to prompt an investigation? Then upon a closer look you found damage that needed repair?

Or perhaps on a routine site visit, you discovered excessive heat on one or more components, and upon further investigation found an elbow that was nearly kaput — it would have failed catastrophically within weeks or days.

This is proactive maintenance and repair. If these near-misses haven’t happened to you, they likely will.

Had you been unable to check those readings after that storm and thus could not notice increasing VSWR, or had you not visited that site and noticed the hot elbow, the condition would have persisted, worsened and eventually failed, taking your station off the air.

That call usually comes at midnight on Super Bowl weekend.

These damaged components are an example of the “outside in” sort of burn that can occur when lines pass too close or touch other coax or tower members.

Checking sites that have suffered through extreme weather events is a prudent practice. So are regular visits, even to sites that may be considered trouble-free. The periodicity will vary — more frequent for trouble sites, perhaps quarterly or even semiannually for more reliable sites.

Annual tower climbs are great if it’s in the budget, but when they are not possible, we come back to intimate knowledge of system performance and those baselines, and running history logs that allow us to review for any indication that a problem has started and at what rate it is changing.

This can be useful information when determining if you need to scramble to make a maintenance visit immediately or can schedule for a later date.

Sample issues

Some things to look for when inspecting for damage in an antenna:

• Loss of dry air pressure, whether entirely or through a slow leak.
• Missing or damaged radiators. Pay close attention to the ends of the radiator and the feed points.
• Kinked, compressed or burned cables.
• Broken or unsealed radomes and/or plugged drains that cause water to collect.

In more complex systems, the power dividers and coaxial lines should be installed without undue mechanical stress on the components.

The coax should have the appropriate hangers and fasteners where they cross tower members or other antenna feed components. Consult the manufacturer for specific recommendations and best practices.

Antennas that have deicers systems usually have an external wiring harness to distribute AC power to each heating element within each radiator. The manufacturer will have the resistive values for each element and current draw to expect.

An ammeter measurement of each leg of the circuit, including the neutral, will give the first clues to the condition of the deicer system.

If the wiring harness was not installed correctly or fasteners have fallen away over time, the harness can hang in the high RF environment. This can cause reflected power issues at the transmitter and changes in coverage; it can cause currents to be induced into the wiring harness, and voltages large enough to cause arcing between the conductors of the wiring harness and tower members or other cables that pass in close proximity.

This is an excerpt of an article “Tips for RF System Installation and Maintenance” you can read in full in Radio World’s “Mission-Critical: Maintaining Your Transmitter Site” ebook.

The post Tips for RF System Installation and Maintenance appeared first on Radio World.

The Dec. 22 issue of Radio World features our Buyer’s Guide for antennas, RF support and power products.

Hank Landsberg is president of Sine Control Technology. The company has a new offering called the HP-200-1-TX.

Radio World: What is the new product?

Hank Landsberg: It’s a lower-cost version of our top-selling, highest-performance surge suppressor. The model number will be HP200-1-TX. It will be suitable for use at transmitter sites, hence the “TX.” It’s rated at 200,000 surge-amps per phase, so it’s ideal for use in high-lightning locales.

RW: How will radio stations use it?

Landsberg: It will be an excellent choice for use with solid-state transmitters that run on 240 volt single-phase power. These are very popular from manufacturers like Nautel and GatesAir, but they are also vulnerable to power supply failure caused by AC power line spikes and surges.

Our existing model HP200-1 has been very effective at eliminating this source of transmitter failure; the new model will make it more affordable without compromising performance.

The HP200-1-TX will be for 120/240 volt single and “split” phase power. It should be installed close to the main electrical panel where the Neutral and Ground wires are tied together.

The unit will also provide a Remote Status Output that can be interfaced to any transmitter remote control system. It will alert the user if there is a power failure or if a fuse in the PowerClamp unit needs to be replaced.

RW: What else should we know? Cost?

Landsberg: Like all PowerClamp surge suppressors, this unit uses a hybrid of multiple suppression circuits to achieve a very low clamping level — just a few volts above the sine wave peak. It’s installed in parallel with the load. There is no voltage loss, nor does its performance degrade over time.

Pricing is not determined yet, but it should be about 25% below the current model with identical performance.

Info: www.henryeng.com or call 562-493-3589 in California.

The post Sine Control Adds Lower-Cost PowerClamp appeared first on Radio World.

I consider it my mission to stay on top of tech — always reading, watching and digging. It is my passion to bring custom solutions to broadcast customers.

I frequently am inspired by software, networking and virtualization technologies used across so many industries, tried and true solutions that easily could benefit local radio.

Generally, IT infrastructure already exists in a broadcast facility in the form of routers, firewalls, switches and virtualization stacks from various vendors. It is imperative to make sure that this infrastructure is designed correctly, with security and functionality in mind.

In our industry, most of us have become accustomed to working with less-than-ideal equipment, not always implemented with the best, most secure, most efficient design in mind. Whenever possible, I use free and open-source software (FOSS) tools for my customers, even “retrofitting around” pre-existing equipment when a redesign is not yet feasible.

With FOSS, community-driven development allows for unique and powerful features, equal to or greater than proprietary solutions. In a time where security should be of the highest priority, I like knowing that source code is free-and-clear to audit at any time by anyone in the world. FOSS can offer significant cost savings to clients, and many times, make doing a project that would otherwise be cost-prohibitive possible.

But misunderstood or misconfigured tech is often more problematic and insecure than not having it at all. I have a lab where I can test software, virtualization, networking and proprietary broadcast hardware and software, and I have remote access to broadcast equipment in the radio stations and labs of partners and clients all over the world.

Working remotely

The pandemic has taught us that remote work, even for broadcasters, is surprisingly doable. With so many at home — aside from audio transport, more on that later — connecting to PCs station-side with tools like TeamViewer, VNC and LogMeIn have been the go-to solution.

But broadcast engineers like Jobie Sprinkle at WFAE in Charlotte, Henrik Poulsen at Radio Nordjyske in Aalborg, Denmark, and Tim Aquilina at 92.7 Mix FM in Maroochydore, Australia, have been looking for a way to give talent physical control again. And they are not alone.

Air talent around the world have grown up pushing physical buttons and adjusting physical faders and knobs without needing to see what they are doing because of muscle-memory. Today, it is possible to build the creature comforts at home that talent has been accustomed to in studios for decades, while embracing new technologies never before possible. It can be done, even on a budget, by combining tools used by IT professionals across all industries with the plethora of tools already designed for broadcasters.

Security concerns

It has always been considered bad practice to open firewall ports to internal services across the public internet, especially when the data is unencrypted. But I still see it happening at broadcast facilities all over the world.

Today, security is of the highest priority, so, using encrypted VPNs with additional internal and external firewall rules in place are the way to go. IPSec, OpenVPN and Wireguard are some of the most common VPN technologies, as well as proprietary vendor-specific ones. SD-WAN, although a buzzword of late, is very powerful and allows for global networks of all kinds of devices.

In all cases, encryption at the highest level available should be used.

Getting Into WheatNet remotely

Working from home myself, I wanted to test the reliability of remote physical control of gear from Wheatstone. In my home office lab sits a Wheatstone Sideboard. It is connected to a full Wheatstone AOIP system over 1,000 miles away. The Sideboard gives me real, physical, tactile control over a Utility Mixer — an 8-channel virtual console in a 1 RU Wheatstone Blade.

This is the intended purpose of a Sideboard, and it usually happens locally, but in this case, the Blade is in another time zone. With the Sideboard, I can select any source on the remote WheatNet system and make it available in the Utility Mixer I am accessing remotely.

So while I am controlling the mix locally, the mix itself is happening in the remote lab. Wheatstone supports using their automation control interface (ACI) between devices over a network, both locally and remote. the Sideboard is just one device on their list of control surfaces that can do this.

To make it possible in my lab, I have chosen a stack of FOSS tools including a router/firewall from pfSense with built-in OpenVPN. I set up an openVPN server on a static public IP address in my lab. On the remote-to-me lab’s side of things, it is behind a consumer firewall with a dynamic IP address. Behind that firewall is a PC connected to the internal internet network on one Interface, and the WheatNet network on another. It runs an OpenVPN Client and connects over the internet to the server in my lab.

In OpenVPN on both sides, I am using TAP Interfaces, bridged to each local WheatNet network. On the tunnel, there is no routing happening, it’s all layer 2, and so the devices on either side do not need a gateway defined to be able to talk to each other. In this way, I am effectively extending the same WheatNet Network across the VPN tunnel. See Fig. 1.

Fig. 1: Extending the network with a VPN tunnel.

Climbing the firewall

Sometimes, due to time, budget or hardware constraints, setting up VPN tunnels between two sites via dedicated hardware is not always possible. This is where a newer technology called SD-WAN, or software-defined wide-area networking, can be helpful.

ZeroTier One, Nubula and Tailscale are examples of this and employ magic (UDP hole-punching) between firewalls to establish connections between devices on an internal network on either side, without the need to insecurely open firewall ports or use hardware VPNs. All data is encrypted end-to-end and allows bridging and routing securely through the internet behind dynamic IPs behind firewalls on both sides.

This is an exciting technology that is making waves across all industries, though setup and configuration can be a bit more daunting than standard VPNs.

Transporting the audio

Solutions for getting audio from point A to point B are in huge supply. Comrex, Tieline, Barix and others have complete lines of hardware devices that do this effectively and efficiently. And Wheatstone has the Blade 4 with audio codecs built in.

Real-time audio in the virtualized world — software to software, and software to hardware — has become the Holy Grail in our ongoing pandemic world, and products that do this have come a long way, too. Some are able to use the high-quality, freely available (and FOSS!) Opus codec via SIP-managed connections; others are web-based like ipDTL and Cleanfeed. LUCI Software offers solutions for mobile, PC, Mac and Linux (think LUCI Live and LUCI Studio). These can work via SIP or direct connection, and have become my go-to solution lately because of their immense flexibility and lifetime licensing fees.

Blurring the lines

Early this year, I heard from a client who wanted to hire a new afternoon talent, but she is located nearly 100 miles away from the radio station. Is this doable, and on a budget? The show would continue through the pandemic and beyond.

I got to work designing and implementing a cost-effective solution.

The station is a customer of WideOrbit automation for radio and runs version 4,0, part of the newest incarnation, and provides “joint control” of each radio station. To obtain this control remotely and securely, all that is needed is a VPN connection. I turned to my trusty pfSesne/OpenVPN combo at the radio station, with an OpenVPN client running on a station-provided laptop at the talent’s house.

WideOrbit’s RadioClient, a native PC application, connects to the station-side RadioServers through the VPN tunnel, and the talent can control the radio station as if sitting in the studio. I configured workflows on hotkeys to route talent’s audio directly to air, take the feed off the air, send caller-audio to the talent, and route the backfeed to hear pre- and post-cut audio for voice tracking.

The off-the-shelf laptop is using a RødeCaster Pro for its audio interface, with an Electro-Voice RE20 plugged straight in. It has a solid DSP-based mic processor with a preset for the RE20, a listen and record bus and allows a mix-minus for the talent to hear return audio mixed with outgoing audio.

Fig. 2: WideOrbit Automation for Radio running on a laptop at talent’s house connected via OpenVPN, with joint control of the radio station, audio from the RødeCaster Pro transported back to the radio station via LUCI Live SE.

The client is particularly sensitive about subscription fees, so audio transport is handled via a one-time licensed version of LUCI Live SE on the laptop. This audio stream, along with WideOrbit control, is sent via the OpenVPN tunnel.

Station-side, a Windows virtual machine with an AoIP driver, is running LUCI Studio. LUCI allows different send and receive codecs, tailoring the codecs to the use-case.

In both directions, I wanted the lowest latency possible. I wanted return audio to be stereo, so that the talent feels like they are mixed well with the music. And so audio received from the talent uses a low-delay, mono, high-quality AAC codec. Return audio uses a stereo AAC codec with low delay and slightly lower quality. Currently, LUCI Studio is handling one bidirectional stream, but it is capable of 64.

Finally, phones are handled via Broadcast Bionics’ Caller One, running on a virtual machine at the station. Calls are answered via a web browser over the VPN remotely, with caller audio transported back to the talent via LUCI Studio, mixed on the RødeCaster Pro, sent back to the station as mix via LUCI Live SE, received by LUCI Studio, and recorded into WideOrbit as a produced package.

All of this does not feel remote for the talent, does not sound remote for the listener, and does not have an ongoing cost for the client.

Remote work is now a part of our lives across all industries. We live in a fantastic time of technology, where so much is available. And, now more than ever, it is possible for broadcasters, too. Doing it securely should be of the highest priority.

The author is owner of Fontastic LLC, a broadcast services company focusing on software and IT, helping radio stations around the world with integration projects. Email: chris@fontasticllc.com Twitter: fonte935

The post Take a Page from the IT Handbook appeared first on Radio World.

The National Association of Broadcasters has announced the NAB Show New York will return to New York City at the Javits Center on Oct. 19–20.

Produced by the NAB, the NAB Show New York is designed to be a more intimate opportunity for the broadcast, media and entertainment industry to present and discover product updates, new applications and workflow efficiencies to deliver superior audio and video experiences.

Additional details, including registration, will be available in the coming months, the NAB said.

More information is available at NABShowNY.com.

The post NAB Announces Plans for NAB Show New York in 2022 appeared first on Radio World.

Nielsen on Thursday morning announced that it plans to move forward with its introduction of Broadband-Only (BBO) Homes in its local television market measurements, beginning in January 2022.

The Media Rating Council (MRC) recently completed an audit of the BBO Homes. And, just after the Closing Bell on Wall Street, shared several “perspectives” on the matter.

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WASHINGTON, D.C. — The Copyright Royalty Judges on December 23 announced that they have adopted existing rates and terms for the retransmission of over-the-air television and radio broadcast stations by cable television systems to their subscribers.

Here’s what that means.

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Corpus Christi, Tex.-based Mako Communications found itself with a group of low-power TV stations with a unique trait: the deadline to build them isn’t until 2023.

It decided to sell them, attracting a variety of buyers and prices. Now, it has a buyer for a facility serving the home of Sierra Nevada Brewing Co.

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It bills itself as a Chicago-based multimedia company that offers extensive radio programming offerings including mix show syndication, production and imaging.

Now, the entity majority-controlled by Robert Jamrog is poised to become the licensee of a FM translator licensed to serve Monterey-Salinas, Calif.

The seller? One of the biggest acquirers of radio stations in the last decade.

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For Nashville radio listeners, there’s been a longtime presence of a unique Classic Hits station targeted to those that may very well been labeled a “hippie” some 50+ years ago.

Class A WHPY-FM is Hippie Radio, and together with an AM/FM combo in Gallatin, Tenn., and a group of stations in Warsaw, Ind., comprise Kensington Digital Media.

Now, its founder has selected the GM of the Warsaw stations to serve as the company’s COO.

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