Industry News

The author is chair of the India chapter of the DRM Consortium.

All India Radio (AIR) has adopted the Digital Radio Mondiale (DRM) standard for digital terrestrial radio broadcasting in MW and SW bands. Thirty-eight high-power DRM transmitters are carrying regular digital transmissions, either in pure digital and/or in simulcast mode.

Sometime back, AIR had issued instructions to increase the transmission hours of such transmitters in pure digital mode. Also each of the four metro cities had been asked to operate one transmitter in Pure Digital Mode. Over 80% of the Indian population was expected to be able to receive radio programs in digital. And this is before most of these transmitters started operating in pure DRM digital mode.

The COVID-19 lockdown has adversely affected the digital transmission schedule in pure digital but we are confident that it will be restored soon.

The stakeholders’ efforts are also paying off, as the ecosystem for DRM digital receivers has evolved in India, from domestic chipset development to receiver design and production.

The Indian auto industry has responded very positively. Over 2 million cars on Indian roads have line-fit DRM receivers, and this number is increasing every day.

Five leading automotive manufacturers — Maruti/Suzuki, Hyundai, Mahindra, MG Motors and Toyota — are rolling out cars with built-in DRM receivers. Most of the other leading car manufacturers are understood to be in the process of incorporating them but are waiting to see the demand first.

Development and production of standalone DRM receivers is also being taken up fast by Indian as well as foreign companies.

Made-in-India Avion DRM receivers are already available online at Amazon. The DRM receiver prototype by Inntot, another India company, has been successfully demonstrated. The company paired with Clarion for manufacturing DRM car receivers and is looking for partners for starting large-scale production of standalone DRM receivers.

Foreign companies — Gospell, Starwaves, Titus and Nedis — have come out with a number of models of standalone as well as car models of DRM receivers. Cambridge Consultants in the U.K. have just unveiled the prototype of a low-cost DRM receiver. Korean companies RF2Digital and AlgorKorea are also developing software-defined DRM radios.

To further boost the presence of digital radio in the country, AIR has taken a number of initiatives and it held a DRM Stakeholders Meeting in February, which was addressed by the CEO and Member (Finance) of the Prasar Bharati. A Project Management Unit (PMU) has also been constituted to ensure that DRM Digital Radio is rolled out successfully.

AIR is broadcasting in the FM band also for local coverage. It provides about 43% coverage of the 1.3 billion population. Private broadcasters in India are allowed to broadcast in FM only but it is not possible to meet their demand for additional FM services, particularly in big cities, due to limited spectrum available for FM broadcasting. Their coverage is also limited to about 40%.

Therefore, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), the broadcasting sector regulator, has recommended that private FM broadcasters be allowed to broadcast in digital in the white spaces in the VHF band II (FM band). Though TRAI has not specified which digital broadcast standard is to be used, it is recommended that white spaces may be auctioned by 200 kHz bandwidth blocks.

India is currently carrying out trials of ITU-approved standards, including DRM, in the FM band. DRM is fully compatible with the existing FM band transmissions. It utilizes the unused white spaces in the spectrum, technically unavailable for further analog FM expansion.

Using DRM, in the allocated 200 kHz bandwidth, a broadcaster can transmit up to six high-quality audio services along with a host of value-added services and Emergency Warning Functionality (EWF). All digital services work without disturbing the existing analog FM services.

DRM standard can be supported natively on all mobile phones based on the already available tuners for analog FM reception. No additional hardware and, therefore, no additional design or component cost is required to enable DRM digital FM support on these phones.

The DRM App for mobile phones has already been developed and demonstrated by a number of organizations. Only the mobile phone manufacturers need to provide access of the baseband digital output. The mobile phone industry is also expecting the clear policy announcement for the country to start incorporating this functionality in future phone models.

For legacy phone models, external FM front-end dongles have been developed. These dongles along with the already developed DRM radio app can be used to receive full DRM FM functions. This has been demonstrated successfully by a number of developers.

As the DRM standard works in all the broadcast bands, most of the DRM desktop receivers available today or in development are already prepared for DRM in the FM band. Several of them have demonstrated their working in all the broadcast bands, including FM band.

The designers/manufacturers of DRM receivers are thus eagerly waiting for the official policy announcements of the Indian government to finalize the digital FM support in their DRM receiver models. Use of DRM in FM band by AIR and private broadcasters in India would motivate them further to incorporate DRM FM facility in the receivers being produced and/or designed by them.

It is thus the right time for India to go for digital broadcasting in the FM band, too, using the DRM standard already adopted in MW and SW bands. Indian industry is looking towards meeting the huge domestic demand and is ready for massive exports.

Read other recent stories and commentaries about digital radio.

Radio World welcomes comments on this or any story. Email radioworld@futurenet.com with “Letter to the Editor” in the subject field.

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The NAB Leadership Foundation is preparing for the 2021 edition of its Broadcast Leadership Training program, for which it is now accepting applications.

Now in its 21st year, BLT is an executive training program for the broadcast industry designed to prepare senior-level broadcasters to advance into ownership or executive positions. This includes the fundamentals of purchasing, owning and operating radio and TV stations.

NABLF especially encourages women and people of color to apply for the program.

This iteration of BLT will be a hybrid online and in-person model because of health and safety concerns regarding COVID-19. All education sessions planned through the end of 2020 will be held online. The inaugural session is scheduled to take place Sept. 24–25. The complete schedule will be announced in early October.

“As we transition to a hybrid online and in-person model, we look forward to expanding the reach of the Broadcast Leadership Training program,” said Diane Sutter, BLT program founder and dean, as well as the founder and CEO of ShootingStar Broadcasting. “Now, more than ever, it is imperative that we cultivate the next class of diverse industry leaders and equip them with the knowledge and training to advance their careers.”

The application deadline for the 2021 BLT program is Aug. 19. For more information or to apply for the BLT program, visit the website.

The post NABLF Accepting 2021 Broadcast Leadership Training Applications appeared first on Radio World.

The author is membership program director of the National Federation of Community Broadcasters. NFCB commentaries are featured regularly at www.radioworld.com.

Pew Research has issued its latest findings on the lead up to the U.S. election in November. The opinions of 11,000+ polled voters may give your radio station ideas on how to create new interest and conversation with your programming.

Pew’s figures revealed that, even amid major upheavals nationally, political affiliation since 2018 for thousands of Americans remains largely unchanged. There certainly have been shifts. The largest flights were among people of color and college-educated whites. However, whatever you think of media’s approaches to the news, early indications are that coverage is primarily seen as informational. Voters still feel as they do. Such is not a bad thing. In fact, this clarity can help us ask better questions to those in our medium.

[Read: Community Broadcaster: Why Look Away?]

What can radio’s role be in an election year? NFCB will explore that issue in a webinar Aug. 12, but it’s a subject all of us, commercial and noncommercial, are trying to figure out.

One possibility for your election coverage is to cover tension responsibly. Ariana Pekary just posted an announcement of her departure from MSNBC that may be instructive about what to avoid. In her view, pursing particular metrics incentivized offering a platform to fringe voices, stoking divisions, and cultivating an us-versus-them ethos. Chasing ratings, she writes, was “practically baked in to the editorial process — and those decisions affect news content every day. Likewise, it’s taboo to discuss how the ratings scheme distorts content, or it’s simply taken for granted, because everyone in the commercial broadcast news industry is doing the exact same thing.”

It is highly tempting to cover the worst aspects of any side of an issue. Indeed, conflict creates excitement and interest, but it may also normalize a distorted position to represent conservatives and liberals. As Pekary points out, commercial media has to change this. It can start with radio.

Another strategy for election coverage is seeking to tackle left-right splits in your community. The GroundTruth Project interviewed two academics on this subject. Reframing questions to avoid defensiveness; and talking with people about how they think, rather than what they think are among the ideas.

And finally, perhaps your radio station can use its website or airwaves to help answer voters’ questions and correct misunderstandings and assumptions they hear from friends or read on social media and text message exchanges. Make a little time for First Draft’s Infotheque 2020 virtual conference, which was held this week and posted its sessions on YouTube. You may discover ways to help your audience by addressing disinformation and, in turn, providing them assurances that you give back to your community.

Election day is less than three months away and listeners are hungry for your station to be the main dish in their information diet. We as radio can contribute with many innovative approaches and a commitment to do more.

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The author is broadcast engineer for Second Opinion, an authorized Telos Alliance integrator.

OMAHA, Neb. — As the coronavirus pandemic began to greatly affect radio stations across the country, many were scrambling to produce and maintain program material for their media services.

KIOS in Omaha, Neb., was in a difficult situation since the radio station studios are located in an Omaha Public Schools building and the school system was being ordered to close. Did this order to close mean everyone needed to evacuate the school’s property, including the radio station?

A conference call was scheduled to discuss the issue and how we would prepare to evacuate the radio station studios. KIOS had recently completed a studio project of its four studios. This involved remodeling the studios physically, replacing some studio equipment with Telos Axia Fusion consoles from Broadcasters General Store, and upgrading the ENCO DAD studio automation system.

Three important questions had to be answered: how to remotely control the program; how to remotely access the automation and console; and how to provide real-time audio or voice tracks from a remote location. I had just addressed the same situation with WHYY in Philadelphia, as we were halfway through a studio system replacement and needed to answer the same questions.

Fortunately, using an AoIP system is the same from one facility to another, no matter the operational size. First, my equipment recommendation for controlling the audio console and automation is a utility computer to use with technical applications. One of the applications is the Axia SoftSurface software installed on the utility computer. Remote control of the console is taken care of using TeamViewer to access SoftSurface.

Next, we looked at the ENCO automation remote control. During an ENCO software upgrade to the automation system technical support normally has remote access to the system, as they did have remote access setup.  We used this remote access setup to remote control the ENCO automation system.

By using this remote access operation in a different way than using TeamViewer, it provided the ability to remotely access both the console and automation with full control from the same remote location computer.

Lastly, the most difficult question to answer is the real-time audio or voice tracks. We only had the internet as our method to provide a media for real-time audio. This would require a codec, same as we use for live remote broadcasts. It would need to be either software codec from a computer or hardware with a network connection at the remote location. If multiple locations are being used, then there would need to be multiple hardware units or traded less units between remote locations.

Since we are restricting contact between one another, trading a unit between locations was not the best solution. Additionally, there is an audio timing issue between audio from the automation at the studio and the codec audio feed that is slightly delayed. This can cause a train wreck on the final program product if not watched very carefully.

Using voice tracks, the remote location needs to have either remote ENCO WebDAD automation or prerecorded audio to be dropped into the ENCO system by Dropbox (file transfer system). The prerecorded remote voice tracking option was the best choice for KIOS. They would not have to worry about the timing issues of a codec and did not have the WebDAD software option installed for ENCO.

KIOS did not fully evacuate the radio station studios, but is operating with a limited staff. Some on-air shifts are using the remote control of the Axia Fusion Console and ENCO automation with prerecorded voice tracks as described. This remote operation will continue until further notice.

I appreciate being involved with KIOS preparing and executing the remote broadcast operation and the team of people involved: General Manager Ken Dudzik, Program Director Todd Hatton, Local Host, “All Things Considered,” Michael Hogan, former Chief Engineer Richard Dennis and current Chief Engineer Chuck Ramold.

Radio World User Reports are testimonial articles intended to help readers understand why a colleague chose a particular product to solve a technical situation.

For information, contact Cam Eicher at Axia Systems/The Telos Alliance in Ohio at 1-216-241-7225 or visit www.telosalliance.com.

The post User Report: Axia Helps KIOS Make Workflow Changes appeared first on Radio World.

Here’s a peek inside new studios of CV Radio in Valencia, Spain.

Manufacturer AEQ shared photos and details about this turnkey project.

There are three studio rooms. Main control is equipped with a digital modular AEQ Forum mixer with 12 faders on the desk, while an AEQ Capitol IP compact digital mixer was installed in the “self-control” studio. Studios connect with AoIP using Dante.

“All studios are interconnected together by means of a Gigabit Ethernet network carrying the Audio over IP,” AEQ wrote in a project summary.

“Forum sends and receives 32 audio signals. Capitol IP manages 16 channels. Two PCs running AudioPlus radio automation software are also part of the audio network. This way, all multi-pair wiring between studios is eliminated while flexibility is drastically enhanced.”

Each studio can record and broadcast at the same time, although usually the self-control studio is for recording while main control is used for broadcasting.

In both cases, the AEQ mixers allow routing of a particular signal over a dedicated path in order to send the on-air program signal. Thus the signal provided by AEQ AudioPlus automation system can be sent on-air, and the two studios are released for recording tasks while a playout list is being broadcast.

An exterior rack holds AudioPlus servers, Venus IP audiocodec, Ethernet switches and radio links to send the program signal to its transmission center.

Content is managed by the AudioPlus automation system, and a continuity system records audio channels 24 hours a day, from which excerpts can be extracted. An AEQ Phoenix Venus codec in the studio pairs with an AEQ Alio codec in an OB van for remote work.

The project was lead by Bernardo Saiz, AEQ’s sales area manager for the Valencian community, in coordination with CV Radio technical services.

Send news and photos of projects to Radio World at radioworld@futurenet.com.

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It’s not surprising these days when a major media group reports sour Q2 results, but iHeartMedia’s financial announcement on Thursday was still eye-popping.

The largest radio broadcast group in the United Sates put an exclamation point on exactly how disastrous the COVID-19 pandemic has been for radio broadcasters by posting a 47% decline in revenue for the period from April–June 2020 compared to a year ago.

“The challenges that we have faced due to COVID-19 were unprecedented and had a severe, negative impact on our revenue in the second quarter,” said Bob Pittman, chairman and CEO of iHeartMedia.

[Read: iHeartMedia’s Q1 Results Dinged by COVID-19]

iHeartMedia’s second quarter reveal on Thursday didn’t come as much of a surprise to radio observers. Other major radio groups have been reporting very poor Q2 numbers due to the economic crisis caused by COVID-19, but now we can see just how steep those revenue declines were earlier this year.

The company saw revenue drop by 50% in April and 49% in May compared to one year ago, according to iHeartMedia’s financial report. Overall revenue was $488 million for the second quarter.

“[iHeartMedia] revenue suffered with a big drop in April, but it’s been showing improvement in each successive month, including the just closed July. It’s still too early to predict the slope of the recovery with any certainty,” Pittman said on Thursday.

Broadcast revenue suffered the biggest fall at iHeartMedia in Q2, dropping 57% to $244 million compared to $561 million in 2019. In contrast to broadcast, the company’s radio networks were down 38.4%; smart audio down 28%; and digital up 2.4%, mostly driven by podcasting, which was up 103%, Pittman reported.

iHeartMedia has taken steps to cut expenses to help navigate the financial impact of the pandemic. “Corporate expenses decreased 36.1% during the second quarter compared to the prior year quarter as a result of lower employee compensation, including variable incentive expenses and employee benefits resulting from expense reduction initiatives,” according to the company.

In addition, the COVID-19 pandemic has caused iHeartMedia to reexamine its real estate holdings going forward, and that includes iHeartMedia.

“We are taking a step back…looking at our organization, looking at things like real estate, which is a significant cost in this company,” said Rich Bressler, president and COO for iHeartMedia. “We continue to focus on maximizing liquidity and strengthening our capital structure during this period of uncertainty.”

iHeartMedia’s well publicized modernization efforts announced earlier this year are helping the bottom line, according to Bressler. “These initiatives remain on-track to deliver the expected $250 million of expense savings in 2020. We expect our modernization initiatives to deliver $100 million of annualized run rate savings by mid-2021. In addition to those savings, we are continuing to evaluate our cost structure to identify efficiencies.

“Our areas of focus will include continued optimization of our real estate footprint and the adoption of technology solutions that will drive increased efficiency and effectiveness in our operations,” Bressler said.

In response to a question from Sebastiano Petti, an equity research analyst at JP Morgan Chase and Co., Pittman on Thursday was blunt about squeezing additional savings out of new work from home strategies that have emerged during the pandemic.

“I will tell you I was not a fan of a work-from-home company at all, but I’ve realized that there are some people in our company who can work as productively or more productively from home, and it has very beneficial financial impacts for us. So we’re examining everything. And again, it’s been one giant experiment,” Pittman said.

The post iHeartMedia Q2 Revenue Down by Nearly Half appeared first on Radio World.

The author is senior vice president for product development at Marketron.

Is there any doubt that radio is the best and most cost-effective reach medium ever created? For many decades, radio broadcasters have made a can’t-miss pitch to advertisers: although they are focused on one primary tactic (the linear broadcast), it is a highly differentiated, high-value product with great reach in a given geography. Most radio stations can point to a long and proven track record of highly successful results, with close ties to the communities and loyal audiences they serve.

But the radio business is facing significant and pressing challenges. As consumer behavior has evolved, today’s advertisers have had to adopt new strategies for reaching potential buyers. That means interacting with consumers wherever, whenever, and however they consume media, from traditional broadcasting to the full range of digital platforms. In order to offer a competitive advertising product in this highly complex market, radio organizations of all sizes are under pressure to augment their traditional broadcast advertising programs with a healthy mix of digital advertising product (both O&O and third-party).

[Read: Marketron Makes Broadcast Business Software Ebook Available]

If managed well, this digital transformation offers a powerful growth opportunity for broadcasters. By some estimates, the digital advertising marketplace is at least seven times larger than the traditional radio market. As a company with a large installed base in the radio community, Marketron has seen even smaller broadcasters who aggressively pursue digital advertising add at least 10% to the top line of their businesses within the first year. And some of them have added 20–30% in additional revenues.

The Changing Market

There’s no question that COVID-19 has had a significant impact on the radio business. We hope and expect the market to begin recovering in the second half of 2020, but radio revenues were already flat or even in slight decline prior to the pandemic. Two big reasons are the growth of the digital advertising market and the strong competition now posed by ad agencies.

In past decades, agencies were complementary partners to broadcasters — aggregating advertising across radio, television, and print and offering another market channel and services radio stations weren’t able to provide, such as creative. Fast forward to today, when agencies can now create highly integrated campaigns, targeted to specific objectives and employing a blizzard of different tactics: radio/TV/cable, print, OTT/CTV, internet display ads, video, search engine marketing, social media, outdoor advertising. Not only are these campaigns more measurable and targeted than traditional radio ads, but agencies can also offer creative development and metrics reporting.

The good news is that an effective digital transformation can enable radio stations to become effective competitors to agencies by maintaining ownership and control of client relationships, pricing, differentiation and targeting.

Making the Digital Transformation: Key Steps

Given those challenges and emerging new opportunities, growing numbers of radio broadcasters are taking the plunge and expanding into the digital advertising realm. But what are the best approaches, and how do you begin?

Most broadcasters already have a baseline of digital products in their mix, which they can use as the starting point to evolve their operation and develop new digital opportunities while continuing to maintain on-air products. That balancing act requires a carefully thought-out gameplan that addresses the following steps:

1. Vision. Create a vision and prepare for change in order to engage employees effectively and set the company up for success and future growth. As we’ve said, this requires a full organizational commitment from the top levels of leadership down through each level of the organization. Everyone must be fully committed to embedding digital advertising into the fabric of the business.
2. Design. Create your digital product suite. Although many radio stations are currently selling digital advertising on their O&O properties (e.g. display ads on the station’s website or social media channels), the ideal digital inventory should be a mix of O&O product and third-party advertising. These are ad products that appear on third-party platforms; e.g. paid social media ads, video pre-, post-, and mid-roll ads on OTT and CTV platforms.
3. Opportunity. Build an internal organization designed for success. This includes an incentive and compensation structure that takes into account the expanded world of digital advertising, as well as the appropriate new hires and skill sets.
4. Services. Create a business infrastructure with a consolidated set of technical services for creating a proposal, generating an order, invoicing, generating campaign reports, and facilitating renewals. All of these services should integrate seamlessly with your back-office system.

Looking Forward

For many broadcasters, expanding into the digital advertising realm might seem like a daunting task, and of course there are some significant challenges involved. However, the digital transformation reward is worth the journey, paying off in the powerful new growth opportunities that a carefully crafted mix of radio and digital inventory will deliver.

Not so far into the future, we see a world in which many radio broadcasters have made a successful leap to digital — so successful, in fact, that they can position themselves as specialty agencies with a highly differentiated product. A radio station can offer something the agency down the street can’t: a highly successful linear channel, offering a powerful public service to listeners with well-established relationships in the community.

With a sophisticated product offering and thoughtfully structured internal operations, stations will be able to charge a premium for a multichannel campaign that uniquely meets the key objectives of the campaign. The net-net: local broadcasters will be able to position themselves as a single source for highly integrated and effective campaigns that meet and exceed all of their advertisers’ objectives.

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Broadcast contract engineer Tim Walker wrote in to say how much he enjoyed reading solutions to problems from engineers in the field in past Workbench columns. It’s reassuring to see the display of engineering talent visible in the pages of Workbench.

Tim shares an experience with a Collins/Continental “Power Rock” 5 kW AM transmitter. This is a pulse-width-modulated transmitter that, in Tim’s case, was intermittently losing modulation of the RF envelope.

The culprit turned out to be a broken connection to the grid of the triode switch modulator tube (Fig. 1).

The soldered connection appears solid but was in fact broken, making intermittent contact with the grid ring as the temperature fluctuated and it vibrated from the high volume of cooling air through the tube compartment.

When Tim finally identified the problem, he was reminded of the welder’s adage:  “A good-looking weld is not always a good weld, but a good weld always looks good.” The same applies to electrical connections, so take nothing for granted when tracking down intermittent problems.

Early in my career, I was working with a consulting engineer, brought in by the station to try to determine why the transmitter would occasionally shut down, while the directional parameters went nuts.

The consultant and I walked to every tower. Using a long wooden broomstick, he rapped components in the base antenna tuning units, followed by a good rap to the coiled copper tube feedline to each tower. The station chief monitored operation and communicated the status over a two-way.

On the third tower, when the consultant whacked the copper feed tube, it broke right off the tower! The weld “looked” OK, but a good-looking weld is not always a good weld.

Connections need to be secure. This is especially true in older AM arrays.

Tip: Don’t Touch!

Projects engineer Dan Slentz and I were remembering the days of the big 50 kW transmitters, and the way the coils would “sing” with the modulating signal. You could actually hear the demodulated signal singing inside the transmitter, as well as in the tuning units at the tower base.

Dan found a memorable video on Reddit to share these memories with Workbench readers.

This would be a good video to post for your entire staff to watch. Hearing the advertisement’s phone number as the battery cable is arcing across the tower base is nothing short of amazing to someone who hasn’t experienced it.

The fact that you “work” on this stuff as a broadcast engineer should amaze your staff as well. Show it to them! Just another day in the life of a broadcast engineer.

Tip: UV sterilizer

Griffin Communications’ Radio Engineering Director Brett Gilbert, researching a simple way to decontaminate surfaces, found an interesting product from CureUV.

The company specializes in ultraviolet light sources that sterilize surfaces. One particular model that looks promising is the GermAwayUV Premier 35 Watt Handheld UVC Surface Sterilizer.

This handheld device is about the size of a cigar box and is supplied with a 6-foot AC cord. It is smaller than CureUV’s other industrial sterilizers and is priced at under $400 list. The device will effectively decontaminate surfaces from viruses, bacteria and molds.

It provides a quick and easy way of sanitizing surfaces, as you plug it in and slowly pass the lamp over the surface to be sanitized.  The bulb lasts up to 10,000 hours (about 1 year). In addition to the UV-C emitting bulb, brightened reflectors enhance the accuracy by up to 30%.

UV-C light is ultraviolet, in the C spectrum, and is especially efficient at destroying harmful microorganisms. In addition to being effective against a range of viruses, the UV-C light can be used to remediate mold, quickly killing mold spores.

UV-C light has a range of applications both residential and industrial. It’s used in food preparation settings to reduce contamination, as well as in hospitals, clinics and veterinarian offices to sanitize surfaces. The company offers a caution that Ultraviolet UV-C light is harmful to your eyes and skin, and users should never look directly at the bulb. The company recommends the use of safety glasses that can be ordered with the device.

But how do you know it’s working? As I read the description, that was my first question; I wondered whether this was snake oil.

The company acknowledges that this is a natural question, since disinfection is happening at a microscopic level. It includes a set of UV-C Visualizer Strips along with all GermAwayUV Surface Disinfection products. You place the UV-C Visualizer card on the surface you wish to disinfect and run the handheld sterilizer over it. The yellow strip on the card will change from a bright yellow to a light green.

Exposing the surface to the UV-C light until the strip turns green will ensure the surface has been treated properly, the company says. If there is no color change, you have to slow the rate at which you move the handheld sanitizer across the surface, or move the sanitizer closer to the surface.

The website was citing a shipping delay of eight to nine weeks at this writing. If you or your station invests in this device, please drop me a line to tell readers how it works out.

John Bisset has spent over 50 years in the broadcasting industry and is still learning. He handles western U.S. radio sales for the Telos Alliance. He holds CPBE certification with the Society of Broadcast Engineers and is a past recipient of the SBE’s Educator of the Year Award.

The post Workbench: A Good-Looking Weld Is Not Always a Good Weld appeared first on Radio World.

While I agree with most of the points raised by the author of “Why WWV and WWVH Still Matter,” as an engineer I’ve long abandoned zero beating WWV to calibrate local frequency references.

In fact I owned a WWVB comparator, basically a loop antenna and TRS receiver tuned to 60 kHz that permitted fairly precise calibration but took many minutes to center the reading due to the typical path instability of radio waves, even using the ground wave, which is only useful in daylight hours.

At night WWVB is unusable for frequency/phase measurements due to skywave propagation but is the best time for those so called atomic clocks to calibrate to the slow time code repeated once a minute on a daily basis.

So, how do I calibrate the frequency references of my frequency counters and spectrum analyzer used for broadcast engineering? The answer is GPS.

The line-of-sight microwave band signals provide much less jitter, especially when more than one SV is used for a timing solution. You can buy GPS timing receivers on eBay and elsewhere for under $100.  Add  a cheap patch antenna or a quality outdoor antenna and you’re good to go.

You’ll get both data for time of day and a precision 10 MHz reference signal you can lock to a synthesized RF signal generator to dial in any frequency precisely. And just in case a GPS signal is for some reason not available I have an old Rubidium Atomic Oscillator on hand, also quite inexpensive second or third hand.

So, ultimately as nice as WWV is to have around, except for WWVB there really isn’t a great need for HF time signals anymore.

The author is chief engineer of Monadnock Broadcasting Group in Keene, N.H.

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