The life of a Broadcast Engineer. I have to get up at 7am tomorrow to drive two hours away for some emergency work. Someone needs to keep the hamster wheels spinning!
@TheGeekJedi you know, I just watched this interesting video today regarding a transmitter breakdown tape the BBC used in the 1960's to broadcast if there were issues. Do stations still use that sort of thing in a digital sense today? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ENRbOWDXmI
@wpgne I do radio, so there’s really nothing we can do to let people know that there are difficulties. We just try and build in a lot of redundancy. In this case, we had everything set up knowing we would eventually have a problem. We were set to make the change in two weeks, but that got moved to tomorrow.
The IP circuit we use is having issues resulting in dropouts of the audio.
@TheGeekJedi perhaps I should clarify my statement: if there's a complete loss of signal from the studio for a given period, do some transmitters have any type of automatic standby local audio they can switch to until the link is restored (with the transmitter still operational)? In the case of the tape I've linked to, it was for TV and would kick in to broadcast on the aurall frequency during an outage.
@wpgne Oh sure. Most new transmitters and IP audio transport devices have built-in streaming clients and USB file support. In my case, I have backup play out systems that mirror the main ones - they can take over in the event of an outage.
@wpgne You’re welcome. For a little further clarity, here’s a link to one kind of IP transport device that I use. The studio to transmitter link is either fiber or Ubiquiti radio depending on the situation. https://www.bswusa.com/STL-Moseley-Rincon-422-P3866.aspx
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