• Contents for this Newsletter

About This Newsletter
Meeting Announcement
Upcoming Meeting Schedule
Meeting Minutes
Get Emergency Messages On You Wireless Device
Are You Flying Blind?
Amateur Radio News
Chapter 24 Web Site Features
SBE Short Circuits
Certification Exam Session Dates Announced For 2005
DTV Stations On The Air
SBE Member Resume Bank
Chapter Sustaining Members
Return to 2004 Newsletter Archives

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The Chapter 24 Newsletter is published monthly by Chapter 24 of the Society of Broadcast Engineers; Madison, Wisconsin. Original hard copy edited by Mike Norton on Pagemaker 5.0. Submissions of interest to the broadcast technical community are welcome. You can make your submissions by e-mail to:

© 2004 by SBE Chapter 24. Views expressed herein do not necessarily reflect the official positions of the Society, its officers, or its members. SBE Chapter 24 regrets, but is not liable for, any omissions or errors. The Chapter 24 Newsletter is published twelve times per year. Other SBE Chapters are permitted to use excerpts if attributed to the original author, sources, and SBE Chapter 24.

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Join us for this month's meeting when we celebrate the Holidays and toast the New Year in a relaxing atmosphere at the Timber Lodge Steak House. We'll gather in the bar area before heading to the dinning area. You can sign-up for the dinner on the Chapter 24 web site, http://www.sbe24.org, and follow the links to the December Holiday Part sign-up sheet.

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Chapter 24 of the Society of Broadcast Engineers met on Thursday, November 18, 2004 at WHA-TV in Madison, Wisconsin for the chapter’s monthly meeting. There were 9 members in attendance, 8 of whom were certified, and no guests.

The meeting was called to order at 7:02 PM by Chapter Chair Vicki Kipp. The minutes of the October meeting as published in the November newsletter were approved.

Paul Stoffel announced a Snell and Wilcox demonstration of their HD/SD production switcher on November 30th at the studios of WHA.

Membership Chair Paul Stoffel reported the chapter has 64 members, 43 of whom are certified. Treasurer Leslie Franzen submitted his reported that the chapter has a balance over $1,000 and we are in the black.

Sustaining Membership Chair Fred Sperry submitted his report on the recent renewals of Belden Wire & Cable, Norlight Telecommunications, and Wave Communications. The chapter currently has 22 sustaining members.

The deadline line for the November newsletter will be Friday, December 3rd at midnight and the folding party will be held Wednesday, December 8th at 5:30 PM at WKOW-TV.

Program Chair Steve Paugh reported the next meeting will be Wednesday, December 15th and will be the annual Holiday Party. The January meeting is planned to be a training session on fiber optic terminations by Belden. The February meeting will be a tour of Electronic Theater Controls' new building.

Certification and Education Chair Jim Hermanson reported one recertification that was processed and sent back to the national office. The next local certification period is February 4-14, with the deadline for applications being December 27. After that, the next period will be during NAB.

Frequency Coordinator Tom Smith submitted his report. ABC requested coordination for the November 6th football game. Comments on the license-free data links operating in the TV broadcast band are due on November 30th. Anyone interested in finding the FCC docket and assistance in commenting should contact Tom.

National Liaison Leonard Charles reported two changes to the national bylaws that were approved during the October national meeting. The revisions concern eligibility deadlines for candidates for the national board and establishing the education committee as a standing committee. The SBE is going to introduce certification specialties, similar to an endorsement, starting in April 2005. The new specialties will target broadcast engineering knowledge that is becoming harder to find and/or is a specialized nature. The first one will be for maintaining AM directional antennas. Those seeking the specialties will need to already hold a broadcast engineering level of certification or higher. In conjunction, the national SBE will start offering one day seminars on AM directional antennas.

The Leadership Seminars for 2005 have been announced. The first course will be in Indianapolis June 7-9.

SBE is also gearing up to help Nextel with the transition 2GHz BAS band. The GAO has given the green light to the FCC proposal, however Nextel has not yet signed it. Nextel and Verizon have settled their legal differences which threaten the transition. The next steps are for Nextel to sign the proposal and the RNO will be published. The transition should take about 2 years. The SBE is asking that local chapters and frequency coordinators form local committees to start planning for this and the roll out to their market.

There was no new or old business. The meeting adjourned at 7:10 PM.

The evening’s program was a presentation on the SBE’s Certification Program presented by Certification Chair Jim Hermanson.

The schedule of EAS Required Weekly Tests (RWT) and Required Monthly Tests (RMT) times to be sent on Wisconsin Public Radio is listed on the web. It can be found at: www.wpr.org/eas

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Would you like to receive emergency notifications on your wireless telephone, digital pager, e-mail inbox, Blackberry, fax machine, or any device equipped with an e-mail reception? A free public service provided by The Emergency Email & Wireless Network makes this possible (see figure 1). Their mission is to "Provide notification to citizens of local, regional, national and international emergencies utilizing the Internet and electronic mail (email) in a secure and expedient manner."

Figure 1. Email notifications on a non-traditional platform.

To sign up for this service, go to www.emergencyemail.org, www.emergencye.com, or www.emergencyemailnetwork.com. Find your state on the left most "Sign Up Here" column. Click on your county in the left-most column. You will need to enter the email address at which you wish to receive emergency notifications, your home county, zip code, and time zone.

You can select which types of notifications you wish to receive from among "severe weather information" (non-emergency), "Homeland Security Code," "Cyber threats to your computer" (limited time free trial), "Organ Donation," "Daily Weather Forecasts" (if available), "Routine Blood Drive/ Red Cross," and "Missing Children Amber Alerts" (as available). You can also elect not to receive National Disaster News. People who get charged for incoming text messages may want to be more selective about which messages they accept.

Some of the messages offered through this service are not distributed via all the sources we traditionally monitor for emergency messages. Having signed up to be notified about non-emergency severe weather information, I recently received a "dense fog advisory," issued by the National Weather Service, on my wireless device.

The Emergency Email & Wireless Network offers notification of K-12 school closings. However, no schools in Wisconsin are currently signed up to provide notification through this service.

As we know, there is no such thing as a free lunch. On the sign-up web page, there is an option which says, "Keep this service FREE. I agree to receive info from our sponsors WHO make it possible." A few of the sponsors are listed on the Emergency Email & Wireless Network web site. Incidentally, the Emergency Email & Wireless Network offers a separate commercial service to private companies where they provide corporate message distribution as designated by that company.

When signing up, you can elect to block all non-emergency emails during certain hours of the day, and specify a range of hours. To complete the sign-up process, click on the gray "Add" button.

If you wish to change your preferences later or to unsubscribe, go to the web site. Click on the "Update – Unsubscribe" menu near the top of the page. After entering your email address and zip code and clicking on "Update Profile" you can unselect options or unsubscribe.

Agency participation to provide notifications to The Emergency Email & Wireless Network is voluntary. City, county, federal, and civil defense agencies, as well as Red Cross chapters and blood centers, and K-12 schools can sign up to send emergency notifications on the Emergency Email Network at www.emergencyemail.org/911message.htm. Localities are charged for the ability to disseminate their notifications through the Emergency Email & Wireless Network. Notification sources can send notifications through the service's web-based sending interface.

While my favorite source of emergency information is my local broadcast station, getting a text alert on my wireless device can be handy at times.

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Recently, I was called in to assist in the repair of a full power UHF transmitter. This particular rig was one of only eight units produced and had been through a lot in the 15 years since it was new, including nearly continuous overheating, years of neglect, and several recent arcs.

The final blow was a water leak that flooded the high voltage section. Prior to my arrival, those responsible had subjected the visual klystron to sufficient stress to crack the tube.

Looking around, portions of the problem were obvious. Not only were the maintenance records extremely sparse, but over the nine days it took to return this transmitter to air, we discovered that most of the meters did not work.

How anyone can run a 60kW transmitter without meters is beyond me, but that was the case. Apparently, this had been done for years. Digging through the paperwork I found a 10-year-old sheet of meter readings that showed three of the 16 meters to be non-functional. Playing with high voltage comes with the territory, but playing with it while blindfolded is simply stupid.

We have all run across the meter or gauge that, after having shown the same reading for many years, has become inoperable with the indicator stuck in the on position. Meters, indicator lights, and status reports are put there to provide troubleshooting information. Sure, it takes time and money to keep these indicators functioning, but the alternative (losing something and not knowing what) can consume far more time and money. In the process of getting that transmitter back on the air, we had numerous instances of emergency parts delivery, both same day and overnight. Each of these added to the overall cost of the repair.

Not only did the previous engineering managers fail to do their jobs as they pertained to equipment maintenance, they also failed to convey the situation to management. Management also is to blame in that it was warned but failed to take action quickly enough. I believe it is up to us as engineers to make those warnings heard. All of us have had to make do with a less than ideal repair due to budgets. For many, finding a way to do it for less is part of the challenge–especially at 3 a.m. when everything is closed. Many of those repairs need to be redone properly as soon as possible for two reasons: first they will likely come back and bite us later, and second we are reducing the value of the station’s assets by doing a sub-standard repair.

Money is tight and the economy is weak, but in the end the station’s signal and audience is what determines its value. Management knows and understands that. It is up to us as engineers to convey the detrimental long- and short-term effects of sub-standard maintenance to management. If they really want to hold their facility together with duct tape and baling wire, it is time to find another job. However, if their intent is preserve the value of their assets, it is our job to find to most cost-effective way to do that.

Steve Epstein is the Chair of SBE Chapter 59, Kansas City. (http://www.broadcast.net/~sbe59/)

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• Astronaut Leroy Chiao, KE5BRW, used his recently minted ham radio license for the first time November 19th to speak with students in southeastern Italy from NA1SS aboard the International Space Station. Arranged by the Amateur Radio on the International Space Station (ARISS) program, the contact also kicked off a series of educational contacts for the Expedition 10 crew, which arrived aboard the ISS in October.

"It’s a great pleasure to be addressing you from the International Space Station," Chiao told the youngsters as the contact got under way. "This is my first ham radio contact, so I’m honored to be sharing this experience with you." Chiao got his license in June while training for his ISS mission.

Posing questions from Earth were youngsters from two elementary schools and a comprehensive school in Polignano-a-Mare, ranging in age from 6 to 14. Members of a local amateur radio club set up a satellite earth station at one elementary school and a backup station at the other elementary school. They also established audio and video links from the station to monitors in the other two schools’ auditoriums. In all, Chiao answered 18 questions from students during the approximately eight-minute contact.

ARISS <http://www.rac.ca/ariss/> is an educational outreach with US participation by the American Radio Relay League (ARRL), the Amateur Satellite Corporation (AMSAT) and NASA.

• The FCC has turned down a Petition for Rule Making that sought to establish specific bandwidth standards for full-carrier AM and single sideband (SSB) Amateur Radio emissions. Two amateurs filed the petition, designated RM-10740, on May 27, 2003. The FCC said a majority of the approximately 160 members of the amateur community who commented on the petition opposed the concept.

The petition had asked the FCC to "remove the ambiguity" in Part 97 of the Rules, and they referenced Enforcement Bureau letters sent to amateurs alleging overly wide SSB signals–sometimes called "Enhanced Single Sideband." On HF frequencies below 28.8 MHz, the petition recommended a maximum 2.8 kHz bandwidth SSB (J3E) emissions and a maximum 5.6 kHz bandwidth for AM (A3E) emissions.

Asserting that most radio amateurs "operate in a manner consistent with the basic purpose of the Amateur Service," the FCC said its existing rules are "adequate to address any noncompliant practices by amateur operators." Current FCC rules require that amateur transmissions not occupy "more bandwidth than necessary for the information rate and emission type being transmitted, in accordance with good amateur practice," and that emissions outside the necessary bandwidth not interfere with operations on adjacent frequencies. The FCC also said the petitioners failed to show that there is "a particular problem" with stations using AM.

The Order said the FCC’s Enforcement Bureau will continue to monitor through its complaint process "nonconforming activities" of operators who fail to abide by its rules.

(Excerpts from the American Radio Relay League’s arrl.org web site)

HamNet meets the second Sunday of each month at 0000 GMT on 14.205 MHz. Hal Hostetler WA7BGX is the Control Station. Any amateur operator is welcome and encouraged to participate.

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Visit SBE Chapter 24's home on the web at www.sbe24.org. There you will find a wealth of information– from Chapter meeting information, sustaining members listings, the Wisconsin State EAS Plan, to a list of past and current officers. You can also check your meeting attendance, which can be useful in completing recertification forms. Check it out!

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Beginning in April 2005, SBE plans to inaugurate several Certification "Specialties." The specialties will target areas of broadcast engineering knowledge that are becoming harder to find and/or are of a specialized nature.

The first specialty will test on maintaining AM directional antennas. Those wishing to take a SBE Specialty exam will need to already hold a current SBE Broadcast Engineer or higher certification. A one-day seminar on AM directional antennas is also in the works.

SBE has scheduled Course I of the SBE Leader Skills Seminar for June 7-9, 2005 in Indianapolis. The SBE Leader Skills Seminar provides management and people skills training for broadcast engineers. Dick Cupka will lead the seminar. The course fee is being determined as of this writing and should be available by mid-December. Please mark the dates and make plans to attend yourself or send someone from your organization. Both the individual and the company will benefit.

The recent rash of break-ins at station transmitter sites in some areas of the country has caught the attention of many broadcast engineers and also that of local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies. There has been speculation that some of these incidents may not be just random acts but pre-planned activities by terrorist operatives. Be sure to report any break-ins or other malicious activities to your local police department and FBI office but also let SBE know.

SBE General Counsel, Chris Imlay is keeping a log of break-ins and is sharing this information with the FBI in Washington, D.C. Send any information to Chris at cimlay@sbe.org. You can read more about the recent break-ins in Chris’ column in the December issue of the SBE Signal.

The new SBE CertPreview sample certification test software is now available. It is Microsoft Windows-based and replaces the previous DOS-based software. New sample tests are available for Broadcast Technologist, Audio Engineer, Video Engineer, Broadcast Networking Technologist, Broadcast Engineer and Senior Broadcast Engineer in both radio and television.

Sample tests include 50 to 100 questions and indicate when an incorrect answer has been given. It provides a list of resources from which to learn more about a subject. Cost for each SBE CERTpreview practice test is $27 plus $3 shipping. Contact the National Office to order a copy.

Finding the right mix of chapter meeting date, time and location can be tricky. Don’t be afraid to experiment with the meeting specifics to determine what works best. Just because your chapter has always met on a certain day at a certain time doesn’t mean that something better may exist. Likewise, the alternative days and times will attract new attendees.

We welcome Chapter 139 of Reno, Nevada, chaired by Tim Stoffel, CSTE, to the SBE. If you are interested in attending their meetings, contact Tim at timba@lionlamb.us.

The Fellow designation is the most distinguished recognition presented to members by the Society of Broadcast Engineers. Members of SBE may earn the Fellow rank through several paths of achievement including conspicuous service, valuable contributions to the advancement of broadcast engineering or its allied professions, or by disseminating their broadcasting knowledge and promoting its application in practice.

Candidates for election to Fellow must be proposed in writing by a voting member to the Fellowship Committee. The nomination must include an appropriate and complete history of the nominee and the written endorsement of at least five other voting members. Nominations are confidential. Candidates should not be aware that they have been nominated.

Nominations for the year 2005 must be received no later than March 31 for consideration. The Fellows Committee will bring the names of nominees to the SBE Board of Directors for consideration and election. The SBE Secretary will notify those elected. They will receive their award at the SBE National Awards Dinner next October in Dallas, Texas, during the SBE 2005 National Meeting, to be held in conjunction with the Broadcast Engineering Expo presented by Chapter 67.

If there is a member in your chapter who has distinguished themselves in the field of broadcast engineering, this is an opportunity for members of your chapter to prepare a nomination for that person.

Nominations for Fellow are to be submitted to Martin Sandberg, CPBE, Chairman, SBE Fellowship Committee, 9807 Edgecove Drive, Dallas, Texas, 75238-1535 or to sandytex@swbell.net.

Chapter chairmen are reminded to be sure their chapter has submitted reports for all of the meetings held in 2004 by January 15, 2005. Several chapters have not yet cashed their rebate checks mailed to them this past June. Please be sure to do so before December 31, 2004. Contact Angel Bates at the National Office at (317) 846-9000 if you have any questions. Rebate checks issued in 2004 may not be reissued after December 31, 2004.

Chapters are also reminded to submit their annual chapter election reports to the National Office as soon after the election as possible. The information on these reports is used to update the national records so we are sure to communicate with the current chapter chair or other officer.

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The SBE National Certification Committee has announced exam session dates for 2004 and 2005. Check the list below for the exam period that is best for you. For more information about SBE Certification, see your Chapter Certification Chair or contact Linda Baun, Certification Director at the SBE National Office at (317) 846-9000 or lbaun@sbe.org.

Please note: SBE Certification exams are administered only by SBE and are proctored in-person by qualified and approved representatives of SBE. No other organization is authorized to administer SBE

New certification information brochures and applications are available from Jim Hermanson, the Chapter 24 Certification Chair.

If you are considering taking an SBE certification exam, would like more information, or have questions about the process, you are encouraged to contact Jim.

He can be reached by sending an email message to jim@jimhermanson.com.

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As of December 4th, there are 1344 DTV stations in 211 markets providing programming. Over 99% of all US homes are in markets with at least one DTV signal on the air. In Wisconsin there are 41 DTV stations currently on air.

The National Association of Broadcasters maintains a list of DTV stations that are in operation. This can be found at the NAB web site (www.nab.org) in the DTV update section.

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Want to get your resume out to employers? Deposit your resume where prosective employers can view your profile and make a withdrawal from SBE. Participate in SBE’s Resume Bank, available to SBE members only, free of charge.

Call the SBE National Office at (317) 846-9000 or e-mail Membership Services Director Angel Bates at abates@sbe.org for information on submitting or accessing resumes.

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