This Week In Radio Tech (TWiRT)

Bill Suffa has been a part of some top-shelf engineering consulting firms, and served as a business consultant to several household names in broadcasting. Now Bill is consulting in a variety of business sectors. At the same time he’s encouraging engineers of different disciplines to go into their own businesses. It’s an interesting perspective from this Professional Engineer with an MBA.

Some radio engineers were shocked this week when told they couldn’t buy StudioHub® adapters any more. Many - if not most - new radio studios depend on adapting RJ-45 jacks to XLR, ¼” TRS, or even RCA connectors. Will engineers everywhere need to take up soldering once again? Mike Dosch’s Angry Audio company is poised to prevent such a catastrophe.

Audio over IP is commonplace now, but fifteen years ago it was barely known in broadcasting. Jorge Garza is the Director of Technology at Univision Radio in McAllen, Texas. In 2004 Jorge took a look at Axia’s Livewire AoIP and said, “That’s what we’re going to do.” Now, 15 years later, Jorge is glad he made the first step into AoIP, and most of Univision’s other radio stations have done the same.

Radio broadcasters in so-called “PPM Markets” are faced with managing two signals for each station. One is the audio program that listeners hear; the other is the watermark signal heard by Personal People Meters (PPM)™. Broadcasters concerned with counting their listeners (all of them in a PPM market) must treat their watermark signal with similar care to their on-air audio. In this episode, Dr. Barry Blesser explains the science of audio watermarking. Then Paul Kriegler describes the Best Practices for making sure your watermark signal is consistently detected in the field.

Some broadcast engineers stumble into the profession. Mark Persons’ engineering career seemed like destiny from an early age. While Mark was recently awarded the SBE Engineer of the Year, his early childhood set him on this path. From climbing to the ceiling at 4 years old, to teaching electronics in the Army, to repairing helicopter avionics in Viet Nam, to building a stellar reputation for quality radio engineering work and custom products, Mark Persons’ advice is worth hearing and using.

From budget cuts to aging equipment, along with fresh ideas and the latest technology - Rich Parker is keeping the member stations of Coast Alaska on-the-air and serving their communities. Rich updates us on some of his recent technical challenges, as well as stories on troubleshooting under time and money pressure in America’s 49th state.

The spectre of ransomware encrypting all the computer files we need to run our broadcast operations is truly scary – heart-stoppingly scary. Ransomware - as well as other malware - keeps morphing to get around our blocking and mitigation techniques. But there are basic, important things every broadcaster can do to seriously reduce the risk of losing everything to ransomware. Stephen Kurtz has a broadcast engineering background and is now an IT consultant. He shares current advice and tips to help you avoid the most common IT security mistakes.

Thinking about all the skills and responsibilities that broadcast engineers have, it seems we’re akin to General Contractors. We have to know something about a lot of things. Disciplines from basic structural load calculations to audio circuit optimization to complex digital modulation schemes. Those and a thousand other topics are critical to the well-rounded and effective broadcast engineer. Chris Tobin and Kirk Harnack discuss how diverse skills relate to our recent experiences.

As a young lad, Mike Erickson was curious why songs sounded “different” on the radio than on his home record player. When a radio station owner gave Mike a retired audio processor he never looked back; he’s been customizing audio processing at for AM, FM, HD, and Streaming ever since. Mike joins us from the Wheatstone processing lab to talk about legacy processing techniques and today’s latest, too.

How did we broadcast engineers learn our craft? What experiences, resources, and people helped become broadcast engineering professionals? Geary Morrill got started with the likes of Steve Church, Vern Post, and Dave Gorman. Now Geary joins us with ideas and solid advice for finding and encouraging the next generation of audio, video, RF, and IT engineers.