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Radio World

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Radio Pakistan Timber Sale Draws Scrutiny

Posted: 20 Jun 2022 05:06 AM PDT https://www.radioworld.com/global/radio-pakistan-timber-sale-draws-scrutiny


An inquiry into the cutting of trees at Radio Pakistan facilities near Islamabad is now the subject of a governmental inquiry.

The state-run Pakistan Broadcasting Corp., looking for ways to raise money
in the face of growing budget deficits, devised a plan in February 2021 to harvest trees on property it holds across the country. The timber sales
would help offset the broadcaster’s accumulated liabilities of nearly 1 billion Pakistani rupees ($4.8 million).

Previously, in October 2020, PBC’s Radio Pakistan dismissed 749 contract employees to help address its financial woes.
Above: Satellite imagery of a Radio Pakistan site in southwestern
Rawalpindi from December 2021. Below: The same site in May 2022. (via
Google Earth)


The timber sale plan began with the removal of some 3,600 trees from Radio Pakistan sites in Rawalpindi and Peshawar, and PBC had begun advertising similar harvests at sites across the country.

In May 2022, Senator Irfan Siddiqui first raised questions about the
harvest and sale of 1,500 trees from Radio Pakistan sites in Rawalpindi. He noted that some 2.5 acres of land had been cleared and that the timber was
sold for 700,000 rupees ($3,350).

[Read More Global Radio News Stories]

Siddiqui belongs to the Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz) Party, which was
voted into power in April 2022 after Prime Minister Imran Khan and his
Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf Party lost a no-confidence vote. The timber sales
were organized under the PTI’s oversight.

Siddiqui questioned whether or not appropriate legal clearances had been received for the timber sale, noting that they came at a time the PTI government was promoting its Ten Billion Tree Tsunami effort to restore ecosystems and mitigate climate change.

In June 2022, Minister for Information and Broadcasting Marriyum Aurangzeb called for an investigation into the timber sale to ensure the price
received was fair, approvals from the Environmental Protection Agency and Ministry of Climate Change were secured, and an appropriate number of replacement trees were planted for each tree removed.

“We will determine those responsible for the act and take action according
to law,” stated Aurangzeb, according to Pakistan Observer. “How the precious trees were cut down amidst the Billion Tree Tsunami claims, the
facts will be brought to the notice of the nation.”

According to The News International, PBC officials stated that the PBC
director general was authorized to make the decision regarding the timber
sale without consolation of other agencies. The Urdu-language Khabrian TV further reported that PBC officials defended the harvest by saying the
trees were “useless trees” and that more than 300 saplings had already been planted to replace the felled trees. Additional replacement trees are to be planted during the monsoon season.

The post Radio Pakistan Timber Sale Draws Scrutiny appeared first on Radio World.


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Transmitters: What Is Your Highest Value Proposition?

Posted: 20 Jun 2022 03:00 AM PDT https://www.radioworld.com/news-and-business/news-makers/transmitters-what-is-your-highest-value-proposition

Andy Gunn, left, and Rob Bertrand

A recent Radio World ebook explored trends in transmitter design and applications.

This interview is excerpted from the ebook. WAMU 88.5 American University
Radio is “Washington’s NPR station.” Rob Bertrand is senior director of technology. Andy Gunn is director of engineering. 

Radio World: When you are considering a transmitter purchase, what is your approach?

Rob Bertrand: One of the biggest considerations is asking, how will this improve our overall efficiency as a business. There are technical answers — considerations around power efficiency or cooling requirements — but I’m also interested to know what support will be like. 

Will this transmitter require less time to maintain than its predecessor?
And when evaluating brands, what features might make maintenance simpler or more complex? 

We recently rebuilt the full main and aux transmitter facilities at WAMU.
Our goal was to minimize the amount of time someone needed to regularly
have “face time” with the transmitters. 

We deployed good old-fashioned GPIO control and status monitoring with our remote control systems, but we also integrated rich data via SNMP from our transmitters. This way we get the best of both worlds: the reliability and consistency of GPIO that is rarely disrupted with a software update or configuration change, and the additional visibility brought through SNMP monitoring. 

We invested in redundant air chains of audio and support equipment, as well
as redundant exciters for each transmitter. The goal was that we could
suffer a failure anywhere in the plant and still have an operational transmitter. With liquid cooling and electrostatic filters on our HVAC
systems, even filter maintenance is reduced. 

While we do make regular visits, the goal was delivering a facility that if other objectives kept us away for some time, the site would keep on ticking even without regular intervention. 

Andy Gunn: Time is always my limiting factor — time to perform routine maintenance, work on new projects or respond to issues as they come up. I’m most interested in building systems that will save me time in the long run
— reduced maintenance time or shorter time to repair or bypass in the event of a failure — even if the initial installation or setup takes a few days longer.

The availability of parts and the stability of the manufacturer are major considerations. How would you obtain replacement parts? Does the
manufacturer have a parts depot nearby or close to a shipping hub? Do they
have a service center nearby? 

Modern transmitters have similar feature sets — high efficiency, support
for all HD modes and power levels, hot-swappable modules, and detailed telemetry and monitoring. The form factor, cooling and build quality can
vary, though all the transmitters above 10 kW that I have worked with in
the past 15 years have had very good build quality. 

RW: For someone who hasn’t purchased a transmitter in some time, what
recent developments should they know about? 

Bertrand: I really think that above a certain power level, liquid cooling
is a game-changer. 

When I arrived at WAMU in 2016 I inherited a plant that, for several
reasons, was supposed to be temporary. The transmitter, a wonderful modern model, was oversized for the air conditioning in the room, which had long outlived its own useful life. So the compressors never shut down and, as
you might imagine, they failed altogether sporadically because they never stopped running. 

This would create a vicious cycle where the emergency exhaust fan would
then kick in, you get the picture. On a hot July day in Washington, this
was not a good situation. 

Being part of American University, my colleagues in central plant dutifully engaged an engineering firm to design a replacement HVAC system for us. Our cooling requirements far exceeded what a pair of split systems could
deliver, particularly when factoring additional solar load, so the only
choice was to go to a package system. 

When all was said and done, I was left with the choice to spend nearly the
same amount on a properly sized package-type HVAC system, or I could
install a new liquid-cooled transmitter and kick the HVAC replacement down
the road a few years. 

I installed the liquid-cooled transmitter, and our problems went away
literally overnight. Our power consumption dropped dramatically, and our stability increased significantly. The emergency notifications from the monitoring systems — or worse the actual power dips on the air that we were dealing with when I got here — evaporated. 

Gunn: Modern transmitters contain a huge wealth of monitoring points — to
the point where it may be overwhelming to decide what to monitor. While
your main transmitter functions and alarms should always be tied into your remote control with physical GPIO wiring, having the rest of your
transmitter data available via SNMP can be a boon to observing trends or catching early warning signs of a problem. While a summary alarm may let
you know that there is a problem with the transmitter, having that
additional data can let you know whether it was a small issue, or a major one. 

I recommend spending time going through the transmitter’s own interface to find the most critical data points — for example, cooling loop pump flow rate, loop pressure, cooling fan speed, etc. These can be vital when troubleshooting an issue that a single “Major Alarm” cannot.

The flip side is that you need a sufficiently powerful and advanced remote control system to handle the number of data points from GPIO and SNMP that
your transmitter and other site systems have available. While it may seem
fine to skimp on the physical GPIO interfaces, I trust a pair of wires more than SNMP, which is reliant on outside network systems as well. 

If you’re planning on getting a new transmitter but have a very old or very simple remote control system, I recommend upgrading this and planning out
new wiring and break-out cables for ease of maintenance. Your future self,
or engineers that inherit your site, will thank you.

RW: We hear a great deal about virtualization of the air chain. What are
the implications for how transmitters are designed and how users will
choose and configure them?

Bertrand: My knee-jerk reaction is that I really don’t want to see transmitter manufacturers getting into this business. Transmitter
technology evolves slowly, while the IP-based technology used to deliver
this kind of content evolves quite rapidly. The last thing I would want to
have to worry about is marrying rapidly evolving (and somewhat
prototypical) needs with the more stable and slower-shifting transmitter market. 

Whatever solutions are chosen to deliver cloud-based air chains to the transmitter plant should remain separate and apart from the transmitter itself. 

It’s likely that if you are large enough to warrant leveraging this
delivery mechanism, you are also going to want to leverage identical
monitoring and control systems across your sites. Very few companies are in
the position of being able to replace that architecture and their
transmitters at a given site simultaneously. 

It’s an important trend but I think it should evolve and mature outside the world of transmitter hardware.

Gunn: I don’t see this as being particularly helpful in a transmission
chain outside of audio processing in an AoIP environment. Even there, I
would be hesitant to have any virtualized systems in my main air chain.
While most high-end audio processors are simply software appliances, the ability to physically bypass and produce a stable composite signal for the analog FM portion of a transmitter is too valuable to virtualize away.

However, as streaming and on-demand listening grow in market share for stations, there may be opportunities for virtualization in the processing
and delivery systems at a station. If the virtualized systems can utilize
AoIP, the transition here would make sense.

RW: How do consumer trends and new platforms like smart speakers, apps and voice-controlled car infotainment systems affect how a manager should plan
a transmitter purchase, if at all?

Bertrand: I think the strategy should start at a place of clearly
identifying the places where we are delivering our greatest value and steer
our investments accordingly. 

Since I’ve been at WAMU, we have divested five FM signals over five years.
As someone who loves over-the-air broadcasting this has been somewhat
painful. However, as we looked at the audience and revenues associated with these repeater stations, it just wasn’t defensible. 

It will be different in different areas of the country; geography and
internet availability means that similar FM networks still make sense in certain places. But in the Washington, D.C., region, our data showed us
that it was really only our primary signal that was delivering meaningful audience. 

[These changes] resulted in minimal revenue drop and near-zero audience
drop. We lost those big recurring expenses, and we took the capital from
those station sales and reinvested it into our primary and backup
facilities for D.C. — buying four new top-tier transmitters, building a new FM combiner and antenna system, and making critical infrastructure
investments to our facility there. 

In terms of the digital side, this has also enabled us to direct more investment to those operations. We require fewer engineering hours to
maintain such a complex and far-flung set of transmitters, so our
engineering team is better able to focus on supporting content production in-house, making sure that our studio facilities can produce all the
products we’re growing, and that our streaming architecture is receiving
the same level of attention as our RF infrastructure. 

We’ve done all that without reducing staff, and also without adding engineering staff. We are just spending our time differently. 

So as a station is thinking about how to handle transmitter purchases — I think it should be done carefully and with consideration for the highest
value proposition. 

RW: What other questions should transmitter buyers be asking?

Gunn: What does a manufacturer’s full on-site commissioning package offer, and what does it cost? 

If you are not familiar with liquid cooling or need help preparing your
site for a new transmitter, what can the manufacturer offer you to help? 

These days broadcast engineers are expected to handle more and more of a station or group’s technical needs, but have extremely limited time. Being able to lean on the manufacturer for help with the hands-on installation,
setup and testing of the transmitter can be a big relief. It can change a two-week process into one week, or even just a few days. Having a site
visit by a technician or installer in advance can also help resolve any
issues that will be roadblocks to a smooth installation. 

We all pride ourselves on our ability to learn new systems and be able to
do it all ourselves, but there is something to be said for spending a bit
of money to save a lot of time and have the peace of mind of working with someone who has done it before. You might learn a few things along the way.



The post Transmitters: What Is Your Highest Value Proposition? appeared
first on Radio World.


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Best of Show: RCS Disaster Recovery

Posted: 20 Jun 2022 02:00 AM PDT https://www.radioworld.com/resource-center/awards/best-of-show-awards-nab/best-of-show-rcs-disaster-recovery


We are featuring the products that won the Radio World Best of Show Award
at the recent NAB Show. Winners were chosen by a panel of radio engineers
and RW editorial staff for their innovation, feature set, cost efficiency
and performance in serving the industry. 

Software company RCS has been helping advance radio’s familiarity with and working knowledge of the cloud. The RCS Disaster Recovery solution is a
natural application of those concepts. It is intended to help stations get
back on the air quickly and efficiently when natural disaster or viruses
take down their IT infrastructure.

“Unlike other automation systems that require multiple external pieces of software, RCS Cloud is a true disaster recovery cloud solution, written for
and on Amazon Web Services, following best practices and securities,” the company explains.

It backs up your audio, logs, metadata and SQL backups securely with
Zetta’s Site Replication service.

“We’ve also incorporated business-friendly workflows. For example, if you have a remote talent without VPN access, utilize RCS Cloud’s empty voice track positions, already built into your everyday clock, to voice track
using RCS Cloud’s two-factor authentication to forward their voice tracks
to your local Zetta system.”

Radio World’s Paul McLane visits Philippe Generali and Neal Perchuk.
(Photo credit: Jim Peck)

[Check Out Other Recipients of Radio World’s Best of Show Award]

The post Best of Show: RCS Disaster Recovery appeared first on Radio World.


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Best of Show: Orban Labs Optimod XPN-Enterprise

Posted: 19 Jun 2022 02:00 AM PDT https://www.radioworld.com/resource-center/awards/best-of-show-awards-nab/best-of-show-orban-labs-optimod-xpn-enterprise


We are featuring the products that won the Radio World Best of Show Award
at the recent NAB Show. Winners were chosen by a panel of radio engineers
and RW editorial staff for their innovation, feature set, cost efficiency
and performance in serving the industry. 

Here’s a Linux-based, customizable processing platform for control of multiple signals from a single point. It provides OptiCloud processing for
up to eight FM and eight HD/DAB+ radio channels, plus eight internet stream channels, for a total of 24 output channels in a 1 RU package and using appropriate XPN-Enterprise Nodes for connection to the server processing platform.  

Orban notes that virtualization and centralized operating environments are rapidly gaining interest in radio and internet broadcasting. Content to be processed is brought to one location using AES3, AES-67, SMPTE 2110-30,
Dante or Livewire+, and the necessary outputs — analog, AES3, FM Composite, DMPX and Orban uMPX — use the appropriate XPN-Enterprise Nodes for distribution to each transmitter site or stream. 


AoIP audio processing allows individual processing for each input; factory presets give users a quick start for each format in the group or cluster. “Less-More” controls make it easy for users to fine-tune processing. Nielsen or Kantar watermarking for each broadcast output is provided using
the appropriate node.

Orban also offers a line of “last-mile” solutions including low bandwidth (<500 kbps for FM and HD-1, HD-2 and HD-3) solutions for virtually any requirement. This service will be useful to stations whose transmitter
sites are in areas with challenging internet access. 

Whooping it up with Paul were Peter Lee and Mike Pappas.
(Photo credit: Jim Peck)

[Check Out Other Recipients of Radio World’s Best of Show Award]

The post Best of Show: Orban Labs Optimod XPN-Enterprise appeared first on Radio World.

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