Art!

I've decided to branch out and do some art. And not something small. Inspired by a local artist (whose name escapes me) who made angels out of aluminum cans and bits from the junk yard, I've decided to make an angel from found objects and things I have laying around.



The wings are constructed from parts of four shipping pallets. The spine is a wooden post (as Marco d'Eramo says in The Pig and the Skyscraper, we're a nation very fond of wood) that I found at the site of the former DAV Thrift Store on Southwest Blvd. They are attached to the spine by a two-by-four, also from one of the pallets. I'll use a piece of wood that I found in my basement (once the wood dries out, anyway) as an additional wing brace.

For the angel's breast, I'll use the old gas tank from my first motorcycle, Arcadia. I'll add a halo (once I discover the head piece) that is the old rear sprocket off my current motorcycle.

I'm going to have to find a way to make the angel stand up on its own. Perhaps I'll add a simple base; I don't think I want to try making legs.

Anyways, I'll post more about the angel as she takes shape. And of course, more adventures in radio. Stay tuned, true believer!

Channel 37

So I was reading the latest SBE newsletter and there was an op-ed by the SBE's General Counsel. I'm not going to talk about that op-ed because I don't know enough about the issues he mentions. What I do want to talk about is something mentioned in passing in that op-ed, TV channel 37.

Channel 37 is a channel that "has never been used by any over-the-air television station in Canada or the United States" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_37). Think about this for a minute. In all the umpteen million TV stations in the U.S. and Canada, nobody has ever used this channel. Why is this?

Turns out that channel 37 - or rather the frequency band from 608 MHz to 614 MHz - is very important to radio astronomy. Since radio astronomy deals with very weak signals - on the order of 10^-18 watts - any activity on this channel has the potential of causing significant interference to those sorts of measurements (http://www.ae5d.com/37/). It's also used in Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI), another technique used in radio astronomy and a subject I know nothing about. :)

So there's a bit of randomness for you. Reporting from the Channel 37 News Desk, I'm Kit Peters.

Sending equipment out for repair

Periodically, Robin sends various pieces of equipment out for repair. Each piece has its own particular procedure for getting sent out, but there's something that he does for every piece:

1. Puts a KCUR sticker in a prominent place on the chassis


2. Tapes his KCUR business card to the bottom


3. Attaches a form letter with model number, serial number, and problem description

This helps to make sure that we get the same equipment back that we sent, we get the problem we complained about fixed, and that the problem gets fixed in a fairly timely manner.

Internet at the TX

Robin is thinking about getting wireless 4G out at the TX for Internet access. Clear is offering "business-class" service for $75/month, which is fairly cheap, all things considered. This would allow us to have IP-based remote telemetry of the equipment that supports it (I don't think our main transmitter (BE FM30B) does, but I bet our HD equipment will). It will also allow us to stream RDS (the text that shows up on some radios with song information and the like) from the studio. On the down side, that's more equipment that needs to be examined and protected from a security standpoint. But I can help with that. :)

We would also need to get an external antenna hooked up and run outside the transmitter building, as that building eats microwaves. Perhaps all the RF equipment causes interference as well, but if that were the case, I would expect that interference to be just as great immediately outside the building. Then again, the GPS antenna is outside the building and it works just fine (when it hasn't been struck by lightning, that is).

So, Dear Readers, have any of you in the radio business (are there any of you in the radio business?) done this? If you have, what have your experiences been?

KCUR audio link down

Apologies for the lack of updates lately, Dear Readers. I'll make up for it with a bunch of posts all in a row. :)

Two weeks ago (18 July) our T-1 audio link between the transmitter and the studio went down. Robin got a call from the monitoring hardware at 0345, then switched over to our backup link. Robin called me the following Monday to say he'd had "an eventful weekend", and rather than meeting him at the transmitter, I ought to meet him at the station. When I got there, he was calmly updating the EAS logs. This may strike you, Dear Reader, as odd, so allow me to explain Robin's philosophy of "important" vs. "pressing".

When I first met Robin, he explained that a given engineering issue can be thought of in two dimensions, "important" and "pressing". An "important" issue directly affects the running of the station - in this case, the audio link between the station and the transmitter going down. A "pressing" issue is an issue that needs to be addressed immediately. The audio link falls into this category as well. However, once Robin had switched to the backup link, the issue continued to be important - after all, with the primary link down, the station was running "without a net", if you will - but the backup link would serve well enough through the weekend, so it was no longer pressing.

Anyway, after he was done with the EAS logs, Robin decided to call AT&T and register a trouble ticket as he was pretty sure it was a telco issue. He got an ETA for the AT&T technician of "soon" and we headed out to the TX to meet the tech. When we got there, the tech hadn't arrived yet, so I set about taking the readings as usual. Everything looked normal on the readings except (of course) the T-1, which was showing an alarm.

When the AT&T guy finally got there, he determined that the problem was a bad pair, and set about finding a good one. It's curious to me, Dear Reader, how much trouble two little copper wires can cause. Somebody can break them with a backhoe. Water can (conceivably) get in and corrode the wires and/or cause a short. Or, as the AT&T tech surmised in our case, lightning can strike and fry the wires and the card attached to those wires.

Once the AT&T guy had found a good pair and replaced the T-1 card, we were good to go again. If we'd had a microwave STL, this wouldn't have happened. However, microwave STL's have their own set of potential problems, I'm certain.

Going to the barnraising!

Thanks to a generous donation, I have managed to cover registration costs for the WGXC barnraising. I'm trying to arrange housing via Couchsurfing.org. I still need to cover travel expenses and food while I'm there, so I'm still looking for donations. Locals, I'm also willing to work in exchange for a donation to the cause - just let me know what you need done.

WGXC Barnraising!

http://prometheusradio.org/WGXC_barnraising

I heard about this on pubtech. They're putting up a full-power FM community radio station the last weekend in September. I totally want to go to this, but the registration alone is $100 at minimum (it's a sliding scale type of thing). Still, that's valuable experience, and I've got a couple of months to make arrangements...