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At about 4 am we lost power on V1 and remotely found the cabinet would not become ‘ready’. On-site it was quickly apparent that tube bias was not satisfied and looking over the schematics again I decided to quickly isolate the tube to know where I should start looking. As soon as I pulled the…
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Quite suddenly and without warning on February 27th, the V2 cabinet for our KBCW was constantly crowbarring (a safety function on high-voltage/high-power transmitters to prevent a tube short or other high beam current events from destroying the Inductive Output Tube) and would not hold high voltage for any amount of time putting our transmitter at…
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Recently SCRI published a teaser article claiming that across the board “…over three in ten TV (30.6%) and almost four in ten cable stations (37.5%) are already transmitting mobile-TV broadcasts.” The article cites an international study they performed which makes pretty bold claims and then links to their for-a-fee marketing report. Which, as we all…
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Scott Adams wanted to make a topical comic about the recent iPhone 4G drama that’s been all the buzz recently and realized that his normal outlet (a newspaper) has a propagation delay of about a month. “I worried that the story would become stale before my comics would work through the pipeline.” His only option…
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While checking the Mobile DTV pavilion at the NAB convention in Las Vegas today I came across several mobile and portable devices showing off how well they can decode and display the new mobile DTV signals being broadcast. All save one…
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I was recently talking with a sales rep I deal with and we got on the topic of the aging TV engineering workforce. He told me a rather depressing story about a recent SBE chapter meeting in his area where one of the old timers started poking fun at a couple younger members who were…
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It’s been about five years since I bought into Sirius satellite (paid) radio. At the time, like many initial customers, I was spending a lot of time in a company truck. For me it was driving from hilltop-to-hilltop working on transmitters or to various studios within “driving distance” and I quickly became fed up with…
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A new article in Broadcasting & Cable highlights the American Cable Association’s attempt to sway the FCC via a December 11th letter by the ACA President Matt Polka (in addition to the regular lobbying of cable-related issues through their PAC) to eliminate “Must Carry” rules so that they can “offer Internet speeds as fast as…
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I’ve been a business user of BlackBerry phones for a few years now and, although I won’t get into a rant about which phone is the best phone to buy, I will say that in having these devices foisted upon me by my oh-so-wise-and-indefatigable employers I have found them capable e-mail devices and decent phones,…
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I’m sure I mentioned before that I really like gadgets and a few months back I bought an eeePC 1000HA for under $400. This is one of the very first Netbooks to have the Atom processor and a 160GB hard drive instead of the paltry 4GB flash drives in the early models. I really wasn’t…