[BC] Re: No More Remotes

[Xmitters@aol.com]

In a message dated 4/4/07 8:12:40 PM Central Daylight Time, 
broadcast-request at radiolists.net writes:

<< How about this... CLEAN UP YOUR MARTI!!! Some stations do Marti shots that  
sound GREAT, while yet other continue not to care, as long as they are on  the 
streets. Being on the streets is of VITAL importance now more than ever  IMHO a
s satellite and IPODs become more prevalent. We ways to differentiate  ourselve
s from these services, and one of these ways is to meet face to face  with the 
listeners. You can't get personal interaction with satellite or  IPOD. People s
till like to interact with others and as long as that is true,  GOOD LOCAL radi
o will always have a place of prominence.    James "JD" Davis  Chief Engineer >
>

What a profoundly great idea. Why did I not think of that? Seriously, this is 
easy to say and quite a different matter to pull off. I know of a station 
that had an absolutely first class remote setup, both at the receiver end and a
t 
the transmitter end. For months, they would receive interference in the middle 
of a remote; interference unknow, It took a long time to run down the source. 
That source ended up being a backup two way base station owned by the local 
school district. It took the chief engineer many very frustrating hours to 
track that problem down.

In another instance, they would do site checks, the tech would check out all 
of his equipment before the remote, check all RF cables, antennas, and the 
mast. They get out to the remote, do a signal check and half way through the 
remote, their signal gets trampled with paging interference. The company owning
 
the paging transmitter refused to fix it and yes, the FCC was notified. To this
 
day, that problem has not been fixed. The station modified their frequency 
allocation and now use the trouble plagued frequency to shoot from the mini-mar
ti 
out to the van; it was previously the frequency used to shoot from the remote 
venue to the station.

Both of these situations were caused by the interfering frequency falling on 
the desired Marti frequency. There is no filter in the world that can be 
applied to the receiver that will eliminate this kind of interference problem. 
These situations are not unusual and are responsible for burning up hours of 
engineering time and generating a lot of frustration for engineering, talent, 
programming and the client alike.

Nobody has told me here yet _why_ it is required that the talent's voice at 
the remote venue _must_ show up live over the station's broadcast transmitter. 
It is understandable the attraction of the morning guy being at some client 
location. OK, promote that from the studio and have the talent talk to the 
"remote" attendees over a PA. What is the attraction nowadays to go through all
 of 
this behind the scenes hassle to get that announcer's voice, live on the air 
from the remote, only to crap up the station's air signal and the client's 
message? The client benefits when listeners show up at the event. I'm not 
convinced that the _ONLY_ way to get customers to show up is for the announcer 
at the 
event to call the listeners to the event. Give the listener a reason to show 
up, and they will come.

For the benefit of those of you joining our program in progress, I readily 
see the importance of live sporting events and possibly news coverage. 


Jeff Glass
Northern Illinois University

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