[BC] RE: That Guy at the PAB who inspected Dana Puopolo's Station

[Matthew Lightner]

Everyone on the list:
 
I am the inspector who inspected Dana Puopolo Client's Station. Before
people starts throwing pitchforks at me I think you need to know the true
story. I need to be careful here since the PAB keeps information from ABIP
inspections confidential. So I'm not going into complete detail, or naming
the station.
 
The fact is when I inspected the station Pupolo is talking about I looked at
the EAS logs and found many discrepancies. Many of the received weekly tests
were missing. I also recall the time was way off on the ENDEC unit. Events
that should have auto forwarded were expired upon reception according to the
printouts attached to the EAS logs. So that was the main problems. I did say
that I felt the unit needed to be at the local studio location. The reason
behind that was because I think the Barix boxes were cutting out, or were
set at such a low bitrate that they had problems passing the FSK data from
the LP1 and LP2 receivers to the remote ENDEC unit. It simply was very
unreliable. Also the ENDEC was installed on the program feed coming from
their remote location. If an EAS event occurred when they were using their
"local studio" I did not see any interrupt unit to put the remote EAS ENDEC
into the program line.
 
As an ABIP inspector I try to be very fair and do a thorough job. In the
last few years I've been doing ABIP inspection, I've received very few
complaints. I'm not a nit picker. This was clearly a life safety issue. I
take EAS very seriously.  
 
As far as Dana Puopolo's remark calling me a Moran I'm not even going to
dignify a response to that. My qualifications as a Broadcast Engineer are
known to many in the industry.      
 

Matt Lightner - President
Lightner Electronics Inc.
www.LightnerElectronics.com
Engineering Consultant/PA EAS Technical Chairman
Pennsylvania Association of Broadcasters
www.PAB.org <http://www.pab.org/> 
(814)-239-8323 Phone
(814)-239-8402 Fax