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

[Dana Puopolo]

>I will imbed comments.

From: "Matthew Lightner" <matt at LightnerElectronics.com>
n

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.

Thank you.
 
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.

>The Barix feeding the EAS decoder was set for MPEG2, 128 kbps stereo (dual
mono)-plenty of resolution for EAS. I have dozens of customers using the
Barixes in this fashion with ZERO problems. It was tested many times by me and
found to be relaible. Now, in fairness, I have no idea if things were changed
after I left.

>Again, as left by me, the program circuit ran though the EAS encoder via it's
external relay audio switch (this is a TFT unit, and they sell an external
stereo audio switcher) from there it went to a 1:1 Tellabs repeat coil
(transformer) and then straight into the Barix Instreamer that directly fed
the transmitter site. All this was hard wired-there was NO way to remove the
EAS from the program circuit.

>When they use their local studio, they sent the audio back to the control
point in Boston.
It was then mixed with spots, promos and PSAs and sent back DIRECTLY to the
transmitter. There WAS no direct way to get audio from the local studio to the
transmitter-EVERYTHING went through the control point in Boston. This was done
deliberately. Your comment about no EAS while running local programs is just
plain WRONG! 
 
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. 
>I'm sorry that I called you names. I regret it. BUT the fact is that the way
I set the unit up was 100% legal. Your telling them that was not legal (and in
fairness  since I got it second hand from them they could be wrong) was wrong,
off base and made ME look like a moron in their eyes!  
>Finally, whay didn't you simply CALL ME? I would have gladly explained what
was going on. Your (incorrect) assumptions about how things were wired not
only made both of us look like idiots, but also cost my (former, thanks to
this) client over $5000.00-to fix a problem that didn't exist! 
-D
 
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