Cutting Edge

The first noncommercial HD radio stations in California, all classical-music stations from the University of Southern California, will use Broadcast Electronics FXi digital exciters and an FMi solid-state transmitter for both analog and digital FM signals. Pablo Garcia, director of engineering for KUSC(FM) Los Angeles, which operates the four-station network, says the university realized that it could go digital for almost the same amount of money it was going to spend to replace existing transmitters with a new solid-state transmitter. KPSC(FM) Palm Springs will hit the air with digital in August, followed by KCPB(FM) Thousand Oaks in September, KFAC(FM) Santa Barbara in October and KUSC later this year. The FXi exciter allows the station's HD and analog signals to share the same transmitter, antenna system and exciter. Each station will get a BE FSi 10 signal generator to originate the HD Radio signal, which will input directly into the BE FXi 60 or FXi 250 digital exciter for common amplification of the analog and digital signals into the new BE transmitter.

WDWB-TV Detroit and KOCV-TV Odessa, Texas, are the latest stations to purchase the Harris ReCon remote control and facility-management tool. The stations will install the Harris Broadcast Communications product at their transmitter sites to monitor and control analog and digital transmitters as well as site equipment. WDWB-TV is owned by Granite; KOCV is a PBS station. ReCon is Web-enabled, monitors simple network-management protocol and can be operated remotely via any Windows-based computer. KOCV-TV also added a Harris DiamondCD DHP60P2 digital television transmitter and Harris MONITORplus RF transmission monitor system.

The Golf Channel will be the first facility to install the Grass Valley Apex audio routing switcher as part of its facility rebuild. It also will install a Thomson Trinix digital video router. Erv Vanags, director of engineering and operations for The Golf Channel, says the routers will give the sports net the capacity to handle signals coming in from golf tournaments around the country. The Apex will be 512x512; the Trinix digital routing matrix will initially be 256x256. Both will be used alongside an existing Thomson Venus 256x256 router for handling digital and analog video and analog audio, giving the company 512x512 I/O capacity to distribute multiple SDI, AES and analog audio signals. The routing matrix, including several channels of Saturn master control, are managed via the Grass Valley Jupiter control system.