Thomson Broadcast has become TheOnLineEngineer’s newest and most generous sponsor. I want to thank all the people who have sent in donations over the last three years, but in particular I want to thank the two biggest contributors, SBE Chapter 38 in El Paso, Texas and their Chairman Antonio Castor and now Thomson Broadcast and Richard Fiore and Joe Turbolski who have jut given us our largest donation to date.
You may have noticed that I have mentioned their transmitters more so than any other, that’s because over the last 14 years I have worked with eight different Thomson transmitters, from analog IOXs to digital DCX Millenniums and their MSDC Paragons. You write about what you know.
These contributions will help in running and expanding TheOnLineEngineer to further educate Broadcast Engineers around the world.
I am putting a lot of effort into this next tutorial which is all about Fiber Optics for Broadcast. But it is taking much longer than usual as I have high hopes to make this a really great tutorial. In the mean time while I work on it here is a sneak preview.
The sound effect were added later, fusion splicers don’t really sound like that, but it seemed like a fun thing to do.
So the HazMat Inventory is coming along nicely. It will consist of a map of each floor including the roof and the grounds. A symbol will mark wherever there is a HazMat located. A list to the side will show an inventory number, which room or area (marked on the map) it is located and the amount (gallons or pounds). On top of that there will be a data base showing more detail on each location.
I figured the map is the most important part as the fire department or who ever shows up can use it to find HazMat stuff by using the symbols on it.
The other day when I realized that I forgot to push a button at the transmitter I knew I had to turn around and go back. Now my transmitter is not far from home, 7 miles as I drive, and there’s never any snow. So I know I have it easy compared to some engineers but it got me thinking. What if I had a robot at the transmitter? Yes, I know there’s the remote control but that does not tie into everything, it can’t push the local/remote button.
I know some engineers have placed web cams at their transmitters so keep an eye on things that the remote can’t. But what if you could read meters, push buttons and generally check on things at the transmitter with a simple robot.
I came across the White Box Robotics 914, it comes with either Windows or Linux OS and you can even get just the frame to build you own. What if you had a robot that knew it’s way around your transmitter, could raise it’s camera to read the transmitter meters and other lights. What if it had a manipulator that could push buttons and even operate a touch screen.
Now I’m not saying it could or should reset breakers but to be able to push that local/remote button would be worth a great deal.
That robot to the left is a good start, it would need a telescopic mast to raise the camera and any manipulator high enough to do some good. A fully operational one costs about $7,000 but the one I am thinking of does not need to be that smart. If it followed a pre planned course and was totally human (engineer) controlled that would be good.
I have gotten a lot of great suggestions for what to put into the iPhone App I am working on. Some are simple, like resistor color codes to an RF exposure meter (a little harder). But they all have been giving me ideas of what to put into the first generation of this App.
If you have anymore ideas please let me know by leaving a comment below.
Our Matco servers have been acting up lately. Our original one is several years old and acts up now and then. A client of ours got a Matco more recently but has stopped using it so we switched over to that one but that too has been going or driving us nuts. When to clips are back to back the second one does not play for some reason. the server just stops and we switch to the default input on the switcher.
We are planning to have one or the other serviced by Matco but the decision was made for us by PG&E, when we lost power (see next post or two) it killed the power supply on our Matco. So it’s down.
But a friend of mine has been looking at a newer server company called Cinegy, a newer automation / video server software package. I saw them at NAB 2012 and they seems very friendly and helpful. They offer a free demo, it comes with no limitations, just a key over the output channel. This way you can really get to know the product before laying down your bucks.
My friend has been looking at the product and likes it, which makes me think it could work for us. It can do several output channels at once and you can get a CG program for it but thats a bit pricey for us.
Maybe even use the old Matco box to run this in, but I think I would prefer a new box with lots of storage.
We could sell all our old equipment and just have a couple of these with a network to ship files around the studio. I think this could work out really well.
Our client that feeds us via a Fiber Line from The Switch with an SDI with Embedded audio now wants to send us two separate signals. As I understand it, it’s just a delayed Satellite feed that could be done at the transmitter. But they seem to want control, don’t we all.
So I told them the only way was either rent another Fiber line to us or use two encoders and mux them together and then have two decoders up here to get the two separate programs. I know our old ASI/SDI fiber converters would do either one, ASI or SDI. But the new box AT&T is using is different and I don’t know if it handles ASI, have to ask.
I told then it would be a few thousand to do this. I will keep you informed.
Our power company needs to do work on one of the two feeders coming up to the tower, so they want to switch it off and let us run on the other feeder. We had meetings and they agreed to bring up generators (well sound insulated ones) to replace the missing feeder for the few days they are working. Thats good news for me because unlike everyone else at the tower I only have a connection to one of the services, the one they want to take down.
So I have to go off for an hour while they hook up the generator and again when they disconnect it, much better than a few days of being down.
The power company told us they were going to do a test on that feeder before the work but that it would not affect us, okay.
Thursday service 2 went down. I got a call from the boss telling me we were off the air, I was picking up my son from school so I collected him and we went to the tower. As I pulled into the parking lot I got a call from the power company telling me it was them, the feeder was down and they were working on it.Okay, at least it was not me.
Now we had our test, all stations were running on service 1 and it held just fine. We had scheduled a test to put everyone on service 1 on an upcoming night but now maybe we don’t need to. In an hour power was back and my trusty Thomson DCX Millennium came back on it’s own, with me pushing any buttons. The video servers where another thing.
I like it when it’s not my fault.
After the boss’ call about being off the air I got a call from U-verse asking what was wrong, they’re very good at letting me know I’m off the air. After I was on my way home I got another call from them, I always know it’s them, there’s no one else in Kansas that calls me. This time they let me know I was missing one channel of audio. So I turned around, after dropping my son off at home and came back up.
I could see one channel was low, tried switching the master control switcher to exercise the contacts but that did not do it. Checked the encoder, it seemed fine. Then I switched the Left – Right inputs to the Audio Encoder and the channels were balanced, I switched them back and still they were good. No idea what that was.
Now we had pictures and two channels of audio. I went home.
So my flashing lights project hit a snag, when I sent an on command to the IP IO 8 box the flashing lights turned on but most times when I sent an off command they stayed on. During the testing phase everything worked well. I turned them on and off with commands from the GUI web interface and from a companion box, the lights came on and went off.
But now that they were built, inside a stainless steel with wired together with fuses and terminal blocks, the relay built into the IP IO-8 box seemed to stick on, even powering it off did not make the contact open. We found that an external octal socket 24 volt relay would do the trick, the built in relay would reliably control it and in turn the flashing lights came on and went off like they should.
The power supply as checked, it produced 5 volts @ 4 Amps and 24 volts @ 1.4 Amps. The flashing lights should have pulled about 1.2 Amps, so this should have been alright. The 5 Volts was for powering the IP IP-8 box and in the original tests I used it’s wall wart to power it, not this supply. Now it seemed strange that during these tests on the completed boxes when using the GUI web interface after each click we had to log in again, I did not remember that from initial tests at all. So we checked the 5 Volt supply, we hung a scope on it and watched.
1/2 ohm resistor
There it was, the 5 Volts was being sucked down by the current draw of the lights, it dipped far enough to cause the IP IO-8 to reboot. But why was that? The 5Volts has several Amps available to it and the little box draws way less than an Amp of current. This is a switching supply, it adjusts it’s switching frequency to follow the current drawn from it, but the 5 Volts and the 24 Volts are tied together. When the 24 is sucked down by a large current demand the 5 Volts is sucked down with it. Thats my guess!
But the flashing lights should be within the current range of the power supply, is it just too fast and the supply can’t keep up? But switching supplies operate at hundreds of kilohertz,
IP IO8 with GUI
how could a switch on and stay on be too fast?
Now the flashing lights are large LED flashers from Federal, their like what you find on top of old police cars. They are rated for 0.4 Amps or 0.17 Amps average. I am running three of them for a total of 0.51 Amps Average, or 1.2 Amps total. The average is used because they have their own internal flash circuitry, so the current must pulse with the LEDs.
The relays were staying latched and the only way they could do that was if they were fused together. But why would just 1.4 Amps @ 24 Volts do that? We needed more data!
So we measured the current, now we had done that already using a DVM and it’s peak hold function and it had read out about 1 Amp. Now I said lets use a resistor and the scope to me sure current so we can see any spikes. And thats what we did.
At first we just looked around and found a 10 Ω @ 1W and put it in series with the 24 Volts and then put the scope probes across it. And this is what we saw -
10Ω that changed to 26Ω
Thats a 15 Volt drop across the 10Ω resistor, with E over R that equals out to be 1.5 Amps, just about what I thought it should be. The resister got hot and changed values so we hunted around the found a really nice 0.5Ω at 60 Watts. We tried again, now I read 500 mV across a 0.5Ω resistor which equals 1 Amp. This was better as this was closer to what I expected and well within perimeters.
Take a look at the video above, of the voltage drop across the resistor, did you see it? That spike right at the beginning, that was our clue, right there.
I thought it might be the big external relay turning on so we put the relay on the other side of the resister and still we got the spike.
Marty set up the scope (he was very good at that) and we captured the spike.
As you can see the spike goes off the top of the screen. Now Marty really caught it and we got a closer look at it.
Voltage Drop across a 0.5Ω Resistor
This was why the 5 volts took a dip at turn on and why the internal relays fused and stayed on. No where in the papers on the big LED flashers did they mention this extreme high current spike at turn on, maybe they don’t even know about it. We think it could be from it’s own DC to DC converter that shows a direct short as it turns on. A single LED Flasher shows a smaller spike but still draws about 8 Amps.
So we are getting a bigger power supply, instead of 1.4 Amps the new one will have 5.8 Amps @ 24 Volts. I hope that will solve this problem, along with the external relay to handle the current. Though I still don’t get why it all worked so well when it was tested before?
This is the seventh installment of Philip J Cianci’s book “High Definition Television – The Creation, Development and Implementation of HDTV Technology”. This book provides a comprehensive look at how we got to where we are today with HDTV. Starting back in the mid 60’s in Japan through the Grand Alliance to today’s global deployment of HDTV, you get an inside view of what went on.
It’s a fascinating story that’s well told.
Phil has made arrangements for TheOnLineEngineer to publish excerpts from his book over the next several weeks. This is the excerpt from Chapter 7.
The book is available from Amazon and a list of links to international booksellers can found on Phil’s website – www.HDTVarchiveproject.com.
Chapter 7
“For the Greater Good”
From its analog birth, formative years and higher education in Japan, through its postgraduate European tour, to digital adulthood in the Land of Capitalist Opportunity, the United States, HDTV had now reached technical maturity. But it was a contentious journey and not all parties were satisfied with the specified final destination. As the U.S. television industry and interested parties awaited FCC adoption of the ATSC DTV Terrestrial Transmission standard, America’s last domestically owned television manufacturer, Zenith, even with the prospect of revenue from 8-VSB patent licensing, was unable to recover from its financial woes. In November, a controlling interest in the company was acquired by South Korea’s LG Electronics (Lowe). America’s once-mighty television receiver manufacturing empire was now under the control of foreign multinational business entities.
SMPTE standards are reviewed every five years and 240M was revisited and modified to include the 59.94 Hz frame rate in addition to the original 60 Hz. After a public review period, SMPTE 240M attained ANSI approval without objection on December 1. SMPTE’s efforts at documenting a family of HDTV standards finally came full circle when ABC’s Bill Miller and Panasonic’s Jukka Hamalainen and others completed a document specifying a 1280 x 720 progressive scanning format that used ITU-R BT.709 colorimetry; the document was subsequently issued as SMPTE 296M-1995. Reflecting the addition of non–HD video formats, a revised ATSC A/53 Digital Television Standard was issued on December 20; 1080p60 was deleted in the process.
Events and topics discussed in this chapter include:
A spatial and temporal scalable ATV system
FCC Comments, computer Industry objections, Film Industry objections
WRAL or WHD – Which station did the first ATSC broadcast?
The Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers adopts a DTV standard
TheOnLineEngineer.org is all about Broadcast Engineering, from Transmitters and Antennas to Video Servers, DAs, TSoIP, and Video Paths just to name a few. We cover it all, Drawing upon my 35 years experience in broadcast television I share my knowledge with others and welcome any input or question from other engineers or students of broadcasting.
Thomson Broadcast has become TheOnLineEngineer’s newest and most generous sponsor. I want to thank all the people who have sent in donations over the last three years, but in particular I want to thank the two biggest contributors, SBE Chapter 38 in El Paso, Texas and their Chairman Antonio Castor and now Thomson Broadcast and Richard Fiore and Joe Turbolski who have jut given us our largest donation to date.
The other day when I realized that I forgot to push a button at the transmitter I knew I had to turn around and go back. Now my transmitter is not far from home, 7 miles as I drive, and there’s never any snow. So I know I have it easy compared to some engineers but it got me thinking. What if I had a robot at the transmitter? Yes, I know there’s the remote control but that does not tie into everything, it can’t push the local/remote button.
Our Matco servers have been acting up lately. Our original one is several years old and acts up now and then. A client of ours got a Matco more recently but has stopped using it so we switched over to that one but that too has been going or driving us nuts. When to clips are back to back the second one does not play for some reason. the server just stops and we switch to the default input on the switcher.
But a friend of mine has been looking at a newer server company called 
