SBE CHAPTER 40 NEWSLETTER
FEBUARY 2000
San Francisco
Roy Trumbull - Editor roy547@msn.com
Bill Dempster - Artist
Advertisers for this month's newsletter are:
Zack Electronics - (800) 998-3947
Advanced Marketing - Frank A. Santucci - (650) 365-3944
Belden - Steve Lampen - (415) 440-8393
Orban - Rick Sawyer - (360) 715-1913
MARCOM - Martin Jackson - (408) 768-8668
William F. Ruck, Jr. Broadcast Engineer - (415) 995-6969
Communications Law Center - Philip M. Kane - (650) 369-7373
RF Specialties of California - Bill Newbrough - (888) 737-7321
Hammett & Edison, Inc. - Dane E. Ericksen, P.E. - (707) 996-5200
LeBLANC - David A. Hill - (650) 574-4600
Gentner Communications - Kelly Hanning - (800) 879-9317
Improbable Missions Fource - Mike Schweizer - (888) 4-ISDN4U
Svetlana Electron Devices - George Badger - (800) 578-3852
Broadcast Systems - (800) 801-2623
Audio Accessories - Rosie Alexander - (510) 787-3335
Brill Electronics - Larry or Sam - (510) 834-5888
Kathrein (Scala Division) - Michael Wm. Bach - (541) 779-6500
Harris - John Briskie - (650) 593-1837

BABES/SBE LUNCHEON ON WEDNESDAY Feb 23TH
This month our speaker is Mike Adams, professor of radio-television-film,at San Jose State University. His topic is the technical pre-history of radio broadcasting. Mike maintains the website:
http://www.charlesherrold.org devoted to local radio pioneer Charles "San Jose calling" Herrold.

As usual, our luncheon will be at Sinbad's just south of the Ferry Building on the Embarcadero near the foot of Mission St.. Please RSVP to Carol Brahney at Zacks: 408-487-9302 (cbrahney@zackinc.com). We meet at 11:30 and are seated at 12:30.

Future Meetings
Jesse Maxenchs Dies
For more years than I can remember, the first person who stood up to introduce himself at the BABES meetings was, "Jesse Maxenchs - Orban". (For awhile the company was TFT.) We haven't seen Jesse for a few years as he's been battling cancer. On January 23rd, Jessie died.

A contribution to the American Cancer Society has been made by SBE Chapter 40 in Jesse's memory,

Napa Valley College Students Help At SMPTE
I attended the SMPTE Winter Conference here and was very impressed by Gary Vann's students from Napa Valley College who helped out at the conference. Gary's current crop is pretty impressive. For a look at their resumes, go to http://www.napanet.net/~smpte-11/resume.shtml.

TI Digital Light Projector at Van Ness AMC
Did you know that at the AMC complex at 1000 Van Ness we have one of the 12 theaters in the country equipped for digital cinema? The Saturday night of the SMPTE Conference, a group of 200 attendees took over theater 2 to see a screening of "Toy Story 2" from Pixar.

This was a film that had never been a film. TS2 was produced on art systems for film release, but, in this case, those files were transferred to a Qubit recorder for display by a TI digital light projector (DLP). The result was a very bright clean image without film grain and projector frame dancing.

My impression was that those, who have a nostalgia for the "film look", will soon have take their liquor with the LP record buffs.

Minidisc OK
Last month I mentioned minidisc. If I was still in radio I think I'd give the minidisc some serious consideration. I bought a consumer unit and have been using it to record lectures. The ability to tag any location and then cue to the tag is very useful. The sound quality is on a par with DAT. The discs are only $2 to $2.50. The stereo recording time is 74 minutes and double that for mono.

DTV Reception
Last month I mentioned that Motorola was here in December to do some field tests. There is a link to their report at Doug Lung's www.transmitter.com.

I've been to four cable head-ends to check out digital reception and at each, all of the Sutro stations came in just fine. The furthest site was Bonny Doon, in the Santa Cruz mountains. It's 49 miles from Sutro.

At my home in El Cerrito, I'm picking up KNTV-DT on channel 12 with a loop antenna. By my calculations, they're 60 miles away.

I just had email regarding testing of third generation receivers. Second generation looks pretty good but 3rd should handle dynamic multipath and portable applications.

EMAIL ADDRESS
If you have an email address, please contact Warren Reese at radions@neteze.com. Warren is in charge of our email list, which we use when we need to notify members when something has happened between newsletters.

WEB PAGE
Webmeister Tim Pozar has the current newsletter plus newsletters all the way back to 1996 at: http://www.lns.com/sbe
Broadcast Transmitters
Performance and Quality from the RF Experts Russ Erickson, Account Manager - ADC Broadcast Systems Division
16778 West View Drive, PO Box 310, Mead, CO 80542-0310
970-535-9300, Toll Free 877-440-7877, Fax 970-535-9110
russ_erickson@adc.com, www.adc.com/broadcast