SBE CHAPTER 40
NEWSLETTER
FEBUARY 1998
SAN FRANCISCO
Roy Trumbull - Editor roy547@netcom.com
Bill Dempster -
Artist
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BABES/SBE LUNCHEON ON WEDNESDAY
FEB 25th
This month our speaker will be Daniel Taylor of Daniel
Taylor & Assoc., Architects. The topic will be "Designing the Digital
Information Factory". Photos of actual construction and systems installations
will be shown. Recently they created the prototype digital television station
for the News Corporation.
As usual our luncheon will be at Sinbad's. Sinbad's is just south of the
Ferry Building on the Embarcadero near the foot of Mission Street. Please
RSVP to Karen Prasek at Zack's: 408-324-0551 x126 asap; we've been running out
of tables and chairs. We meet at 11:30 and are seated at 12:30.
FUTURE PROGRAMS March 25th –
Mark Haynes of Leo's Pro Audio on the
LightHouse digital audio switcher.
DTV IS MTV Not Music Television,
mystery television. We still don't know what 8VSB is despite the graphics in the
various magazine articles whose author's jobbed them all from the ATSC notes. I
wrote Brad Dick to ask him what the unlabeled vertical axis was in a recent
article on 8VSB. No one really knows. I cornered a Zenith engineer at the recent CES show and asked him what Q was in their
system. He admitted that a Q signal was created but that the system didn’t use
it. He also said that the trellis coding was a PC decision that actually costs
the system some of its operational margin.
The pre-distortion of the signal, to make it fit into the FCC mask, takes
place in the 8VSB modulator. Don't look in the published block diagrams.
Instead, Place your hand on the ASTC test report and smile proudly into the
rising sun. Also, filling a slot in the modulator, is a circuit that can mimic
the delay characteristics of the channel filter. No peaking. (You'd better bet
your sweet tweaker there is.)
Have a nice bandwidth.
LET IT RAIN, LET IT POUR I put a
fresh roll of paper in my TFT
911 on 12/30 and it ran out by 2/7 and we had to load another. From 2/2 to
2/8 I counted 28 Alerts that KRON forwarded
including three that were for immediate evacuations. Several were from KQED and didn't come in as duplicates so we ran
them. One was from the NWS radio. By the time it made it through KQED's box and
our box, it was pretty well trashed. I had some viewer comments on that one.
We use a CODI in master control that can be loaded with text by the news
dept.. They got to be real good at picking off the NWS wire copy and pasting it.
Often it was loaded and ready prior to KCBS kicking off the party.
While I've said that if KCBS don't play
the music, we won't dance, we also groove to KQED's Eine Kleine EAS musik.
GABBERT CALLS I said something nice
about him and the phone rang. Actually Jim was lamenting that there are so few
of us pre-stereo guys around who remember what it was like in the days before
the entire dial got its check cut by the same corporation. Jim recalled some of
the call letters I'd asked about. KNBR-FM was 99.7. The original owner of 97.3
was KWBR in Oakland which predated KDIA. KCBS on the Clay - Jones Apt. Building
was 98.9. I have a dim memory that that frequency may have gone on the air as
KJBS-FM. Jim remembered that the 94.1 slot occupied by KPFA was originally a commercial station with
the call letters KSFH. And going through some old files I found that KRON-FM was
96.5.
Another Gabbert story has to do with a directional antenna that I believe
engineering legend Al Eisberg designed for (then) KNBC-FM. It was in the bone
yard up a San Bruno and Jim recognized it for what it was and adapted it for
KPEN. He was authorized for 120KW in the major lobes before the blue meanies
came up with the "new rules" in the early 60s.
Done Your ULS Filing?* Late last
year I got several letters from the Wireless Bureau re filing call letters along
with a taxpayer ID. I didn't think much of it as I thought it was related to a
CEL site in Arizona that we'd sold to Bell Atlantic. A few weeks ago I got 8
more letters all with the same content. Wireless is handling all of the licenses
for Broadcast Aux and it appears they want them all associated with a taxpayer
ID.
What makes this a little sticky is that there is one call letter file per
taxpayer ID. If there are a number of stations in a group with a common EIN
(employer identification number), then all the calls have to be gathered and
uploaded at one time. You can upload a plain text file with one call letter per
line. I've done a little more extensive article on this topic. It's
on our Web page.
*(does not mean unidentified lingerie sighting)
WEB PAGE The chapter 40 web page is
at http://www.lns.com/sbe and is maintained
by Tim Pozar.
EMAIL MEISTER The keeper of the
chapter 40 email address list is Warren Reese his address is radions@jps.net. Please note the new
email address.
Warren worked for the KPH in Bolinas which was one of the last coastal Morse
sites. He has photos of KPH on his web page at http://www.jps.net/radions.