Tech Notes from the Field

Apparently we me be on the road to the answer of why our HTHD+ transmitter randomly drops off air. If you have followed my posts these random events are annoying to say the least. Recently we discovered the transmitter recovers on its own within 2 minutes, a long time in radio land. What is this potential solution?

Set the Exgine Buffer such that the Buf Used and Buf Max is in the 20-30% range. We moved ours from Default to 0.836 and the system seemed to stabilize. We still experience Exporter Sync Unlocks, but are not as often. Also when using thos setting the Lock Indicator does not swing as much. This will count down to zero, go negative, reverse, and “swing” between random limits. Apparently if the swing is within some tolerance the sync indicates a lock and the buffer is running optimal.

If the buffer is over utilized there seems to be a DSP barf which mutes the exciter. Seems odd that this could happen, but since changing our settings we surpassed our 2 week wall and shut offs. After checking this morning the sync was unlocked and we noticed our T-1 circuit took a hit. Makes sense that some corrupt packets came in and caused loss of sync. We await a re-sync. Too bad there is no good way to remotely monitor this.

I will keep on top of this, so look for tweets and future blog updates.