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Same,but Not

March 11, 2011

Ever get the feeling things stay the same, but then discover they are not?  We had anotther UPS fault this week. This time on the processing rack. I did the early morning swap without incident. Off air time was that of the reboot. Phew.  Then tonight a surprise;  station drops off the air!

There are many frustrations when dealing with old infrastructure.  We have an Aux site for three stations, but only the remote control for one operates it!  So, said station goes off, it calls me and I go to the Aux transmitter:  no audio!  I instructed my assistant to turn on the Aux site, if not him I would have to dial up the Aux site and turn it on. Then I would dial back to the main site to make sure all is off there.  Annoying and a waste of time.

So much for my rant.  We need a better remote system!  Anyways our Harris HDHT+ dropped. I could not find a problem. Ran it in a load. Ran it back on air. Nothing. No log entries. These are the very symptoms as last year. I suspect the Flexstar exciter did some barf. Again no logs to confirm or deny it. I checked UPS logs and found no indication of a power event. I looked at other devices for tell-tale signs, and found none. For piece of mind I rebooted the exciter. Let’s see where this goes. Of course all this occurs days before I take a few days off.

Next I will lay out what should be a reliable remote system.  All busy work, but becoming necessary. That along with how to deal with the emminent NextGen system being forced upon us. Our 20 year old infrastructure cannot handle this extra hardware.  No space and no power. I should detail that story in a future post!

Cheers!

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  1. andy armstrong
    May 8, 2011 at 07:39

    Bill:

    We also have the Harris HT/HD+, we also had an outage that must be related to the exciter muting! It’s damn frustrating. LAst night a 12:05am the transmitter was off the air yet still ON (plates etc.), I have a note in the instruction manual to call me first if the station is off and wait 10 minutes for me to respond. I was dead asleep so I missed it BUT the RF was off for 6 minutes and restored itself to normal without user intervention.

    I just updated the exciter to the most recent rev. and rebooted 5 days ago….today I’m backing up one version since I haven’t had any outages for quite a while…but summer is here and it’s my worst time…..

    BTW: We used to lose blockers pretty regular bue to the loss of RF while the PA was still active, they have a new blocker design (2 layers instead of one) which has held up for more than a year now….consifering we went through 10 in the first two years of operation I’d say it’s a fix.

    Keep me updated with your TX status…I’m calling Harris tomorrow.

    Andy

  2. Bill Eisenhamer
    May 8, 2011 at 08:28

    Andy, I feel your pain. Either get in touch with Walter Freeman or Louis. If all else fails, contact Tim Anderson.

    Of course you will be grilled on type of data path, where you have your GPS clock, etc.

    I am still shocked that HD data can, and will, mute an exciter.

    If you know how to so it, capture PLL data for analysis. It gives an example of how robust a data path is. For some reason the path must be fairly robust, yet how many have robust data paths to transmitter sites?

    If I can help please let me know.

    Bill

  3. andy armstrong
    May 13, 2011 at 06:35

    Bill:

    Spoke to Walter and he suggested updating the Exporter to 4.3.2, Spoke to Jacob and he’d never heard of the problem before but very courtious. Another suggestion was to add a 10Mhz clock at the tower site, saying it -may- help. The only fix may be to move the exporter to the tower if this continues…

    Do you have a time reference at the tower site for the exciter?

    I’ve been capturing the PLL with nothing to note other than lots of re-learning, it used to be solid and somewhere along the way through software updates we lost that.

    What versions are you running?

    We have 2.4.2 exporter, 4.34/8.21 Exciter now backed up to 8.18

    Thanks.

    Andy

  4. Bill Eisenhamer
    May 14, 2011 at 05:57

    Andy,
    Very interesting. I am at 2.4.2/8.0. I am asked to go to latest. I have everything at the studio, so 10 MHz clock is at the studio. I do the same with my Nautel’s, but I do not have problems with them.

    If you do not go the eBay route, a GPS receiver with the 10MHz output is not cheap. Moving my equipment is my extreme final choice, and I do not wish to do that.

    I will post as I do my updates. Frustrating in the least.

    Bill

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