Industry News

The FCC has issued a ruling in a dispute over a construction permit to move a FM translator in the city’s historic Beacon Hill area.

The WGBH Education Foundation, licensee of non-commercial WGBH(FM) in Boston, in June of 2020, filed a modification application to move the existing WGBH translator (W242AA) to a new site immediately adjacent to its licensed site in the city. WGBH also proposed a non-adjacent channel change from Channel 242 to Channel 247, and explained the swap would eliminate contour overlap with first-adjacent channel full-service WSRS(FM), licensed to Worcester, Mass.

It was the request to move the WGBH FM translator channel that would begin a domino effect and bring on a flurry of FCC filings by several other radio groups.

To start the FCC’s Media Bureau granted the WGBH modification request on June 24, 2020. The next day Beanpot License Corp., which owns WXRV(FM) at 92.5 MHz in Andover Mass., filed a request with the FCC to modify the facilities of its FM translator station Channel W243DC in Needham, Mass., to take advantage of the vacated WGBH channel on Chanel 242.

Then WJFD-FM Inc., licensee of full-service WJFD(FM) in New Bedford, Mass., in July 2020, filed a petition for reconsideration of the WGBH translator modification CP on the basis it would cause predicted interference to WJFD at 97.3 MHz.

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WGBH subsequently submitted a cancellation letter a month later to the Media Bureau stating it intended to stay put in its existing location and continue operating its translator on Chanel 242. Beanpot then objected to WGBH’s cancellation letter.

Beanpot in its argument supporting its objection to the of the WGBH translator modification cancellation cited several previous bureau decisions to support its claim that “once the FCC grants a translator modification application, the applicant must carry out the approved channel change and has at best an implied STA to continue operating on its original frequency while it constructs the new facility,” according to the Beanpot filing.

The back and forth between the parties continued with WGBH writing in its reply to the FCC “it has chosen not to change channels because information provided by WJFD has demonstrated to WGBH that it would not be practical for [the translator] to be built out on Channel 247.”

However, Beanpot continued to press the FCC to force WGBH to complete work on its new translator within the terms of its construction permit. “Beanpot disputes the validity of the predicted interference showing submitted by the WJFD application,” the broadcaster wrote.

Beanpot, which bills its WXRV(FM) as “Boston’s Independent Radio,” further argued that WGBH failed to formally serve the broadcaster with its CP cancellation letter in a timely fashion.

WGBH in Nov. 2020 attempted to resurrect its FM translator CP and move to the new site but to remain on the existing Channel 242 and at a lower power (3 watts ERP). In its second modification application, WGBH insisted its proposed transmitter facilities would not cause any prohibited contour overlap with the licensed Beanpot translator.

The NPR affiliate stated: “[The] proposed WGBH translator facilities would comply with respect to the first adjacent channel facility authorized in the Beanpot Modification Application because the area of existing overlap between the proposed WGBH Translator and the proposed Beanpot Translator would not increase as compared to the existing overlap between the licensed WGBH Translator and the proposed Beanpot Translator (in fact, would slightly decrease).”

Beanpot within a day filed an informal objection to WGBH’s second modification application.

Albert Shuldiner, chief of the FCC’s Audio Division, in a letter last week rejected Beanpot’s objections to WGBH’s cancellation letter and WGHB’s second modification application. The finding granted WGBH’s second modification application and appears to give the green light to WGBH to complete its FM translator move to the new facility site and remain on Channel 242.

It’s not clear from the FCC filings whether Beanpot License Corp. will proceed with its proposed modification request to switch FM translator channels.

Comment on this or any article. Write to radioworld@futurenet.com.

The post FCC Rules in Dispute Over Boston Translator Move appeared first on Radio World.

He’s the founder and Portfolio Manager of a Chicago-area investment house focused on “micro-cap value equities.”

According to his LinkedIn profile, its portfolio “is constructed through [a] in-depth, fundamental research process focused on the potential risk and return of each investment.”

Among the companies that part of his portfolio: Saga Communications.

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Chuck Kelly has retired.

“Since the summer of 1973, all I’ve wanted to do was be involved with radio,” he wrote on LinkedIn. Forty-eight years later, he can say he met his goal.

Having worked early in his career as a jock, PD, news director and chief engineer for stations in Colorado and Illinois, Kelly moved into technology sales in 1980 by going to work for 3M, where he was sales manager of International Tapetronics for eight years.

From 1988 to 2006 he was with Broadcast Electronics, a face of the company to the international market as its director of international sales. He then went to Nautel and worked there for 13 years as director of sales and later regional sales manager for the Asia/Pacific region.

In 2019 he rejoined Broadcast Electronics, which was under the new ownership of Elenos Group, as vice president of market development. His last day was Friday.

Kelly also is a longtime member of the Society of Broadcast Engineers and was its president for two terms.

“Thank you to the folks who worked beside me and had endless patience with my mistakes as well as my enthusiasm,” Kelly wrote on LinkedIn. Thank you to the customers, business partners and friends from more than 120 countries in every corner of the world, I can never forget you.”

“While I won’t be working 8 to 5 anymore, I have several consulting gigs lined up to stay busy, and will hopefully continue my association with SBE Chapter 25 here in Indianapolis, as well as with the Holy Spirit at Geist 9:30 a.m. choir,” he wrote. “And I plan to fire up W9MDO on HF and DMR from time to time. I hope to catch you down the log.”

[Read Chuck Kelly’s 2018 commentary “Radio Matters, Here’s Why”]

The post Chuck Kelly Retires appeared first on Radio World.

On September 23, 2019, the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) on Monday (9/23) released an open letter to marketing and advertising leaders imploring them to develop and executive campaigns that reflect today’s U.S. populace and consumer. 

With NBC’s telecast of Super Bowl LVI, several commercials appear to have answered the need for greater diversity in the creative. Among the standouts — spots for Google Pixel 6 and the NFL itself.

We are pleased to share once again the ANA’s letter in its entirety:

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This is the story of KZMX-FM, a Class A FM at 96.7 MHz licensed to Hot Springs, S.D. It serves a portion of South Dakota due south of Rapid City.

It shouldn’t. In fact, it was supposed to cease broadcasts on this frequency more than seven years, so another licensee could construct his 100kw FM atop Terry Peak, due northwest of Rapid City and adjacent to Deadwood, on the same dial position.

The FCC is now taking action.

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In November 2021, the FCC‘s Office of Economics and Analytics (OEA) and the Media Bureau joined together to seek comment on the procedures to be used for “Auction 112,” a sell-off of construction permits for full-power television stations.

Now, the Commission is moving forward with the auction. And, as expected, bidding will begin in June.

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Drive 40 minutes to the northeast of Buffalo Niagara International Airport, and you’ll find the town of Medina, N.Y., home to the lone tunnel under the Erie Canal. Few outside of Western New York know the small town, but it is presently on the FCC’s radar.

Why? A homeowner could be faced with “significant fines” of up to exactly $22,021 per day for what the Enforcement Bureau says is harmful interference to a Commission licensee’s LTE communications, and the resident’s refusal to allow a Bureau Agent to inspect the premises to identify the source of the interference — believed to be a TV antenna.

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The authors are, respectively, senior product manager and evangelist at ALC NetworX, and business development manager, OEM & Partnerships, at Ross Video.

Bill Rounopoulos (left) and Andreas Hildebrand

Remote production is clearly a hot topic today, as companies around the world race to maintain their existing workflows with their talent dispersed in many off-site locations. Such production is the new normal and — now that we have experienced its potential — is likely to continue to be a focus in the future.

While many solutions have been hastily cobbled together, there is a need for higher-quality productions with lower latency that integrate easily with existing equipment.

Starting Point
We started with a basic question: Can we send Ravenna/AES67 traffic over the public infrastructure and over long distances?

Then we wondered, would we be able to listen to something resembling audio? Would it be good quality?

It is one thing for a single company with their own equipment to do it, but could we also interoperate with equipment from other companies? After all, this is the whole point behind Ravenna and AES67.

Finally, we also wondered how we would do it and what challenges would we face.

Before digging into the setup and challenges that needed to be overcome, it is important to understand that Ravenna and AES67, even though they use IP, are designed to be used in local-area networks (LANs).

Despite this, Ravenna and AES67 have been proven and are being used commercially in wide-area network applications across private networks, even though their use in WANs was never contemplated by the standards.

Private dedicated networks, whether owned or leased, are well-architected, have predictable behavior and come with performance guarantees.

Public networks, on the other hand, are the equivalent of the “wild west.” You can’t control them. They are congested and unpredictable. Public networks suffer from packet loss due to link failures and have large, sometimes dramatic, latency due to packet re-transmissions.

This makes the public environment hostile for Ravenna and AES67!

Challenges
There are three main challenges: latency and packet jitter; packet loss; timing and synchronization.

Fortunately, the increased latency and packet jitter of the public network is handled by Ravenna by design, through the use of large receiver buffers that must be able to handle a minimum of 20 mS. AES67 only requires 3 mS but also recommends 20 mS.

Most well-designed Ravenna solutions, like all the equipment used in this experiment, have even bigger buffers and other associated techniques that can compensate for the added delay.

The AES Standard Committee working group SC-02-12-M is working on guidelines for AES67 over WAN applications, and a key recommendation is to increase the buffer size within devices.

Packet loss is another important challenge. Ravenna and AES67 are not designed to cope with dropped packets.

Fortunately, there are other transport protocols that are architected to deal with dropped packets without introducing a lot of extra latency. These include Secure Reliable Transport (SRT), Zixi and Reliable Internet Stream Transport (RIST), but there are many others.

We solved the challenge of packet loss by using SRT encapsulating Ravenna traffic within SRT.

The final but significant challenge is timing and synchronization. We start by having a separate Precision Time Protocol (PTP) Grandmaster (GM) at each site that is synchronized to GPS. All equipment at each location is locked to PTP locally in order to maintain synchronization among all participating devices. No PTP packets are sent across the WAN or through the cloud, which would simply not be practical as packet jitter is too high to achieve adequate synchronization precision.

The Demo Setup
These musings resulted in an ambitious proof-of-concept demo involving equipment from three Ravenna partners — Ross, Merging Technologies and DirectOut — across four sites over two continents, North America and Europe, that leverages the public cloud infrastructure from Amazon Web Services, or AWS.

Fig. 1: Block Diagram of Demo Setup

The Fig. 1 graphic gives a generalized view of the demo setup. Ross equipment in Ottawa, Canada, interfaced with AWS Virginia, while the Merging and DirectOut setups in Grenoble, France, Lausanne, Switzerland and Mittweida, Germany communicated with AWS Frankfurt.

On-site in Ottawa, Mittweida, Lausanne and Grenoble, various Ravenna/AES67 gear from Ross Video, DirectOut and Merging was used to create and receive standard AES67 streams. Gateways on the local networks were used to wrap these AES67 streams into SRT flows, which in turn were handed off to the AWS cloud access points using the public internet.

The flows were then transported within the AWS cloud between the access points, from where they were handed off (secured by SRT) to the local SRT gateways via public internet again. The gateways unwrapped the AES67 streams so that they appeared unchanged in the local destination networks and could be received by the Ravenna devices.

All SRT gateways were built from Haivision’s open-source SRT implementation. While Ross Video and Merging used separate host machines to run the SRT gateways, DirectOut was able to include the gateway functionality into their Prodigy.MP Multi-I/O converter.

Since all Ravenna devices were synchronized to the same time source via GPS, the generated streams received exact RTP timestamps that were transparently transported through the cloud, so that a deterministic and stable playout latency and inter-stream alignment could be configured at the receiving ends. Since streams were not processed or altered in the cloud or by the SRT gateways, the audio data was bit-transparently passed through with full quality.

Since any packet loss was coped with by the SRT protocol, a higher latency setting needed to be configured to accommodate the larger packet delay variation (PDV) due to occasional packet retransmission.

Thankfully, the Ravenna receiver devices used in this demo provided ample buffering capacity to allow adequate configuration. In practice, buffer settings (= overall latency setting) ranged from 200–600 mS, depending on quality and bandwidth of the local Internet connection.

A monitoring web page connected to a local loopback server hosted on AWS enabled listening to the live streams via http within any browser, including display of live VU metering and accumulated (unrecoverable) packet loss per stream.

More information and the live demo page are available on a dedicated page at www.ravenna-network.com/remote-production/.

Lessons Learned
The proof-of-concept demo worked well, and we are very pleased with the results. It required some expertise and fiddling with manual settings to get it to work.

Many lessons were learned from the proof of concept. Here are a few:

• “Local only” PTP synchronization locked to GPS works fine.
• There is packet loss, but this can be managed via SRT.
• Latency, at significantly less than 1 second, is lower than what we expected, but still substantial.
• To manage increased network delay, manual tuning of the link offset at each location was required, as expected, but the deep buffers of the receivers were able to compensate for it.

Future Considerations
There are a few items that require further study to make it a more practical and usable solution:

• A big one is how to transport timing through the cloud.
• We consciously decided on manual connections using session description protocol (SDP) files to keep things simple. It would be valuable to be able to use Ravenna or NMOS registration and discovery over the cloud to automate the connection process.
• Ease of use would be greatly enhanced if the link-offset could be handled automatically to compensate for network delay.
• To manage packet loss, it would be interesting to learn if ST2022-7 redundancy would work.
• Although SRT worked great, it would be good to experiment with RIST to understand if there are any performance or reliability benefits.

The proof of concept showed there is a lot of promise for Ravenna in the cloud and we are excited and motivated to tackle these items soon.

Thanks to Angelo Santos of Ross Video for providing the drawing of the proof of concept setup; Nicolas Sturmel of Merging Technologies for programming the monitoring website and setting up the AWS cloud access; and Claudio Becker-Foss of DirectOut Technologies for providing thoughts on gateway programming.

The post Ravenna Takes It to the Cloud appeared first on Radio World.

The Chief of the FCC Media Bureau’s Audio Division has ruled that the licensee of a currently silent 5-watt FM translator at 96.3 MHz in the Kendall Square area of Boston can move ahead with the facility’s modification — a decision that came just months after a cancellation request was made.

The approval means GBH can proceed with an action it has wanted to do, but was met with an objection from another licensee.

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For the last several years, a Texas licensee has been seeking to operate a Class A radio station at 92.7 on the FM dial. However, that hasn’t happened because another licensee, led by Roy Henderson, has been authorized to do so but never followed through with a shift to that frequency for a Class A FM at 106.1 MHz.

This led the FCC’s Media Bureau to open a Comment and Reply Comment period to help come to a resolution on the matter.

Now, Henderson is making headlines for another matter involving the Bureau: “DKHTZ” no longer has a “D” in its call letters, as a license renewal submitted March 31, 2021 with the Commission has been granted.

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