Friday Update: 9/17/2010 (For lack of a better title!)

I figured I would update all on the workings that occurred while we were concentrated on our Studio M build.  As of today, Studio M is a big success.  I think I’ll post some progress pictures on the website as soon as I can.  (I have an issue at work with FTP uploads, damn firewall.)  Today is the first day with live audience in the studio.  They squeezed 20 people in the room.  HVAC is holding up.  They are loving it.  Comfort level is good.  He’s commenting on it as I write.

While we were working on this thing there has been other items that needed taking care of.  One is our Nautel V1-D.  Believe it or not, our front panel overlay, which has the buttons for On/Off and LED display indications seemed to cause mysterious Off commands resulting in shutting the transmitter off.  In reviewing the schematic and doing the troubleshooting with our friends at Nautel, the Off switch is paralleled with the remote Off command.  This makes sense in terms of being able to override the remote and shut the transmitter down if necessary.  Do to what I believe was thermal expansion and contraction we had random off-air situations do to the transmitter receiving an Off command.  We eliminated the remote control as the cause leaving the overlay.  Once the overlay was bypassed, the issue went away.  A new overlay has been installed and all is well now.

You ask, “Overlay?”  Yes.  It is an interesting design in that the switch is not a big, square switch, but something similar to a keyboard micro-switch, for lack of a better description.  As it is part of the physical front panel, there is no way to replace or fix the switch.  I am curious now if this issue will begin to surface again as the box ages.

As if we had nothing else to do, we did a software upgrade on the NV20s.  We moved from version 2.7 to version 2.8.3.  We had no issue with 2.7, per se.  We did have one, just one, occurrence where one, and only one, NV20 had an off-air situation.  We took a data hit on our T-1 STL which caused a loss of AES audio briefly.  The exciter did not recover, so we had a transmitter on the air with no audio.  Very weird.  After an exciter reboot, all was good.  This issue would probably never occur again, but as a precaution we updated the software as there is a fix for this rare situation.  Only three known occurrences of this from what I have heard, and of course I would be one of them!

Update on the Harris Flexstar issue.  We’ve been running the beta firmware for months now without incident.  Our diversity delay drifts a bit, still.  Our center frequency drifts a bit (last measurement was +270Hz).  The real thing is we have not been off the air due to an exciter lock.  No RF muting.  I would say we have made significant progress on that one.  As things slow down, I will request the release version of the firmware and complete the cycle.  At this time, if it ain’t broke, don’t mess with it.

Last, be assured I will post some details on our Studio M build.  What we use and how we overcame some situations.  The final decision is whether I write it up for a trade.  If this is the case, then I cannot have a previous post on that that.  Stay tuned.  Hope you all are enjoying updates as I file them.

Cheers!