Analog and HD out of sync...why?

[kfbkfb]

I've noticed several cases here in Kansas City where the
HD part gets out of sync with the (AM or FM) analog part (it
sometimes takes a while to fix it).

I would think, with present day technology, sync could be
set at HD installation and would stay correct (except due
to equipment failure).

Kirk Bayne

 

[nd2023]

Because no one listens to HD, not even the engineers.

 

[tomservo]

There actually is some sort of device to keep delay in check (designed for this very purpose, not using a profanity delay) but stations are too cheap to put them in because… as Nick noted, no one's really listening.

HD radio is such a catch-22. No one's listening so we won't upgrade the power/electronics/software, and the delay is bad the power is too low and the sound quality bad so no one will listen.

Chicken, meet egg.

 

[Savage]

Day Sequerra makes a processor that syncs the analog and digital, but it's a $3500 BandAid to an already-expensive system. You would think that iBiquity would offer the box as a retrofit-update to its customers, but....nooooo.

Yep - nobody's listening, and 9 out of 10 engineers hate the stupid HD stuff anyway. A couple have expressed the sentiment to yours truly that if they ignore it, management will eventually tire of it and give them permission to turn it off.

 

[ddsparxx]

I have noticed the same thing in my area--HD sometimes out of sync with analog.

 

[RadeoEngineer]

My friend here saddled with three FM HD's gets a call from stupidquity as soon as any of his slip. What a waste of time and effort.

 

[tomservo]

There's a Crumulus station in my market whose HD has been 7 seconds behind the analog for over a year now.

I'd complain, but being a giant corporate structure there's actually no method to "contact us" beyond a main switchboard line. I've been that route before trying to get in touch with engineers and got nowhere, so…

I understand many engineers don't like HD but if the station is going to do it, why not take pride in the entire setup and at least make sure the hated piece of technology works right? Stop being a bunch of whining pansies and do your effing jobs.

 

[Savage]

Zach, you obviously have never been responsible for a number of signals simultaneously. Nor struggled with a frozen contactor in drizzle on a mountaintop when you're running a fever from the flu, as your family waits at home with Christmas dinner on hold.

Or you've never gotten the Dreaded Cell Call while you're waiting on line at the movie theater with your kids or grandkids you haven't seen in months - because a satellite receiver crashed right before the big game.

Or you've never been awakened out of a sound sleep at 3am by some 19 year old trainee-jock who informs you, "I can't hear myself in the headphones. The sound is 'too far back.'"

And you think blowing off the delay drift for an HD service listened to by literally nobody is "whining?" As you keep being asked to do more and more with less help and smaller budgets, by clueless suits who regard you as some kind of technical janitor?

Have a little respect, my friend.

 

[RadeoEngineer]

Zack there are only so many hours in the day, and days in the week. The friend I mentioned is in the middle of replacing an entire tower and moving FM antennas right now, and it isn't very pleasant outdoors right now. So if the HD is running at all, it's good enough for the three geeks listening to it until he has the time to drive to three separate sites to make the corrections. My last job I had four stations, by myself, and each transmitter site was an hours drive from the studios in a different direction. Nothing worked, and they wouldn't spend the money to let me fix anything. That's when I decided retirement was a great opportunity. I would have gladly worked my ass off to get things in shape, but they refused to fund it. I never had to deal with HD, but if I had, it would have been low on my priority list.

 

[tomservo]

Have a little respect, my friend.

I certainly respect all the engineers out there for their wealth of knowledge and awesome troubleshooting/repair abilities, and I've heard a lot of stories about how engineers pull out seeming miracles to get critical hardware working on a shoestring. It's not about respect, it's about doing the job you've been tasked with and not complaining about the parts you don't like.

Everyone knows I'm not a radio person. I represent the listener — for the most part — on these boards, and just want the station "to work" when I turn on the radio. I'm sorry if I came off too gruff but I spent a short (not short enough) time in a managerial position at a manufacturing facility and the people under me were non-stop complainers. Not about me (AFAIK) but just about the job they were tasked to do in general.

I just got real tired of people complaining when they should have been happy to have a job. It just seems like when you're making, oh, 30-50 bucks an hour on call outs to fix crashed boxes and whatnot, that's a pretty fair tradeout for always being on call. Heck, I'm probably low-balling those hourly rates.

With consolidation breathing down everyone's necks I can't fathom why the few remaining overworked engineers won't be obsessed with doing the darned best jobs they can lest they find themselves in the employment line at some point. And when doing the best job means doing a lot of hard work PLUS also twiddling a knob once a week to keep the HD in sync, that just sort of seems like crying about a lot of nothing.

I had little patience for those under me complaining about their $9/hr jobs, so I guess it stands to reason that I'm downright jealous of those with the wherewithall to make tons more money and can't understand how adding one tiny task (keeping the HD running properly). But considering my sickly, jobless position now, I guess I'm a little flustered at the concept of complaining by people with good educations and good paying jobs.

Perhaps this is a missed opportunity on my part. "Professional box rebooter and knob twiddler." I'll charge $10/hr for call outs instead of $50 or $100. Let the engineer work on the real problems. ;D

 

[tomservo]

Zack there are only so many hours in the day, and days in the week. The friend I mentioned is in the middle of replacing an entire tower and moving FM antennas right now, and it isn't very pleasant outdoors right now. So if the HD is running at all, it's good enough for the three geeks listening to it until he has the time to drive to three separate sites to make the corrections. My last job I had four stations, by myself, and each transmitter site was an hours drive from the studios in a different direction. Nothing worked, and they wouldn't spend the money to let me fix anything. That's when I decided retirement was a great opportunity. I would have gladly worked my ass off to get things in shape, but they refused to fund it. I never had to deal with HD, but if I had, it would have been low on my priority list.

I don't expect HD to be high on anyone's list. But that doesn't mean a delay can't get fixed in 13 months.

No one wants to work for a tightwad who won't pay to fix things that need fixing. So I don't blame you at all for getting out; that was the best thing to do, I bet. But did you sabotage* what you were left with, or did you do the best job you could with what you had? I bet it is the latter and not the former.

* sabotage in this case meaning purposefully not dealing with things that WERE in your power, just to make the station suffer more.

 

[Savage]

A little more feud for thought here, Zach...

Consider this scenario: local management actually SUPPORTS the beleagured engineer who is overworked and overstressed - at least as far as HD goes. What if the local cluster GM had HD imposed on him by corporate and hates the interference and cost and maintenance meltdowns as much as his CE - whom he calls in his office, demands "do everything to keep that damn IBOC on," winks, rolls his eyes and hands the engineer a gift certificate for dinner at a nice restaurant?
Think that's far-fetched?

It isn't.

I think your suggestion to hire yourself out as "delay management tech" for $10 an hour has merit. Why not call local stations which are out of sync and offer your services?

 

[ajc_trw]

I've mentioned this before and will again.

Why doesn't a station simulcast the main HD-1 audio on their analog signal? Run the station like it's all-digital and simply plug the received HD audio into the analog transmission.

Answer: HD is not better than analog and stations do not want to eat the three-eyed fish.
Simpsons reference

Yes?

 

[Chuck]

Perhaps this is a missed opportunity on my part. "Professional box rebooter and knob twiddler." I'll charge $10/hr for call outs instead of $50 or $100. Let the engineer work on the real problems. ;D

Well, you'll go broke if you do. While I understand your frustration with people who do nothing but complain about their jobs, I don't think that is the real problem here.

I have quite a few broadcast engineer friends. For for the most part, they are overworked and underpaid. Frequently, when there is a problem, the management isn't willing to make the investment in doing the job right. They go for the quick (and cheap) fix, postponing the inevitable. To me, that is like having a death wish, but that seems to be the current management philosophy of some broadcasters.

 

[RadeoEngineer]

Zack there are only so many hours in the day, and days in the week. The friend I mentioned is in the middle of replacing an entire tower and moving FM antennas right now, and it isn't very pleasant outdoors right now. So if the HD is running at all, it's good enough for the three geeks listening to it until he has the time to drive to three separate sites to make the corrections. My last job I had four stations, by myself, and each transmitter site was an hours drive from the studios in a different direction. Nothing worked, and they wouldn't spend the money to let me fix anything. That's when I decided retirement was a great opportunity. I would have gladly worked my ass off to get things in shape, but they refused to fund it. I never had to deal with HD, but if I had, it would have been low on my priority list.

But did you sabotage* what you were left with, or did you do the best job you could with what you had? I bet it is the latter and not the former.

* sabotage in this case meaning purposefully not dealing with things that WERE in your power, just to make the station suffer more.

Zach I'm going to go easy on you here, because I believe you have no concept of what it is to be an on call broadcast engineer without sufficient support from the upper deck.

I never "sabotaged" anything. Why would I do that? It would make me look bad and make my job harder, because eventually you have to make things work, and hopefully, if supported, work well. Had I done anything to make any station "suffer" it would have been in conflict with my ethics, as well as a conflict to my professionalism. I have done many things in broadcast engineering, including returning early from vacation in Europe to resolve a serious issue. We know what we sign on for, but when we're treated as plumbers and cost centers, I take offense. I actually was called in to resolve a problem in a control room, but was asked first to fix a leaking toilet. Think about that. What were the priorities and the consideration for my skills and knowledge?

If you have a situation where there is something causing your station to go off the air on a regular basis, and you tell the suits what it will take to fix it, and they glare at you like you're trying to mug them and they say find another way that's cheaper, and you know you can do that but it will break again, what the hell are you supposed to feel about being treated like that?

If the proper maintenance was allowed and funded, there would be no issue with your precious HD delay, but when the automation is crashing, your AM is tripping off in lightning because of bad grounding, and your FM is blowing diode stacks because of shitty power and no funds to protect, the last goddam thing you're going to care about is HD delay.

Sorry. Didn't mean to get that hostile, but seriously, you just don't understand.

 

[tomservo]

Sorry. Didn't mean to get that hostile, but seriously, you just don't understand.

No, I don't understand; your hostility is understandable. So it's as much the company's fault as anything for not spending money to build a quality setup. That's fine.

My question now becomes, if it's so bad, why stick around? You said yourself, you got out and retired before it went too far downhill, right?

A good engineer should, in theory, always be in demand. It's not like there's a lot of you guys out there, ya know.

Sabotaged was probably not the right word, which is why it included an asterisk. I'd say the way management treats engineering problems qualifies as sabotage because they're putting cost above everything else, including having the station run smoothly.

I know I've read countless engineering stories over the years about engineers rigging fake buttons and knobs to placate GMs who want to tweak (eg, mess up) the processing to suit their whims and things like that. That's a form of insubordination, albeit for the good of the station, ainnit? The whole wink-and-nod to HD is the same way. Do it or don't do it. Either run it right or come up with an excuse to corporate about why it has to be off. I just don't like seeing things done half-arsed, I guess.

I don't expect anyone to sit around and watch a low-priority thing like HD to make sure it's in sync. I do expect someone to take a cursory glance at it once a month at least just to see if it's even running or has crashed. Besides the HD with the delay completely gone, we have one running an HD-2 with no audio. It's on but no one's home. How long does it take to reboot a PC in a closet? Shoot, you shouldn't even need an engineer to do that. Just get the secretary to take a listen every month or two to make sure the thing is running.

Here's food for thought: How would it have affected Sirius and XM if, in their early days when there were only a handful of subscribers, the channels randomly went off air for months at a time? Would that have led to the platforms growing, or not?

Just because few are listening to HD now, it doesn't mean they should be treated like red headed stepchildren. The whole system can't grow if the stations themselves don't give a damn about the product they put out. HD has a hard enough battle as is with coverage issues in tight markets and the whole AM HD mess that should never have been allowed to breathe air. But what we have is a system that can work in limited release, and should at least be given a chance to die on its own, without help from wary programmers and incensed engineers.

 

[RadeoEngineer]

Man, you just so don't get it. I tried.

 

[Savage]

Zach, you need to be careful what you wish for, because we're zeroing in on the reason why good broadcast engineers are becoming as commonplace as....well, standalone HD Radio receivers (or hen's teeth - pick your metaphor.) Given the financial problems facing radio groups and the intense pressure and poor-quality management, a majority of qualified, experienced professionals like RadeoEngineer have bailed to go to work for internet or cellular or public-service carrier companies. It may not be showbiz, but at least there are reasonable expectations and they're not asked to fix leaking toilets.

The reason why there were never the problems you hear on HD subs on XM and Sirius is those services were appropriately staffed and funded. Also, despite sat-radio's history of bleeding oceans of money, the only product they generate for cash is their air signal - no spots. So I'm sure those services have a level of redundancy unheard-of in broadcast radio; if the signals went off even occasionally they'd be out of business.

HD Radio listeners are treated like "red-headed stepchildren" because they don't even qualify as red-headed stepchildren - in the real world, where you apparently don't live. It's ridiculous to argue that three listeners, or ZERO listeners, should have the same engineering priority as a top-billing FM analog main channel. Do you want triage at the local hospital ER where your acute cardiac problem shares the same priority as some illegal alien's hangnail? I don't.

 

[K6JHU]

"I don't expect anyone to sit around and watch a low-priority thing like HD to make sure it's in sync. I do expect someone to take a cursory glance at it once a month at least just to see if it's even running or has crashed. Besides the HD with the delay completely gone, we have one running an HD-2 with no audio. It's on but no one's home. How long does it take to reboot a PC in a closet? Shoot, you shouldn't even need an engineer to do that. Just get the secretary to take a listen every month or two to make sure the thing is running."

It is not just HD! I was driving around listeneing to a 5Kw AM (a mainline station) and the audio went out. I get curious about how long it takes to come back. 20 Minutes later I was driving by the studio and the audio was still out so I stopped. There were three poeple in the building and not one, was listening to the station (or the AM/FM they had either). When I told them the audio had been dropped for 20 minutes, they did spring into action. But you are right. Somebody on the staff should be delegated to listen to the station, any station - mainline or HD, when it is on the air.

 

[Savage]

Incredibile. Keeping HD streams in sync is one thing, but dead air on an attended station is another. But you can buy silence sensor units from a variety of manufacturers like Broadcast Tools and have it light a warning lamp or sound a buzzer - it's about an hour of work and $200 to install.