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RDS Phantom

J

jboyd

Gentlemen: I am in the market for three (3) basic self contained automation systems to interface with satellite programming, and can switch seamlessly on that basis. The above unit is on the short list...any comments? Tnx JBI
 
Sorry...Independent broadcaster who does as much live as possible, and needs these overnite,,,any answer to the question?
 
JBI: my input is very out of date. I looked at a couple of "for sale" stations 4 or 5 years back and they were equipped with RDS Phantom... so I dig into the topic and had extended conversation with the people producing the system at the time. I came away with the feeling that there were better systems available if you needed great robustness couple with bells and whistles, but I concluded that Phantom was adequate and ideal for the circumstances of these stations, and the scenario you describe you are trying to accomplish.

I don't know if ownership management has changed at RDS since then, but I observed that they were the kind of vendor where in a catastrophe you throw the system in the back of your car, drive over to RDS and get it straightened out like NOW.

I did talk to one owner who complained about continued problems with his Phantom but I also got the idea he wanted the tooth fairy to show up unseen in the middle of the night and kiss it and make it well. He may still be waiting.
 
Get prophet. You won't be sorry. Their ala cart pricing on the lower-priced system smokes everything in that price range in terms of overall interface, user friendliness, and downright bulletproof reliability. Bank it.
 
The RDS Phantom was designed for satellite programming and does it well. It's simple to set up and use and since it's DOS-based you don't have to reboot it every week (and if for some reason you do have to reboot - it's up and running in about 15 seconds). I have one station that has been running one since 1995 and have only to replace the hard drives. The only drawback has been if you use the timed record, you can't record anything else at the same time.
 
I ran an RDS Phantom on a N/T Station nearly 15 years ago. It was reliable and felt that it worked quite well for its day. It did not have a lot of bells and whistles, but the Prophet is a better choice. Smartcaster? Biggest piece of garbage ever built. No rotators and awful support, unless you pay for it. The RIDZ switcher it uses is clever, but I'd take the Phantom any day over it. I liked the time compress and break append functions for promos. Simian is better than those two options as well.
 
dose anyone have a start up disk for the phantom mine if full of errors and isn't working correctly. I talked with the owner of phantom and he was suggesting that I pay him for service (tech) for years that I didn't ask to be under contract.
 
RDS is very big into charging for things they saell that fail to work out of the box. We bought their delay system. This is an RDS that delays programming an hour. It took 6 months to get it to work correctly.

I have a great respect for the Simian software. If it is just for spots, This will load easy and catch all the breaks. You are looking at $1500 for each software pack and another $1k for each Broadcast Tools.

If you bring music into the mix it would change things. Simian can play music but it likes wav files only. mixing wav and mp3 sounds like a train wreck. When you add music you get into many problems you want to stay away from.

A lot of times folks get into the automation for one thing and it morphs into another thing. "No, no music ever " becomes, "now we want to play music."

When you go through the trouble of playing music in a single day part the cost of maintaining one shift ends up making the automation having to be used in at least two shifts because weekly scheduling music and logs becomes a major task. Usually thi9s means the automation is used in all shifts. New music every week for example. Oldies stations, not so much so.
 
ChiefEngineer said:
If you bring music into the mix it would change things. Simian can play music but it likes wav files only. mixing wav and mp3 sounds like a train wreck. When you add music you get into many problems you want to stay away from.
Click to expand...

As cheap as hard drive space is these days, I can't imagine why anyone would want to air any lossy format on a new automation system. You can buy 2TB drives for under $100 pretty much anywhere.
 
radiogooroo said:
As cheap as hard drive space is these days, I can't imagine why anyone would want to air any lossy format on a new automation system. You can buy 2TB drives for under $100 pretty much anywhere.
Click to expand...

The under $100 2TB drives are great for home machines, and if we are wise we will buy more than one for redundancy.

There is a reason the hard drives in mission critical servers are a tad more expensive. (O.K. A WHOLE BUNCH more expensive!!!)

Even in a small community rural station... I would have to ask myself... am I willing to gamble on a lot of dead air over the money I save on cheap drives?

But, I agree with you. Today's prices on hard drives, whatever quality of drive you choose, probably indicates there is NO NEED to use lossy file formats any more.

This thread started out as an inquiry about Phantom systems. I looked at a couple of stations that were for sale that had Phantoms. My memory is that Phantom was designed in such a way that you almost had to use some formats and maybe some hardware that were in the original design. Going down to the local retailer and picking up popular, bargain priced hardware was a no-go. But then again, my memory sometimes gets bent. ::)
 
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