SCA Digital Feed

[ChiefEngineer]

Is there a product to send a digital audio signal over your sca? Besides digital radio express. The product should allow injection into a common sca generator and ability to decode at the other end.

Have all the encoder and decoder equipment.

Does this exist?

Apparently it would require encoding and decoding with no handshake back and forth.

Anything in the computer field to reuse this valuable spectrum??

 

[Charlie Gee]

I believe you are thinking if Digital Radio Express and FMextra.
Check out http://www.dreinc.com.

 

[ChiefEngineer]

looking for another option. DRE wants you to purchase the encoder and 200 Aruba radios.

 

[radioguy33]

You can buy the DRE from Bernie at Energy Onix without the 200 radios. I just put one in and it works great.

 

[boiseengineer]

How much delay is there?

 

[ChiefEngineer]

There is some delay however this is a given with HD also. enough delay you can't listen live or broadcast the air feed at a remote.

Commission staff is allowing HD to be rebroadcast on translators. They have not yet allowed SCA. DRE is in the digital domain however and as such would work with digital radios in the hybrid mode.

We would like to find any digital mode that is inexpensive that could be used for the specific purpose of exiting the sca on an analog fm to allow us to feed translatotrs with new programming designed for community x y or z that has lsot it's local fm service.

No expense for the ibiquity ransom also.

 

[Chuck]

There is some delay however this is a given with HD also. enough delay you can't listen live or broadcast the air feed at a remote.

Commission staff is allowing HD to be rebroadcast on translators. They have not yet allowed SCA. DRE is in the digital domain however and as such would work with digital radios in the hybrid mode.

We would like to find any digital mode that is inexpensive that could be used for the specific purpose of exiting the sca on an analog fm to allow us to feed translatotrs with new programming designed for community x y or z that has lsot it's local fm service.

No expense for the ibiquity ransom also.

It seems to me that if you program a translator separately than the originating station, you would violate FCC rules, since they aren't allowed to originate programming other than an occasional plea for local funding. On the other hand, if the programming was an HD-2 or FMeXtra feed of the originating station that happened to target the community where the translator was located, then it might be allowable. That’s probably not what the Commission intended. It is an interesting set of circumstances that I'll bet the FCC hasn't really contemplated. Something about the "Law of Unintended Consequences,” perhaps?

For what it's worth, we recently experimented with FMeXtra on our LPFM station, which also is rebroadcast on translators. It worked quite well and passed through the translators with no problem. It would make a very good STL, delivering a lot cleaner signal than receiving our analog signal off the air. That in itself might be worth the price of admission. The delay was not very long, maybe a half second or so. It was enough that you’d go nuts monitoring off the air, but wasn't so bad that you couldn't figure out how to deal with it.

 

[radioguy33]

We are using the DRE as an stl to deliver a seperate signal to a distant tower 35 miles away.
It has been on two months with no down time. Signal is strong and clean. Delay is minimal - 1/2 second.
We got a channel specific antennna from Samco to receive it into the Aruba radio.

We are sending this through our stl link from studio to the first tower to broadcast the signal. We are only using one channel on the dre. You can send two channels, but bandwidth of stl channel could be a problem, but fixable. $10,000. got it done.

 

[ChiefEngineer]

There is some delay however this is a given with HD also. enough delay you can't listen live or broadcast the air feed at a remote.

Commission staff is allowing HD to be rebroadcast on translators. They have not yet allowed SCA. DRE is in the digital domain however and as such would work with digital radios in the hybrid mode.

We would like to find any digital mode that is inexpensive that could be used for the specific purpose of exiting the sca on an analog fm to allow us to feed translatotrs with new programming designed for community x y or z that has lsot it's local fm service.

No expense for the ibiquity ransom also.

It seems to me that if you program a translator separately than the originating station, you would violate FCC rules, since they aren't allowed to originate programming other than an occasional plea for local funding. On the other hand, if the programming was an HD-2 or FMeXtra feed of the originating station that happened to target the community where the translator was located, then it might be allowable. That’s probably not what the Commission intended.

This IS what Staff intended. Cumulus got this through - the rebroadcast of HD and digital services to translators.

Place DRE or HD on for no other reason than to feed a translator. Not required to be stereo. Currently AM, HD, or any digital service can be rebroadcast.

This is now an accepted practice but SCA in itself does not apply. this would be easy to use a $200 encoder purchased on ebay.

To get the priviledge of programming a translator for a local community I really don't want to buy DRE. The Report and order on digital has allowances for many digital services.

Is there another digital service available that one can afford? Using the SCA (As FM Extra in the hybrid Mode) and any type of encoder/decoder combination this IS a digital service.

What is out there that could be encoded over an SCA using it's bandwidth? Modem with one way encode decode function?

Someone has to have an idea.

 

[Chuck]

This IS what Staff intended. Cumulus got this through - the rebroadcast of HD and digital services to translators.

Place DRE or HD on for no other reason than to feed a translator. Not required to be stereo. Currently AM, HD, or any digital service can be rebroadcast.

This is now an accepted practice but SCA in itself does not apply. this would be easy to use a $200 encoder purchased on ebay.

Fascinating. The FCC does it again. Of late, they have become very adept at contradicting themselves. If you programmed a translator separately using a wire or IP hook up, you would be in violation of the rules. But program separately it via an HD-2 signal, and it is OK. That is a very interesting loophole.

Presumably it would also be OK to use any secondary digital channel system that meets FCC approval? Since you are free to do whatever you want with your SCA channels, your idea is a good one. Even if you bit the bullet and went with FMeXtra, just one season of local high school football could make doing this very worth while. Although I'm "thrifty" by nature, FMeXtra is not that expensive, and you could always argue that receivers are available to the public, should they care to buy them. That might come in handy in case of an FCC inspection.

I agree with you though, there must be a way to encode audio into a digital stream that your existing SCA equipment could pass. Something along the line of a Barix box comes to mind, but they have fairly high bandwidth requirements. I'll bet there is a simple answer.

 

[ChiefEngineer]

We have a local high school that wants to have it's own station. We have an extra translator. They could use this for local sports with the students doing play by play.

If we can find a one way delivery device that can use phone type bandwidth on existing sca equipment this would work.

Essentially a high speed unidirectional modem and decoder.

Still looking for ideas.

 

[Chuck]

We have a local high school that wants to have it's own station. We have an extra translator. They could use this for local sports with the students doing play by play.

If we can find a one way delivery device that can use phone type bandwidth on existing sca equipment this would work.

Essentially a high speed unidirectional modem and decoder.

Still looking for ideas.

If it is legal to use a secondary digital stream on your translator, why wouldn't the same logic hold up for just using your analog SCA feed? Has it been tried? It would certainly be easy, but I don't know what the FCC would think. You could even encode and decode it with some stand alone noise reduction equipment, like dbx.

 

[Chuck]

We have a local high school that wants to have it's own station. We have an extra translator. They could use this for local sports with the students doing play by play.

If we can find a one way delivery device that can use phone type bandwidth on existing sca equipment this would work.

Essentially a high speed unidirectional modem and decoder.

Still looking for ideas.

If it is legal to use a secondary digital stream on your translator, why wouldn't the same logic hold up for just using your analog SCA feed? Has it been tried? It would certainly be easy, but I don't know what the FCC would think. You could even encode and decode it with some stand alone noise reduction equipment, like dbx.

I'll answer my own question, but leave the conversation open for comment. There may be more information that surfaces. I'd like to learn as much as I can. There appear to be many shades of gray.

It seems the reason the FCC is OK with running HD-2 program audio on a translator is the fact that the HD-2 channel is available (and intended for) public consumption. Presumably that would also hold true for FMeXtra as there are radios available for the public to receive the signal off the air. On the other hand, SCA is not considered a broadcast service. Tunable SCA receivers are not permitted (47USC605, 18USC2510-2521) although I've seen some for sale on the Internet. Therefore, using your SCA to make the hop to the translator wouldn't be permitted. In the eyes of the FCC, you would not be rebroadcasting the signal of an originating licensed broadcast station.

As a result, it looks like finding a non-standard way to digitally modulate your SCA is not going to pass muster with the FCC unless you can prove that the service is such that the general public can receive it off the air with consumer oriented radios. Using a proprietary digital encode and decode system probably would not pass in the event of an inspection.

It looks like you'd be safe with the Ibiquity system, probably OK with FMeXtra and SOL with any other currently available technology.

 

[ChiefEngineer]

While the R and O on Digital leaves many options open for broadcasters that may have new ways to do this, their look at this now has no wiggle room. DRE is being presented in a filing. Will see how this goes.

 

[Chuck]

While the R and O on Digital leaves many options open for broadcasters that may have new ways to do this, their look at this now has no wiggle room. DRE is being presented in a filing. Will see how this goes.

As they say, "Stay tuned."