WMTJ 620 iboc crashing at boot up.

[Tom Wells]

Found WTMJ 620 sounding mighty clean this morning, then enjoyed a few seconds of nice clean WMT 600
then checked out the Spanish language ? on 640.

Thought maybe they had gotten tired of embarrassing themselves.

Then I heard a few WTMJ iboc boot-ups fail and drop out.

Wonder what causes that?

They finally got it to stay on, and they're back to sounding miserable, damaging the work of others, and annoying listeners.

 

[rbrucecarter5]

KMIC IBOC has been off for over a week - I am hearing similar reports from listeners to other Radio Disney affiliates. Have they pulled the plug network wide? I know in KMIC's case, the coverage is so miserable that they simply cannot afford the power hit that comes with IBOC. Their analog signal certainly goes a lot farther than it used to.

With 30 or 40 stations (at least) - a network wide shutdown would be a significant portion of the remaining AM IBOC stations.

 

[rbrucecarter5]

I see a lovely notch in their nighttime pattern protecting KMKI Dallas. Many times, I visited a friend who happened to be in KMKI's reciprocal notch towards Milwaukee, and she wondered why she was getting a Milwaukee station at night instead of KMKI in parts of her house! I imagine the nighttime WTMJ will be an easy catch now if you null KMKI in the DFW area. I know I could null KLIF on 570 and easily hear WNAX Yankston SD. I could definitely hear WNAX for a split second driving through the KLIF null on the freeways at night.

These directional arrays are incredible pieces of engineering!

 

[dumber than a box of hair]

I heard a few WTMJ iboc boot-ups fail and drop out.

Wonder what causes that?

The HD exciter is usually nothing more than a PC running some flavor of Linux. They seem to need constant software and firmware updates, if not outright factory swaps for new boxes.

 

[dxho]

KMIC IBOC has been off for over a week - I am hearing similar reports from listeners to other Radio Disney affiliates. Have they pulled the plug network wide?

As of today, WDZY hasn't.

 

[pianoplayer88key]

KMIC IBOC has been off for over a week - I am hearing similar reports from listeners to other Radio Disney affiliates. Have they pulled the plug network wide?

I'll try to remember to check later tonight when their signals are strong enough for me to detect the hash, but as far as I'm aware, 1110 KDIS Pasadena / Los Angeles and 1580 KMIK Tempe / Phoenix are still running IBOC.
Until several months ago, 1290 KKDD San Bernardino was a Disney outlet ... and as far as I know, they NEVER ran IBOC. They switched to a simulcast of 99.1 KGGI for a few months, and are now a religious station. While they were running Disney, they had audio out to at least 8 kHz. As a religious station now, I'm guessing they have it out to 10 kHz or so. (I haven't checked with a radio that passes that high of a frequency, but I've learned to determine their approximate frequency range by observing the sound when detuning my Tecsun DSP radios set to their narrowest bandwidth.)

 

[Chuck]

The HD exciter is usually nothing more than a PC running some flavor of Linux. They seem to need constant software and firmware updates, if not outright factory swaps for new boxes.

It's not even Linux. As I understand it, it runs on Windows, which is probably a part of the problem. The other part of the problem is it is Java based. Java is bloatware. No wonder it doesn't work very well.

 

[pianoplayer88key]

KMIC IBOC has been off for over a week - I am hearing similar reports from listeners to other Radio Disney affiliates. Have they pulled the plug network wide?

I'll try to remember to check later tonight when their signals are strong enough for me to detect the hash, but as far as I'm aware, 1110 KDIS Pasadena / Los Angeles and 1580 KMIK Tempe / Phoenix are still running IBOC.

I can confirm, based on hearing the hash, that both KDIS and KMIK are still running IBOC.

 

[dumber than a box of hair]

The HD exciter is usually nothing more than a PC running some flavor of Linux. They seem to need constant software and firmware updates, if not outright factory swaps for new boxes.

It's not even Linux. As I understand it, it runs on Windows, which is probably a part of the problem. The other part of the problem is it is Java based. Java is bloatware. No wonder it doesn't work very well.

All the ones I've seen (from four different manufacturers) are definitely Linux, and no Java involved at all.

 

[rbrucecarter5]

KMIC IBOC has been off for over a week - I am hearing similar reports from listeners to other Radio Disney affiliates. Have they pulled the plug network wide?

I'll try to remember to check later tonight when their signals are strong enough for me to detect the hash, but as far as I'm aware, 1110 KDIS Pasadena / Los Angeles and 1580 KMIK Tempe / Phoenix are still running IBOC.

I can confirm, based on hearing the hash, that both KDIS and KMIK are still running IBOC.

OK - it could be a "don't repair or spend money on it" directive. It stays on as long as it works, then if it goes down, they won't spend money on it. I'll try to detect the sidebands of KMKI 620 tonight, see if it is on the air in HD at night. I only have 630 that I can use to monitor, though, because of a local 610.

 

[tomservo]

It sounds like the IBOC software is proof that it doesn't really matter what the underlying OS is… if the software is poorly written, it's going to be garbage no matter what it runs under.

Java was how my old "feature phone" used to run third party apps. This was back in the day before "smart phones" which aren't. The Java applets worked great and weren't much of a battery drain. And my particular copy of Windows XP, after a lot of work to get stable, often runs for weeks without needing a reboot. (It gets them regularly now that I installed Netrunner along side it, though.)

But if there's some ratty software installed, then all bets are off.

 

[MarioMania]

KMKY still has HD

 

[audioguy]

WTMJ Ibuzz noted off again this morning. Has been on and off the past week or so.

For whatever reason (I'll let you guys argue about it!) the station comes in much better when it's off. Especially at night when they have a tight pattern that reduces signal to the south.

 

[rbrucecarter5]

WTMJ Ibuzz noted off again this morning. Has been on and off the past week or so.

For whatever reason (I'll let you guys argue about it!) the station comes in much better when it's off. Especially at night when they have a tight pattern that reduces signal to the south.

Well duh - that has been reported for years now. Dirty little "secret" iBiquity won't admit to ---

 

[Darth_vader]

"As I understand it, it runs on Windows, which is probably a part of the problem. The other part of the problem is it is Java based. Java is bloatware. No wonder it doesn't work very well."

Yeah.

But even Linux gives me crap from time to time with its installation of JAVA, so I usually just remove those packages altogether. Strangely enough, Firefox and KDE (the former of which, as I understand, is largely JAVA-based) actually seems to run even faster without it than it did before. Guess they're just weird like that.

On the other hand, Windows and JAVA are a deadly combination! (Windows and *anything* is a deadly combination, but that's another thread in itself.)

 

[Tom Wells]

It's off tonight, checked on the way home and maybe they're getting tired of rebooting or
they're waiting for another new box.

Let's hope they are tired of trying to swim with a millstone tied to their neck.

 

[rbrucecarter5]

It's off tonight, checked on the way home and maybe they're getting tired of rebooting or
they're waiting for another new box.

Let's hope they are tired of trying to swim with a millstone tied to their neck.

I would think that they would be more concerned with the lucrative Chicago audience to the South than with providing IBOC to a few dozen people in Milwaukee. I bet Chicago coverage goes way up when the IBOC box crashes.

 

[satech]

For whatever reason (I'll let you guys argue about it!) the station comes in much better when it's off. Especially at night when they have a tight pattern that reduces signal to the south.

That's a well known phenomenon. If the receiver has a wideband front end (even if its AM audio response is not wideband), its AVC will react to the RF energy of the IBOC sidebands and reduce the gain of the signal, making it come out weaker and quieter than if the station was transmitting a plain analog signal.

 

[rbrucecarter5]

For whatever reason (I'll let you guys argue about it!) the station comes in much better when it's off. Especially at night when they have a tight pattern that reduces signal to the south.

That's a well known phenomenon. If the receiver has a wideband front end (even if its AM audio response is not wideband), its AVC will react to the RF energy of the IBOC sidebands and reduce the gain of the signal, making it come out weaker and quieter than if the station was transmitting a plain analog signal.

Nothing unique to AM there - FM does the exact same thing. Some stations lose as much as 60 miles range.

 

[tomservo]

Nothing unique to AM there - FM does the exact same thing. Some stations lose as much as 60 miles range.

I'm curious how many FM stations sell ads to businesses that far out. Even here in our land of big C's with 150 mile end-to-end real world coverage, they don't sell ads more than 30-40 miles out from the stick. Ditto AM. Even WWL doesn't carry ads for anything outside the New Orleans metro, despite having a signal that hits 7 or 8 other rated markets during the day and many more at night.