WUAL 91.5 in T-Town now in HD

[Doctor_Technical]

Wondering if anyone has stumbled across the shiny-new HD-1, -2 and -3 feeds on 91.5 WUAL, which were first tested for a while last Friday, then turned on -- hopefully for good -- today around noon. It is early-early in the testing and the debugging stage; right now the focus is getting the HD-1 levels and timing synced up with the analog FM carrier. Meanwhile NPR's "XPoNential" music service is running in test-mode on the HD-2 and lower-bandwidth HD-3.

It's not appropriate for me to share pictures of the install -- yet -- let's just say there are six, yes six different engineers who have been working on various aspects of this project, involving a large pile of equipment being stuffed into 160 rack spaces over four new equipment racks. And that's just at the Duncanville transmitter building for 91.5.

Many miles (of wire) to go before we sleep.

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[tomservo]

Someone has, because I got an e-mail alerting me that it was back on the other day.

I know WUAL ran HD for years before, and I heard it myself while visiting relatives up in Bessemer, back around 2010 (?) or so. Despite the distance, it actually came in better in their old home than some of the Birmingham-based stations on Ishkooda Mountain.

Kind of surprised that Xponential is still around, last I heard they'd stopped offering it to stations outside of the Philly region. I was under the impression it was programmed in-house now as "APR Rocks".

Will the BBC eventually be back on the HD3?

Also, can you clue us in on the plans for the 92.5 translator in Tuscaloosa? The app I saw said it was going to rebroadcast WUAL-HD4 but I've never heard anything else about it since the translator went on air a while back.

 

[Doctor_Technical]

Z, if your e-mailer caught our short HD tests from last Friday, then good on them, as for a short time we were testing the old "space combined" FM+HD system, one which uses separate antennas for FM and HD. What we turned on yesterday afternoon is the new single-transmitter combined FM & HD system -- with a whole rack full of supporting equipment.

Can't yet speak as to what WUAL will eventually do with HD-2, -3 and -4, and the translator(s) that may or may not repeat those channels -- my job on this project being to fling whatever audio is given to us into the air via 100 KW of fancy new FM and HD equipment -- but speaking personally as a newsradio fan & listener I hope that BBC finds a home somewhere on an HD-x channel. I was surprised to learn today from another Public Radio friend that the BBC feed is "expensive" (to the stations that carry it). That is somehow disappointing, but still I get it.

Found this list of affiliate stations on http://xponentialradio.org/find-a-station/

 

[tomservo]

Goodness, not many XPN affiliates left. I seem to recall they were more or less the defacto "second channel" on dozens of NPR affiliates after HD began rolling out. I'll have to update my website with the corrected information.

That's really surprising about BBC World Service being a costly product. I would have thought it'd be free, since it's so widely available from so many sources. APR appears to run it overnight still, at least I hear it at night on WHIL here in Mob-town. Still, the most common way for me to come across them is via shortwave, because I am old fashioned, ha ha. I used to listen to it a lot before we got BBC World News on DirecTV.