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Cumulus Media has joined other broadcasters in instituting furloughs, pay cuts and other measures this week to combat the financial downturn anticipated due to the effects of COVID-19.

Chicago media observer Roger Feder reported Wednesday morning that Cumulus’ “salaried employees will take three weeks of unpaid leave in one-week installments over the next 15 weeks. Others will take 90-day pay cuts, and a third group will be put on 90-day furloughs, starting April 16.” 

However, SAG-AFTRA, which represents station on-air talent, is pushing back, according to his reporting.

Additionally, CEO Mary Berner will take a 50% pay cut, Feder writes.

Cumulus declined to comment when contacted for information about this story.

The post Cumulus Institutes Furloughs, Salary Cuts appeared first on Radio World.

Russia has resumed Digital Radio Mondiale broadcasts on shortwave. The country originally aired the Voice of Russia via DRM a few years ago. The new service is tentatively called Radio Purga (“Radio Blizzard”). The target area is the Chukotka region of the Russian Far East. Analog shortwave transmissions once served the area, but those ended in the early 2000s when the broadcaster left analog shortwave.

Getty Images

Chukotka is vast and the target audience only numbers a few thousand. Thus, shortwave is the only practical way to reach the population. The transmitter site, Komsomolsk Amur, used to broadcast Voice of Russia’s analog programming and is now being used for the DRM program.

NEW SERVICE

The new service is a joint project between the government in Chukotka and the Far Eastern regional center of the Russian Television and Radio Broadcasting Network.

Using DRM for Radio Purga has several advantages over analog shortwave. Radio Purga over DRM, for example, offers a static-free and higher fidelity signal. Studies have shown that DRM is just as reliable as analog shortwave over this distance via single-hop transmission.

The broadcaster is considering transmitting two audio programs from a single DRM transmitter. This is something analog shortwave can’t do. It’s also planning on using DRM’s ability to transmit short text message or a type of RSS feed (Journaline). DRM transmissions also use only a quarter of the power that analog transmissions do.

“We have in these remote places 2,000 residents who need to be provided with communications services … the Northern Sea Route also requires attention,” said Roman Kopin, the governor of Chukotka, last spring when the project was initiated, according to a Russian press report. In addition to mariners on the Northern Sea Route, the audience includes geologists, miners, reindeer herders and hunters.

Test transmissions started in August via different DRM modes and bandwidths to trial “hardware setup and determine signal acceptability,” with the goal of covering over 95% of the area. Programming consists of a music loop and has been heard as far away as the United States. As of press time the broadcaster was still carrying out transmission tests but regular programing is expected to begin sometime in the next few months.

One of shortwave’s greatest strengths has always been its ability to communicate to hard-to-reach locations. Radio Purga’s audience is spread over an immense, remote region. The resumption of shortwave via DRM will provide the population with a communications lifeline in both audio and text.

The post Russia Returns to DRM on Shortwave appeared first on Radio World.

Duchesne Drew

Duchesne Drew will lead Minnesota Public Radio as president effective May 4, MPR CEO and American Public Media Group President/CEO Jon McTaggart announced Wednesday.

Next month, Drew will take over for interim MPR President Tim Roesler, who has held that title since November. The prior MPR presidents were McTaggart and MPR founder Bill Kling, according to the Star Tribune. According to the press release, Roesler will help with the leadership transition through June, when he will return to his normal full-time position as chief business development officer for AMP Group.

[MPR Names HQ After Founder]

In his new role, Drew will be responsible for strategy, programming and daily operations for the 46-station radio network, and MPR brands including MPR News, Classical MPR and The Current, as well as the pubcaster’s social and digital services. 

Drew most recently served as community network vice president for the Bush Foundation. Prior to that, he was managing editor for the Star Tribune.

McTaggart described Drew as having “terrific leadership and news experience” and said “his commitment to using public media to inform and inspire people is a perfect fit for MPR.”

The post Minnesota Public Radio Hires New President appeared first on Radio World.

If you wanted to learn how your community is handling the coronavirus pandemic but had trouble getting the information you needed, what would you do? If you’re like many of us, you’d probably turn to Google, send a couple emails and then, exasperated, call it a day.

If you’re Bill Trifiro, that would be an inadequate response.

Trifiro, a radio reporter based in Roanoke, Va., became frustrated last week when trying to report on the local situation. “I could get the Cleveland Clinic on the phone, but I couldn’t get our local hospital system to answer questions,” he explained in a Monday morning interview.

He also identified the absence of hyper-local information and a need for connection. With his background and professional network, Trifiro decided a coronavirus radio station programmed by volunteers was a logical solution. 

Trifiro then reached out to Rob Ruthenberg, “the guy who knows everyone and can build radio stations,” as he put it.

Ruthenberg, who is a radio consultant and former GM, had been experiencing his own frustrations related to the pandemic and doing his part to help friends and neighbors navigate the situation. He noted the emphasis on national news and also was concerned about potential misinformation being spread on social media. Trifiro asked Ruthenberg to help create the format and recruit volunteers.

Next, Trifiro reached out to Flinn Broadcasting, which holds the license for WBZS(FM), a commercial station in Shawsville that had also just ended a local market agreement. According to Trifiro, Lonnie Flinn quickly agreed to let them use the 102.5 MHz signal and passed him on the engineers who could make it happen. 

“These guys are not just sharing their time and their energy and footing the electric bill, they’re sharing their license,” said Ruthenberg. He and Trifiro understand the gravity of this. “It’s important to stress that these people are trusting us, and we owe it to them not to damage that,” Ruthenberg said. 

SETTING STANDARDS

In order to ensure that their fellow volunteers are on the same page, they’ve instituted a training program to explain how to assess news sources and vet information, the standards talk.

About one-third of the volunteer staff are veteran broadcasters or have been trained so far, according to Trifiro. Both expect to get the rest up to speed quickly, and they also hope more people will join their ranks as the word spreads about the COVID Virginia project. As of Tuesday afternoon, COVID Virginia has about 20 volunteers who have signed on or expressed interest.

COVID Virginia is looking for more volunteers to host shows, screen calls, serve as producers, and do the innumerable tasks that keep a station running. They’re also asking people to do this work from their homes and with their own limited resources. 

MAKING IT HAPPEN

In order to enable this collaboration from the technological side, Trifiro reached out to Backbone Networks Chief Technology Officer/Vice President George Capalbo. At Trifiro’s request, Backbone created a custom network and shared an app that enables volunteers to get on the air with uncompressed audio to ensure that the station’s audio is broadcast-quality. All for free for the next 60 days, or perhaps even longer.

“We’re planning on going through June 10, when Virginia’s emergency order lifts,” Trifiro explained. “But if it goes past that we’ll go past that, and George has already said he’ll go past that and it give it to us for free as well.” 

Their appreciation for this generosity is apparent, and it’s not hard to understand why the pair sound a bit incredulous that they’re actually pulling this off.

“The hardest parts were outsourced and given to us for free! And people are giving of their time,” Trifiro said, explaining how some of their volunteers are also reporters from the local NPR affiliate or broadcasters who have come out of retirement to step up for their community.

Trifiro and Ruthenberg are also excited to partner with other radio stations and even a TV news team on the project, which will give them resources to cover news that would otherwise have gone unreported. Other stations understand that COVID Virginia isn’t “trying to be the competition,” Trifiro said, noting that it helps that the format has a designated sign off date (and they aren’t planning to run commercials).  

WDBJ(TV) channel 7 is providing audio for the 5–7 a.m. time slot, and 24/7 News Source — which is owned by iHeartMedia and for which Trifiro is also a correspondent — has donated top- and bottom-of-the-hour news updates, in addition to other audio as the COVID Virginia volunteers require. “We want to be local, but it’s great to have the national information to ‘localize’ and lean on for comparison,” Trifiro explained.

WHY RADIO, WHY HERE, WHY NOW?

Ruthenberg is in charge of volunteer recruitment. So far, he’s taken an individualized approach, going through his address book and calling up colleagues and reaching out to local colleges. He’s gotten a communications professor and one student volunteer to sign on thus far, and he hopes others will follow.

“It’s a real opportunity for people who want to work in this environment to get a real first hand, brass tacks kind of handle on it. It’s one of those things in this industry, your biggest learning experiences are under fire. This is no exception,” Ruthenberg said.

He is also clear why the COVID Virginia station is so important to southwest Virginia. It’s simple: demographics. The area around Roanoke is popular among retirees and others older than 65, who are among those most vulnerable to COVID-19 — and those who can least afford to parse Facebook posts’ veracity. 

“We have this aging population that has this inherent disconnect with different forms of technology,” Ruthenberg explained. But he is confident radio can make a difference here. “We’re bringing radio back to being the initially useful tool that it was intended to be.”

Trifiro agrees. “In times of crisis, when there’s epidemics, or now a pandemic, when there’s horrible disasters, people need local radio.”

For this project in particular, Trifiro said, “Part of what we’re going to do is help dispel the stuff that you’re seeing on Facebook that isn’t true, and we’re going to do it in a way that hopefully ties the community together and makes them feel not so alone in isolation, like the tag says, we’re together in isolation.”

As far as they know, COVID Virginia is the only station that will not only be covering the press conferences remotely and interviewing experts, but also taking calls from listeners who are seeking connection while practicing social distancing. (As of Tuesday afternoon, Trifiro was troubleshooting some issues with the phone system, but expected to have callers on the air by the Wednesday morning show.)

Ruthenberg is clear that the station will fight misinformation, but also seek to affirm people’s emotions, while learning from past mistakes. The fall out from the “war of the worlds” broadcast, for example, is exactly what they plan to avoid.

Just as Flinn, Capalbo and others contributed to getting COVID Virginia on the air, Trifiro and Ruthenberg want to help other broadcasters pursue similar initiatives. 

“If there are other communities in Virginia that are in need of this kind of sharing and information to cut down the isolation, we are definitely up for adding on,” Trifiro said. He added, “We’re focused on southwest Virginia because that’s where the terrestrial stick is, but we’re all Virginians.” 

Trifiro said he hopes the radio station can emulate what FDR did during the Great Depression with his fireside chats, providing information and hope with a steady voice. However, he knows that COVID Virginia’s audio signature will be quite different.

“We’re going to be as professional as possible because we’re running a radio station, and we have that obligation,” Trifiro said. “But at the same time, folks are going to hear my kid knocking on the door, the dogs barking, perhaps, and know that we’re going through what they’re going through, which I think is unique.”

It’s only been a week since he dreamed up the idea, but Trifiro says he’s already looking forward to taking the station off the air, which he and Ruthenberg say won’t happen “until we win. When we beat COVID-19.” 

If you’re interested in learning more about COVID Virginia, visit https://www.covidvirginia.com, check out their Facebook group or tune your dial to WBSZ(FM) 102.5 in Roanoke, Va., area. If you’d like to volunteer for the station, email help@covidvirginia.com. 

The post COVID Virginia to Help Listeners Be “Together in Isolation” appeared first on Radio World.

The bad news: AM radio will never be the same. How many dyed-in-the-wool broadcast vets built crystal sets or foxhole radios and played with a cat’s whisker? How many hours of AM DXing, especially during the Sunday morning maintenance period, listening for an announcer in a distant control room to give the calls? 

In the digital AM world, we’ll sure miss the singing of an iron core when it’s replaced with a digital “whoosh” sound. Nostalgia will always exert a tug on the heartstrings of a Real Broadcaster of a Certain Age. 

Those days are disappearing.

The good news: AM radio will never be the same. It will be substantially better. That is to say, the game is likely to be changed radically by all-digital “HD” AM.

Many of us have objected to the jamming of first adjacents by IBuzz. It’s difficult to tolerate the degraded audio when an “HD” AM signal reverts to analog. 

Those qualities were attendant to the use of MA1 hybrid analog/digital use on the standard broadcast band. All-digital MA3 is a whole new ballgame. Xperi, successor to iBiquity, currently is allowing AM stations to license the technology at no cost in perpetuity.

Under the hybrid MA1 standard, the analog signal was accompanied by a digital signal that was 10 to 20 dB down from the nominal carrier power. Under the all-digital MA3 standard, there is no analog signal; the digital signal is at full power. 

Some 75% of the power in an analog signal was wasted in the carrier and redundant sidebands. Only one “single sideband” at a maximum of 25% of the station’s total power was necessary to convey useful data, the station’s audio. With all-digital AM, 100% of the station’s power is employed for that purpose. It’s much less vulnerable to many kinds of interference, and audio quality is not limited by the receiver’s IF response curve.

Fig. 1

The tests of all-digital MA3 at WWFD in Frederick, Md., have been famously successful. The station’s 2 mV/m contour (green in Fig. 1), often considered to be an AM station’s analog listening limit today, covers about 368,000 people in a 1,300 square mile area.

The 0.5 mV/m (orange in Fig. 1) is protected from interference, and was historically considered to be an AM station’s daytime coverage before AM interference became a significant issue. For WWFD, this signal covers about 2.33 million people over a 4,545 square mile area.

The all-digital MA3 signal has been proven reliable out to around the 0.1 mV/m contour, or 100 uV/m (red in the figure). This is 1/5 the strength of the old standard, and merely 5% of the signal level that is generally considered usable on today’s radios. 

For WWFD, this contour covers about 10 million people over a 21,900 square mile area. I carried it from 70 miles south of the station in Stafford, Va., to beyond Baltimore. (I neglected to try beyond that, so it might have even greater range.) The audio was indistinguishable from FM stereo, and in the future can incorporate graphics and other data. 

My stock 2013 BMW car radio with a windshield antenna is nothing special. In fact, the analog AM side sounds awful, just like so many other “modern” dashboard AM receivers. 

But HD AM dashboard penetration is already around a third of all cars, and climbing. That’s significantly higher than AM’s share of AQH listening in our country today. All-digital MA3 signals are totally compatible and listenable on any HD AM receiver. (Note, however, that all-digital WWFD did not stop a scan.)

I made two very informal short videos on an iPhone of my WWFD listening experience last May and posted them on YouTube here:

• Stafford, Va.: https://youtu.be/vyG8Nyba_lk
• Baltimore: https://youtu.be/hWp6mh4WKQU

CASE IN POINT

As I write this, I’m helping a friend who’s ready to retire from operating his 10,000-watt AM in Greenfield, Mass., so I decided to look into its potential as an all-digital AM. 

Fig. 2

The station is WIZZ, a daytimer on 1520 designed with a single two-tower pattern to protect Buffalo during Critical Hours, as required for two hours after Local Sunrise, and two hours before Local Sunset. Between those two limits, however, a preliminary study shows that WIZZ can operate with 50 kW non-directional.

The potential of WIZZ HD AM all-digital coverage by day at 50,000 watts non-directional is shown in Fig. 2 in red. This is the 0.1 mV/m coverage contour. Also shown is the currently licensed 10 kW directional contour. Note that the station also has some freedom of movement to optimize population coverage, by moving toward Boston, for example.

All-digital HD AM coverage from the present site would be just under 5 million people within a 15,600 square mile area. 

[Upgrading to AM All-Digital: Why, How and Lessons Learned]

I wouldn’t want to use a daytime facility like this to compete head-to-head with a format that exists in every market, but the phenomenal coverage is ideal for reaching an enormous potential audience with any unduplicated or specialty format. In that way, it’s not so different from FM in the 1960s. This station now broadcasts a format of American standards and pop hits that most stations have abandoned. The audience for this kind of format is older but fiercely loyal, not to mention well-heeled. When the station goes off, so does their radio. In this format, the station enjoys revenue streams from both advertisers and listeners. The associated FM translator can retain the audience during a transition to all-digital AM.

This is one example of the difference MA3 all-digital AM can make for an AM station. Obviously, each situation is different, but it behooves every broadcast engineer to take a close look at digital AM and advise their licensees of its potential in their particular situation.

The author is a technical and general radio consultant and small group owner. He has held numerous radio roles and founded an AM, six commercial FMs, two NCE FMs and numerous translators.

The post All-Digital MA3 Is a Whole New Ballgame appeared first on Radio World.

Moseley describes the NX-GEN-T as an economical advanced microwave STL/TSL software-defined frequency-agile digital radio for 6 GHz to 38 GHz bands.

It offers T1/E1, Gigabit Ethernet, 2 x OC3, DS3, NxDS3, add/drop MUX, OC3 interfaces. Modulation includes 4QAM, 16QAM, 32QAM, 64QAM, 128QAM, conforming to channel bandwidth and payload requirements along with ATPC, XPIC, Adaptive Modulation.

[Check Out More Products at Radio World’s Products Section]

The data rate is 155 Mbps to maximize payload capacity. A web browser interface provides for remote operation.

This carrier class product transports a programmable mix of native TDM and IP traffic separately, ensuring a seamless transition from legacy TDM networks to an all-IP network, the company says. An onboard “Add and Drop” multiplexer allows DS3/28DS1, SDH/63E1, add/drop operation. A QoS/Ethernet features deliver secure LAN/WLAN networks.

It is at home indoor or outdoor with an integrated package that can be directly mounted onto a pole or tower. Operational temperature range is –22 F/–30 C to 131 F/55 C.

Info: www.moseleysb.com

 

The post Moseley Steps Into the Next Generation appeared first on Radio World.

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Electronics Research, Inc. has updated the design of its low-power integrated FM channel combiner, Model FI136. This compact and easily installed combiner is intended for use with FM translators and low-power FM facilities. It combines any two FM channels, with a minimum spacing of 1.6 MHz, into a single output to be fed to a broadband FM antenna.

The FI136 has 7-16 DIN, female inputs, that are rated to handle 750 watts each for a combined output power handling capability of 1.5 kW. The FI136 is available with a 7/8-inch or 1-5/8-inch output and includes a single port directional coupler at the combined output to allow for intermodulation product measurements.

[Check Out More Products at Radio World’s Products Section]

The combiner is constructed from a lightweight aluminum housing with copper resonators. The design includes nonadjacent coupling which increases rejection of out-of-band emissions and features temperature compensation for stable operation even with varying ambient temperatures and at initial startup. The combiner is designed to allow for retuning with a minimum of disassembly. The FI136 includes mounting tabs for attachment to the transmitter building wall or ceiling, with customer supplied hardware.

ERI also manufactures the FI836 which is a high-power integrated FM channel combiner that is available to combine any two FM channels, with a minimum spacing of 1.8 MHz, with power handling capability of up to 30 kW at each input, 60 kW at the combined output.

Info: www.eriinc.com

 

The post Low-Power Integrated FM Channel Combiner From ERI appeared first on Radio World.

The DB4005 is the latest monitoring product from DEVA Broadcast.

The company explains that the unit makes use of sophisticated DSP algorithms and provides SDR FM tuner-based signal processing. “Its powerful digital filters are a guarantee of precision and enable the FM signal to be accurately and repeatedly analyzed with each device,” the company adds.

[Check Out More Products at Radio World’s Products Section]

A leading feature of the DB4005 is the MPX input, which allows users to monitor external composite signals, regardless of whether they are from a composite STL receiver/stereo FM encoder, or from an off-air source. In addition, the loudness meter allows for measurements to be shown as defined by ITU BS.1770-4 and EBU R128 recommendations — the DB4005 supports both standards.

DB4005 is easy to use and packs a host of features. These include TCP/IP connectivity, audio streaming, and automatic alerts for operation outside of predefined ITU-R ranges, as well as optional GSM connectivity. Onboard tools include oscilloscope, loudness analyzer, spectrum analyzer, de-emphasis, stereo decoder, RDS/RBDS decoder, data logger, FTP server and audio streaming.

Alarms include RF, pilot left and right audio levels, MPX, MPX power and RDS. Remote operation can be rendered via PC or Android and Apple smart devices.

Info: www.devabroadcast.com

 

The post DEVA Broadcast DB4005 Promises Precision appeared first on Radio World.