Kudos on EAS

Sep 1, 2008 12:00 PM

While sitting in an airport I read your viewpoint in the June issue. I agree with your statements about the engineers against the owners, I also agree that it will be the engineers that will be expected to make EAS work, so why should they not have a hand in developing the replacement system? As the EAS chairman for Central Indiana, I know how much time goes into making a broken system work. We did it originally 15 years ago when EAS came around and then again to adapt Amber into the system.

Thanks for bringing the new EAS to the top of mind for many people in our industry who keep forgetting that we are here to serve the public first (especially in times of disaster) and to make money for our shareholders/companies second.
Dan Mettler
senior VP engineering, Central/NE Region
Clear Channel Radio

This is one of the best commentaries [June 2008 Viewpoint] about radio’s role in EAS that I have ever read. It could not have been written any clearer.
Bobby Adams
president/CEO
GSS Net

A bad idea

I think this promotion for a $50 rebate by the HD Radio Alliance is very ill conceived. The problem I have with the rebate program is that it requires the consumer to 1) have a cell phone and be willing to reveal its number, and 2) have texting service on that cell number, and send a text message to Ibiquity.

This application then opens the consumer to (in the Alliance’s words) up to three promotional text messages a week from the Alliance. This is revealed in the fine print, but nowhere called out boldly. There is no alternate method for the $50 rebate according to the folks at 866-915-2797 who are managing the promotion for the Alliance.

So what’s my beef? Well, they have the right to set the rules as they see fit. But, one has to dig in the fine print to see the targeting by text ads. I think this is deceptive. It seems counterproductive to me, to engender all that ill will once folks started receiving those ads. Additionally, if this is a promotional campaign, these restrictive rules leave out a large number of potential buyers of the radios. Just think of all the older folks out there that could benefit with additional radio programming, but don’t have cell phones, or cell phones with texting.

If HD Radio is to ever succeed, then it needs the broadest base of users, not a narrowly targeted subset.
Bart Cannistra

A little extra padding

Yesterday, I was working on a cue tone decoder system. I have a stack of Digiciper IRDs that have a cue tone out but the signal is way too hot for the DTMF decoder. I was feeding the signal into an analog audio DA and had the gain jumper at -12dB which was still too hot. I needed another 10dB or so of attenuation but I needed it at 600 ohms input and output. After a Google search I found the pad calculator in the Engineer’s Notebook at RadioMagOnline.com.

I ran the requirements through the calculator, went to the annex to get the parts, put it together and it works perfectly. Thanks for the great resource.
Chris Spacone
Global Digital Media Exchange

Perfect on IP

Just finished the great article on IPV6 in the August issue. There was a lot of info in a little space. Overall, the perfect size article and a wonderful topic.

Please forward my appreciation to Kevin McNamara as well if you don’t mind.
Barry Thomas, CPBE CBNT
president
Society of Broadcast Engineers