This is one in a series about managing radio operations and infrastructure effectively.
Vermont Public was created in 2021 by the merger of Vermont Public Radio and Vermont PBS. It airs 38 signals from 27 sites, including 15 full-power radio stations and 15 FM translators, programmed with news or classical music, as well as three full-power TV stations and several TV translators.
Joe Tymecki is senior vice president of engineering and technology. He talked with us about budgeting and the sense of urgency resulting from the end of federal funding in public media.
Radio World: It must be challenging to approach budget questions following a merger.
Joe Tymecki: Yes, and with IT under our purview, there’s even more to wrangle.
On the surface we’re one company, but in some cases we’re still operating as two technical plants — with our networks, our private LANs, our terrestrial fiber circuits and Windows domain controllers. We’re working to address that, one project at a time.
Then in August we had to lay off 13 people and eliminate two other open positions, due to the federal funding situation. Every one of those people was contributing, everyone was already super busy. But income and outgo were starting to diverge badly.
In our workflows we make extensive use of shared documents. We use a Google spreadsheet, a legacy from the radio side that has existed for 14 years. Our new fiscal year starts in July but we already have a tab on the sheet for the next fiscal, and sometimes two years out.
Everyone in technology and every manager has access to that sheet. I tell them, “If you think of something, don’t mention it to me in the hallway. Write it on the list, and at budget season I will circle back to discuss what you need, whether it’s new lenses for the Sony field camera or chargers for electric cars in the parking lot. Tell me what it is that you want to do and if you have even a wild-ass guess as to what it will cost.” This might involve IT, studios, compliance with FCC rules and so on.
RW: That provides a starting structure.
Tymecki: Then I or Kira Parker, the chief engineer of transmission, or Frank Alwine, chief engineer of studios, will discuss it with our facilities person. This applies mostly to capital items, but it also includes expense items. It gives us an early idea on whether we’re going to need, say, a million dollars this year or $300,000.
Then we have a big round of winnowing to focus on what’s important. Do we need to replace our mountaintop ATVs or our site generators? Are there pieces that we can punt until next year?
We consider ourselves as being in the content delivery business, so that’s our north star: How can we help our people do their jobs internally to meet that goal?
Anticipated service life is tracked in our accounting system. Everything’s always fully depreciated though. Honestly we don’t really replace things on a schedule. We replace based on need.
Until recently we had an old Harris tube transmitter from the late ’70s or early ’80s still in backup service. It couldn’t do HD Radio, and it could barely do 1,800 watts, but that was enough to keep us on the air in an emergency. We should have replaced it 15 years ago, and we finally got around to it.
Often what drives the decision is not that something stops working but that we can’t get support for it anymore. For example in TV master control, we had playout servers that were still highly functional but no longer supported by the manufacturer. The TV engineers were going to eBay and buying ingest and playout blades that others had decommissioned, just to try to keep servers on the air. Even the manufacturer couldn’t get parts; Sony had apparently stopped making a key chip.
That’s when we say, “I guess we have to replace it.”
RW: How do you track and forecast costs like power, site, rent, maintenance?
Tymecki: We use a popular cloud-based accounting system; and we do a monthly dump to Excel because we like its spreadsheet tools. As we approach the end of a fiscal year we have a good idea of how we’ll end up, and we can start populating next year’s numbers.
Vermont is a small state, so there isn’t an open market for utilities like electricity and natural gas. But if we know that a given utility is planning a 2% increase we can build that in.
The accounting system manages purchase orders; and we use a different system to manage external credit card purchases. We now tag our spending to the 27 sites so we know what each site is costing us.
Kira, our transmission chief engineer, makes much use of internal tagging. And it’s not just major recurring costs like power. If we stop at a local Ace Hardware to buy parts to shore up an ice bridge — well, those kind of things add up. If we have to get a tower crew to repair or replace tower lights, we can tag that to a site too.
External costs like data networks are more unwieldy. For instance there are a couple of bandwidth providers in Vermont. In some cases we have parallel fiber lines going up the same mountain, one to the TV transmitter side of the building, one to the radio side.
[Related: “Public Media Stations Confront Money Crisis”]
This reminds me to share a cost-saving suggestion. When you sign a three-year contract, they usually won’t call you when the term is up, so you just keep paying that rent, whether it be $300 or $800 a month.
But whenever I’ve gone back to a provider to renew a contract, they inevitably will say, “Yep, the rate’s lower now.” Especially at sites where we have multiple providers, the situation is extraordinarily competitive. It’s the same with our internet connections at the studio facilities — suppliers are tripping over each other to try to get our business.
In fact I called one of our big fiber providers and said, “I need a list of every circuit we have with you.” I had a good idea but wanted to know what they thought we had — the contract dates and monthly payments. And about half of them had expired. Without even dropping a note, our salesperson, said, “I can absolutely get you better rates on all these.”
Sure, switching fiber providers is a pain. Half of our network is on an MPLS-like system. Those are a little more difficult to change over or reconfigure, and we prefer not to make extra work for ourselves if we can avoid it. But those are the kind of things we look at on the utility side.
RW: Do you have discussions with your team about finding efficiencies and extra dollars?
Tymecki: Jeff Mahaney, my counterpart at Maine Public, has a Maine farmer mentality about new spending. He asks: “Is what you’re proposing to do worth laying somebody off for?”
Especially since our layoffs, we ask everyone to look at every expense in that light. We’re down to saving hundreds. Not that we were flush with money in the past, but now we might look at a data switch that’s getting full and old, and if it’s still supported, we’re not going to replace it unless there’s an immediate risk or a lack of support.
Over the summer we discussed raising the set point of the air conditioning at our sites. Some of them are very well air conditioned, and even on a 96-degree day, which we get now in Vermont, the sites will be 65 degrees inside. We have a lot of Nautel equipment, so we talked with Jeff Welton, who told us the transmitters will be perfectly happy in the low 70s. So we took that advice.
We’re also taking steps back from HD Radio. We put a new classical station on the air two years ago and had HD Radio on it for about a month, but the importer/exporter failed, and we just left it off. We took the transmitter and repurposed it to a site where we still need HD so we can keep an analog translator going.
Similarly, when we bought a small station from a local college, we decided not to do HD because of the cost. We’re not abandoning HD yet, but we’re not growing the HD footprint.
Both Nautel and GatesAir now put the importer/exporters in a single box. If you’re doing HD2 and HD3, you have to get the audio to your site separately. In the past we put the importers at the studio, and it would send the MUX over the data line. You can’t do that anymore unless you buy a second box, and it becomes a kludge. We didn’t want to buy another pair of codecs to get the audio to the site. In the end, is that a lot of money? No, but 3600 bucks is 3600 bucks.
RW: Are more of your bills now for monthly services rather than one-time hardware purchases?
Tymecki: For traffic and billing, our TV and radio systems are cloud-based now, as are the accounting systems.
We use an out-of-house IT provider for our deep networking — firewall management, subnets and so on. Also, we’re now emphasizing computer security over convenience. That is a recent and major philosophical shift. We’re using a cybersecurity awareness provider for in-house training and testing to see how susceptible people are to phishing attacks.
Also, we don’t have a TV master control anymore; we shut that down early last year. It is now hosted by Centralcast in Syracuse, N.Y., a wonderfully run operation. All of our program storage and automation are there. They have ports to our cloud-based traffic system, and the over-the-air ATSC is fed back to us over a fiber line. We have multiple backup provisions in case of backhoe fade.
Operationally, this was a huge change. We can’t just run down to master control anymore and say, “Hey, can you pull this show and put this one on?” We have to work through their processes. And we did eliminate personnel; we don’t have people sitting in master control anymore.
We also have a membership data system that is cloud-based; and of course the big item in the cloud is email. Until the merger, radio still hosted its own servers and phone systems. Now we’ve migrated to the same VoIP provider that television uses, and put everybody on a cloud-based email provider.
We were never current on Windows server upgrades anyway; it would have taken a full-time person just to stay on top of those. Now you’re not lying in bed at 2:30 in the morning wondering whether you’re missing a security patch.
RW: Calculations of total cost come into play with decisions about transmitter purchases.
Tymecki: On our big station, WVPS, we had a Nautel NV30 that had been on the air for years. And our backup transmitter only made around 5 kW rather than the 24.8 kilowatts needed on the output.
When it came time to purchase a full-power backup, it was the start of COVID and money was tight. We chose a liquid-cooled transmitter. All of our large TV transmitters are liquid-cooled. And I told our board that we shouldn’t be paying money to make radio waves that heat the room and then paying more money to move that heat outside.
Separately, when we recently needed lower-power 1 or 2 kW transmitters, we shopped to buy efficiency. We went with Nautel for those.
And not to harp on HD Radio, but it makes transmitters inefficient. Classical WVER-FM in Rutland only has a 1,000-watt transmitter now but the power consumption probably dropped 20% just by not having HD on there. Because the transmitter is more efficient, we were able to pull out our VS2.5 and put in a lower-power analog-only unit. We didn’t need that step up in size because we weren’t doing HD.
If there’s anything we can do to move the needle even a little bit, we should.
RW: Other tips or thoughts?
Tymecki: We have sites that before the merger were owned by the radio company and sites that were owned by TV.
In Bennington we own the radio site, while television rents a site on the other side of town. We’re paying $20,000 a year on that, so now we’ve applied to move that translator onto our radio tower. Yes, it’s going to cost to get a tower crew, and we’ve done the engineering for it. But at worst, this project will pay for itself in less than two years. And it’ll make maintenance easier.
Also, we’re rethinking past practices. At Vermont Public Radio they managed like Sherwin Williams — they wanted to cover the earth with signals. This meant we had a lot of translators and translator CPs. But back then, listeners didn’t have smart speakers, they didn’t have great cell service, they didn’t have reasonable WiFi at home.
All that has changed. So now we have to consider whether maintaining a 10-watt translator in a corner of the state is worth $18,000 a year in rent. Certainly someone will be upset if we take it off. But with the kind of financial crisis we’re in, we have to take a very careful look.
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