Heading into the NAB Show, Nautel has announced a new iteration of its flagship FM transmitter line. The company says the GV 2 family is the first to integrate all HD Radio components inside the transmitter.
It said the hardware platform supports HD Radio with Xperi Gen4 Importer, Exporter and Exgine implementations for HD Radio encoding, station logo and Artist Experience.
“Omnia for Nautel covers all FM and HD Radio audio processing needs and provides Livewire AoIP inputs for all audio streams. No additional hardware is required.”
Nautel will begin accepting orders in Q2 this year and expects to start deliveries in Q3.
It said the transmitter has new power supplies, solid-state storage, a new interface card and “dramatic” increases in computational capacity. It also features a fresh iteration of Nautel’s Advanced User Interface based on HTML5.
The transmitter line incorporates a software-based air chain architecture discussed by Nautel at last year’s NAB Show, when it demonstrated the air chain hosted in the Amazon Web Services cloud. The software components can also be hosted on the HD MultiCast+ platform and natively within the GV 2 platform.
“A key component of the architecture is an air chain selector, which allows the GV 2 to select one of many air chain inputs (FM and all HD) and gracefully change from one feed to another, no matter whether the feed originates from the studio, the cloud, or the internal platform,” Nautel said, adding that FM/HD1 time alignment is assured through the blend lock function without the need of GPS.
CTO Philipp Schmid says FM stations operating digital modes or considering a shift to HD Radio will benefit from streamlined deployment and elimination of time-alignment tissues.
“As long as there is an IP audio feed available at the transmitter site, operation is audio in and RF out,” he was quoted saying.
Nautel will be in Booth W2843 at the NAB Show.
[Read more of our NAB Show preview coverage.]
