Like Michael LeClair, I usually take in the more leisurely NAB Sunday radio sessions at the Convention Hall. This year I decided to check out the Sunday NUG gathering at the Riviera. NUG is the Nautel Users Group meeting that the Canadian based transmitter company has been holding at NAB for many years. This year the NUG seemed to be a breakthrough event. I was expecting to see maybe a few dozen attendees but was blown away by an impressively large group of about 100 engineers who came to hear all about Nautel’s products and vision as a company.
I certainly don’t intend this blog to sound like a commercial, but it’s no secret Nautel has rapidly become a premier radio transmitter player in a field that not too many years ago was dominated by “the big 3”. That group did not include Nautel. All transmitter companies have been challenged in the slower economy, but Nautel has been pushing forward in impressive fashion and is now considered by many as a leader in new transmitter technology innovation.
The speakers and presentations at NUG dealt with various topics, including air versus water cooling, high power and asymmetrical HD implementation, N+1 redundancy configurations and a particularly enlightening session by Jeff Welton, the go-to-guy at Nautel for so many things. Jeff conveyed a superb list of invaluable tips and tricks for better grounding, building airflow design, the use of ferrites for lightning suppression and a host of other goodies helpful for any engineer who maintains a transmitter site.
The company’s president (I cannot recall his name) discussed the Nautel V.2011 vision. He said that while they are proud of their hard-won reputation as a innovator, they will be focusing on making Nautel the premier customer service radio transmitter company in the world.
— Phil Simon
