Comments on: Medford TV station evacuated – no backup plan in place

By: Steven

Steven — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 14:41:34 +0000

Doesn’t seem to address the problem of hijacking your STL.

By: RadioActive

RadioActive — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 05:24:27 +0000

One way to kill the transmitter is to kill the signal feed from the STL or other source. The Automatic Gain Control should see a loss in signal and trip it off. However, if you have a downstream program feed whereby a loss of signal trips a secondary video feed such as a test pattern or alternative feed source that is not going to work. This is good info to ponder in any case.

By: boiseengineer

boiseengineer — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 01:41:14 +0000

Locally most groups can control their transmitters from outside the building. Quite a few can also control their on-air automation remotely. A couple few have a studio in another location as backup.

By: RDS

RDS — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 15:44:44 +0000

The problem I see in the scenerio given above is they evacuated their building, and no one thought to turn off the transmitter on the way out. Once outside, they could not control it, since the remote control could not be reached. Many systems assume there is a body at the studio. So, even with all the STL’s and subcarrier controls, they still had to be there to push the button.

By: RadioActive

RadioActive — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 09:22:27 +0000

Its going to take a real RF engineer to quote chapter and verse on this one, but if a station’s transmitter can be remotely monitored (and around here they all seem to be someplace else than the studio-KFXD was not the norm) then it should be fairly easy to use the STL and its subcarrier control system, or the transmitter power monitoring system (via dial up DTMF ) to so something of this nature shouldnt it. The FCC says if you are going to have a remotely controlled transmitter, you have to have the means to shut it down….right? Even the lowly little low power TV stations have to abide by some of these remote control rules…. love to hear the experts give their views….