标签: broadcast

In broadcast engineering, one of the priniciples is that when something breaks you shouldn't focus on fixing it. Your first action is to get things back on-air! Also, you can't panic. Too many times I have seen talented technicians melt under the pressure of knowing that the systems they are working deliver TV to millions of people. Anyone prone to moments of headless-chicken hysteria or paralysis through fear is simply not fit to work in this type of environment. At the beginning of my career I worked 12-hour shifts running the satellite earth station master control room of a major European communications company. Engineers worked solo on an eight-day week with two day shifts, 24 hours off, two night shifts, and then three and a half days off. Frankly this was a great shift pattern, and I did loads of overtime during my off days. On the day of this particular incident I was in the middle of a long run of overtime. I was pretty beat, but loving the extra cash! I handed things over to the day-shift engineer and went home to grab some sleep. At 1 p.m. my jangling phone jolted me out of a dream. "The Middle East has gone down," shouted the day shift engineer. Now wide awake, I asked "What service?" His reply cut through me like a knife: "All of them, and the MCR manager is on holiday. Can you come in?" I threw some clothes on and literally ran halfway across central London to the office. He was right, almost every Middle-East service was offline. We had a number of large telcos in the Middle East and some call centres in South Asia that used us either as backup links or for premium rural customers. The day shift engineer was one of those guys who didn't do well under pressure, so I seized command and started digging in. After a few hours of getting nowhere, I sent the day guy home because he was really just getting in the way. One of the senior managers had turned up because his phone was ringing off the hook. He was fielding calls from irate customers. I stripped half the entire satellite earth station, bypasssing or reworking just about everything. This is very challenging when you can't actually see the other end of what you are transmitting to and have very little indication if what you are doing is even working. I had to call people on sat-phones in Iraq who I knew would have spectrum analysers and ask them to help me. I had to call the satellite owners and ask for their help, but it took me hours. By 2 a.m. I had switched over half the systems. Quite frankly, I don't know or I forget what combination actually worked, but the system was back and customers were somewhat happy again. The manager taking the calls went out to get me a kebab while I came down from my caffeine and adrenaline buzz. When he came back, he said, "Hey, isn't it your shift now?" Yes, at 8 p.m. the previous evening I was on shift, so I now had to do my shift until the next engineer came in at 8 a.m.! On two hours of sleep I was now finishing the final five hours of my very long day. Needless to say, that was a long night. It wasn't the last time I did several days without sleep, but thankfully I never had another failure that big. This article was submitted by Bob Hannent as part of Frankenstein's Fix, a design contest hosted by EE Times (US).

One of the principles of broadcast engineering is that when something fails you shouldn't focus on fixing it. Your first action is to get things back on-air! Also, you can't panic. Too many times I have seen talented technicians melt under the pressure of knowing that the systems they are working deliver TV to millions of people. Anyone prone to moments of headless-chicken hysteria or paralysis through fear is simply not fit to work in this type of environment. At the beginning of my career I worked 12-hour shifts running the satellite earth station master control room of a major European communications company. Engineers worked solo on an eight-day week with two day shifts, 24 hours off, two night shifts, and then three and a half days off. Frankly this was a great shift pattern, and I did loads of overtime during my off days. On the day of this particular incident I was in the middle of a long run of overtime. I was pretty beat, but loving the extra cash! I handed things over to the day-shift engineer and went home to grab some sleep. At 1 p.m. my jangling phone jolted me out of a dream. "The Middle East has gone down," shouted the day shift engineer. Now wide awake, I asked "What service?" His reply cut through me like a knife: "All of them, and the MCR manager is on holiday. Can you come in?" I threw some clothes on and literally ran halfway across central London to the office. He was right, almost every Middle-East service was offline. We had a number of large telcos in the Middle East and some call centres in South Asia that used us either as backup links or for premium rural customers. The day shift engineer was one of those guys who didn't do well under pressure, so I seized command and started digging in. After a few hours of getting nowhere, I sent the day guy home because he was really just getting in the way. One of the senior managers had turned up because his phone was ringing off the hook. He was fielding calls from irate customers. I stripped half the entire satellite earth station, bypasssing or reworking just about everything. This is very challenging when you can't actually see the other end of what you are transmitting to and have very little indication if what you are doing is even working. I had to call people on sat-phones in Iraq who I knew would have spectrum analysers and ask them to help me. I had to call the satellite owners and ask for their help, but it took me hours. By 2 a.m. I had switched over half the systems. Quite frankly, I don't know or I forget what combination actually worked, but the system was back and customers were somewhat happy again. The manager taking the calls went out to get me a kebab while I came down from my caffeine and adrenaline buzz. When he came back, he said, "Hey, isn't it your shift now?" Yes, at 8 p.m. the previous evening I was on shift, so I now had to do my shift until the next engineer came in at 8 a.m.! On two hours of sleep I was now finishing the final five hours of my very long day. Needless to say, that was a long night. It wasn't the last time I did several days without sleep, but thankfully I never had another failure that big. This article was submitted by Bob Hannent as part of Frankenstein's Fix, a design contest hosted by EE Times (US).  

Have you ever got to the last episode of a television season you are really enjoying and thought to yourself "Oh no! What now?"? I have several friends who never watch broadcast television. Some of them use a television set to show DVDs—but some don't own a television set at all. By comparison, we (my wife, son, and I) have a television set in just about every room in the house. I'm not particularly proud of this, you understand—that's just the way things are. The bottom line is that I love doing a lot of things, including reading books, creating weird and wonderful electronic projects, working with ceramics, and playing with my kiln. But I have to admit that I also spend a lot of time watching television. My current favourite programmes include Doctor Who , The Big Bang Theory , Storage Wars , Pawn Stars , Masterpiece Theater , and the Antiques Roadshow , to name but a few. So, as I mentioned earlier, what happens when you reach the end of a current season? It could be six months, nine months, or even longer before the next season starts. What are you going to do until then? Household chores? Ugh! Well, I just heard from my chum Jude Fiorillo, who obviously watches too much television himself. As you may recall, Jude and his friends are the little scamps behind CPUBoss.com, GPUBoss.com, SSDBoss.com, and PhoneRocket.com, so I have no idea how they find any time to watch television in the first place. Jude tells me that he and his "gang" have been slogging away, creating a new website called Televisor.com . It seems that their systems collects millions of user-submitted TV ratings from sites around the web in order to harness the wisdom of crowds and analyse what shows have fans in common. All you have to do is to enter the name of one of your favourite shows in the "Find me a show to watch like..." field as illustrated below:   Their system then personalizes a list of TV recommendations for other shows it thinks you will like, together with trailers, IMDB info, and streaming sources, all in one place. The system further interprets and adapts its recommendations to your likes and dislikes as you interact with the site. I couldn't help myself, I immediately bounced over to Televisor.com and entered Babylon 5 just to see what would happen. The results were pretty impressive, involving a mix of some of my favourite science fiction series along with some I'd never even heard of before—a few of which looked very interesting indeed. Then I started venturing further afield. In some cases, I wasn't too sure of the system's recommendations, but the great thing is that you can use the "Thumbs-Up" and "Thumbs-Down" icons associated with each offering to say whether you like it or not, and the system uses this to personalise your results. I'm assuming that it gets better and better over time the more you interact with it. The only problem is that this is somewhat addictive, because you keep on discovering more and more programmes with which you are unfamiliar, but about which you want to learn more. Speaking of which, I just ran across a series called Angel from 1999 that I never saw, but the trailer looks brilliant—I'm going to download the pilot to my iPad this evening and check it out! Is it just that I'm easily led? What about you? Why don't you take a look at Televisor.com and poke around for a couple of minutes and then post a comment below to let the rest of us know what you think.  

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