SEATTLE — The transition of the Broadcast Auxiliary Service, now several years

completed, could be viewed by many who it affected as an enormous visit from Santa

Claus. After all, something around a billion dollars worth of microwave equipment and

its installation was delivered free to broadcasters to allow them to use narrower

channels in the 2 GHz band. (Channels were narrowed from 18 to 12 MHz.) The freed up

spectrum was for Sprint, which paid the BAS bill.

Also having a sleigh with eight tiny reindeer land on their roofs were primary

suppliers MRC (now Vislink), Nucomm and RF Central (both now part of Integrated

Microwave Technologies), NSI, Troll and GMS, as well as integrators, tower folks and

truck builders.

It was not an entirely smooth process, especially when lawyers got involved over tax

questions. It took years longer than anticipated, and required affected broadcasters to

undergo a leap-of-faith that the digital radios they would receive would provide the

reliability that their trusted — ;if long-in-the-tooth — analog gear had provided.

Most television markets were already using the new digital BAS a couple of years into

using their narrowed channels when the Anchorage, Alaska, market finally tuned-over to

the new band plan in the summer of 2010, signaling the end of the transition.

A LEVEL PLAYING FIELD
So how’s it going?

“We’re very happy with the way it works,” said Karl Sargent, chief engineer at

California Oregon Broadcasting Inc. Though COBI operates in smaller markets, two

stations in the Eugene, Ore., market and two in the Medford/Klamath Falls, Ore.,

market, the company’s BAS equipment replacement was the second largest in the nation,

due to 20 translators spread over southern Oregon and northern California. Sargent

estimated all of COBI’s 2 GHz microwave paths sum to 2,400 miles.

“It not only provides multiple ENG pickups throughout our coverage area, but switching

from analog allowed us to provide a lot more bandwidth for the ancillary services that

we do, such as data, and IP links,” Sargent said. “We have a data link, T1 of data

available, plus we have multiple ASI. We can do a lot more remote monitoring. It’s

been a really good thing.”

Greg Thies, news operations manager at Seattle’s KING(TV) said one of the benefits of

replacing BAS equipment in such a short period of time is that it is “putting

everybody on the same playing surface.” As market frequency coordinator, “I’m the

above-one-gig guy.” He said replacement of analog gear — some dating back as much as

30-plus years — with digital equipment all of the same vintage, has paid operational

dividends.

“It just puts everybody at the same point technically, we are all capable of doing the

same things, working within the same parameters. A lot of what we do is all ‘gentlemen

handshake’ stuff, based on our frequency coordination. We’re all able to operate and

stay out of each other’s way, or help each other in cases where we need to, such as a

pool situation.”

Joey Gill, chief engineer at WPSD(TV) in the Paducah, Ky./Harrisburg, Ill./Cape

Girardeau, Mo. market, said there’s a huge advantage to having a fresh flush of

microwave gear when it comes to maintenance. “Rather than stock parts and spares for

equipment acquired over 30 or more years, it allows us to keep one stock of parts, one

stock of spares,” he said.

That said, Gill credits the station’s maintenance people with the large amount of

replacement gear it received. “One reason it was so big was because we had a strong

maintenance staff that kept gear going for 30 years,” he said. “When [the inventory

checkers] showed up, if the power light would come on, you got a new one.”

Gill pointed out that not all the new gear they received were microwave transmitters

and receivers. His station has two microwave towers located so remotely that the only

utility they have is power, which required control telemetry to the sites to replace

the 455 MHz data links they were using. “If I had a tower an hour away that had north,

south, east and west antennas on it, and we had a train wreck south of that site, then

I would need to select the south antenna to receive video from the microwave truck at

the story,” he said.

Sprint engineers came up with a better solution, according to Gill. “They paid for

HughesNet data dishes at these sites, and got all of our control on IP-based control,”

he said. “And not only did they put in the HughesNet dishes, but they also paid for

five years of data. They paid the bill for us for five years. It was cheaper for them

to do that than to put in an antiquated terrestrial, 455 MHz telemetry link back in.”

FILTERS FOR FREE
One annual ongoing gift-giving to BAS relocation stations are RF filters. The filters

are needed to strip off all out-of-band RF, especially important for the BAS channels

adjacent to frequencies occupied by cellular operations.

About once a year AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon send the stations papers to fill-

out for filters. “I now have a stack of filters that would flatten a pickup truck’s

springs,” said Gill. He finds the filters built into his digital radios adequate to

the task, but KING(TV)’s Thies suggests hanging onto the filters sent each year.

“You never know when you might need to have that filter, and gosh, why didn’t I take

the filter when they were offering it to me for free?”

Though the cellular backpacks are all the rage for liveshots currently, Thies said

there’s nothing like a signal path where you don’t have to rely on someone else’s

infrastructure, especially in a natural or other disaster. “If you’re providing a

service and it’s an important informational service, then you need the reliability,”

he said. “People not only tune in our broadcast channels, but come to our digital site

for important information. So it’s important for us to have that capability to provide

the service.”

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