Beach Haven

At work there has been some shakeup in upper management. One person exhibited bad behavior by apparently using his authority to sexually harass women in the workplace. Given these events involving the poor judgment of a single individual, I'm reminded how one person can cause so much affect, for the negative or the positive. We should all probably take a collective individual pause and consider how each of us help or implead people we interact with. A little personal introspection can be healthy now and then.

The news called to mind a very specific experience I had on a much smaller scale. One holiday season while serving in the Navy, my ship was in Subic Bay in the Philippines for one of many stops at that location. Back then it was a common place for Navy ships to get work done and prep up for the next portion of a western pacific deployment. At the mouth of Subic is a little island ironically called Grande Island. Back then it was owned by the Navy and used exclusively for R&R.

That Christmas day I spent my time with a few shipmates night diving on the channel side of the island. When it was time to head back to the ship, we joined others cramming into a gig to motor back from Grande Island to the main pier on the base. It was a pitch black night. We were sitting on benches that ringed the after portion of the gig, covered over by a canvas shade. I was sitting on the forward most seat looking aft. All I could see in the dark were the vague shapes of people sitting along either side of the boat. On the stern bench directly in front of me facing forward was a young sailor and a local girl. They were outlined by the dim starlight.

Everyone except the sailor seated astern was happily chit chatting about the day, Christmas, their families far away, the fun they had; that sort of stuff. All of a sudden the guy at the back of the boat started yelling epithets in colorful language euphemistically called "sailor's tongue." His speech was slurred slightly from the day's "grog." He was deriding everything and everyone associated with Christmas specifically, and the holidays in general. This went on for a minute or so before he seemed to run out of steam.

We all fell dead silent. Our silence went on for about the same amount of time as his tirade had. Finally, someone to my right shouted sarcastically, "Bah Humbug!" Everyone laughed, and the conversation turned back to the happy chattering it had been before the outburst.

I felt sad for the sailor on the stern. I felt sad for how easily we all allowed him to have a negative effect on us. I felt grateful to the one person brave enough to verbally dismiss the blowhard. I wished it had been me that had thought to do it. Then as now I was struck at just how much one person can turn a good moment into an ill one, and vice-versa.

A few weeks ago I attended a symposium on Media over IP hosted by the North American Broadcasters Association (NABA). As with many of these events the topics seemed mostly TV-centric, but there are usually some radio gems hidden in the flow. Many of the presentations discussed issues around implementation of a new SMPTE standard called ST-2110.

The point of ST-2110 is so that a TV station can pass all its content around inside their plant using IP. Most of our public radio stations have been doing this for years. Many have been using a Live Wire version of network. Others have been using Wheatnet as their primary IP system. The TV people by and large have not been IP based, but rather have used SDI or HD-SDI as their data format. In fact, HD-SDI is exactly the sort of system we put in during my time in Nebraska when we went from analog to digital TV. That was in the early 2000's.

One encouraging thing I heard in all this conversation was that the architects of the SMPTE ST-2110 standard decided to adopt AES67 as their format for managing audio. We at NPR use it at places in our system, and our recent RFP requires AES67 interoperability for the new IRD (satellite receiver) that will be placed at each station. Both Live Wire and Wheatnet claim some level of interoperability with the AES67 standard. This is good news for public radio stations that are dual licensees, meaning they are also a public television station. More than 70 of our interconnected stations are dual licensees. If both their radio plant and their television plant are using AES67 for moving audio around, it would help break down some technical silos/boundaries that often exist in these locations.

Here is a slide highlighting the main subdivisions of the new standard:

One advantage of the proposed standard is it eliminates one layer of data. In the current approach, the SDI transport stream contains the "essence" (meaning video, audio, metadata) wrapped in the SDI format. The SDI is then wrapped in the IP format. When a station wants to decode the video or audio they have to first unwrap the IP packets, then again the SDI format to get to the essence. Using ST-2110 means the essence is directly combined in the IP stream and there is no additional SDI layer.

Time will tell how quickly the TV folks catch up with us in their trek toward an IP-based station infrastructure. Public radio is not 100% either, but we are significantly closer than our TV cousins.

As you might already know, the public radio satellite system operates in the C-band. The downlink portion of that band is from 3.7GHz to 4.2GHz. A little over a year ago, terrestrial broadband services convinced the FCC to allow them to start offering data services in the extended C-band (just below 3.7GHz) within the U.S. NPR filed a formal argument against the idea, as did many others. Our arguments fell on deaf ears.

Fast forward to now. We are in the midst of an even bigger threat to our C-band operations in that the FCC has asked for comments on the idea of allowing terrestrial broadband providers to operate within the downlink band; the entire band (3.7 – 4.2). If the FCC allows this the result will be increased RF noise (interference) in those frequencies and lower performance at the downlinks located at many of our station customers.

As you might imagine we joined forces with a large number of other entities to fight this. The satellite owners such as Intelsat and SES submitted comments as did many satellite bandwidth users like NPR. We are analyzing all the filings, and reaching out to other constituencies. Industry associations such as the NAB, SIA and NABA also weighed in. 

It's hard to say how this will go. The C-band is already shared with fixed microwave systems. In that case if our antennas are registered, then new microwave systems have to not interfere. The broadband network proposals would make this less secure, even if they only win access for fixed systems (antennas that don't move). If they were to get all they want, to include mobile operations (read cell phones), then the interference will be random and unpredictable.

The broadband advocates are saying that satellite antennas could be licensed for specific frequencies at specific look angles instead of the full-band and full-arc as we often do now. That might lessen the potential interference, but it would also mean that every time a network changes transponders or satellites there would be another filing process with the FCC. If a network has to move due to a problem on the satellite, then that migration needs to happen quickly; an impossibility if filing with the feds becomes a requirement every time a change is needed.

There is also an economic consideration. If satellite antennas have access to less of the C-band frequency block, then the value of what is accessible will go up. Less bandwidth availability (supply) means increased value for the bandwidth. Increased value means increased cost.