Gary Minker likes to point out that a good broadcast engineer is someone who knows what he does not know. By knowing when to pull his hands out and call for help, problems can be solved before things really go south. If you are in the Broadcast Engineering business as an employee or […]

AM stations are under pressure. Sometimes the land is worth more than the station. Other times, the question might be “we have all these towers, what are they good for?” A New Mexico station answered the question using a unipole. KKBE (910) in Roswell, NM had a problem. A unipole helped solve it. […]

For years, there has been a search for a way to reduce the costs of AM broadcast antennas, both from the standpoint of construction costs and land costs. There is a solution at hand. Many AM radio stations are now suffering from high costs of land and tower construction/maintenance, especially at a time […]

Early this month a fire at the Tiger Mountain broadcast site destroyed the antenna for six Seattle market FM’s.ERI sent a two-man crew to inspect the damaged antenna. This is the report on the incident from ERI President Tom Silliman. November 20, 2018 The ERI team has returned from Seattle where they measured […]

We continue with Tom Silliman’s discussion on the things that can cause problems with FM antennas, and how proper maintenance can prevent those problems. Who better than the manufacturer to help up keep the transmission system going at full speed? Here Tom tells you what to do and why. What is involved in […]

How can you tell if your tower or antenna needs maintenance? A good start would be a presentation from an antenna manufacturer on how to tell if your antenna needs repair or replacing – and how to do it. Much of the following information came from a presentation by Tom Silliman at the […]

Each time a lightning storm passes, broadcasters tend to hold their breath and hope their facility will not attract a lightning bolt that will take them off the air – or, worse, damage the transmitter. After all, broadcasters should not be surprised that their site might attract lightning strikes. Essentially, those towers are […]

Consulting engineers can spend a lot of time fitting a station into the area available. Sometimes having the right antenna at hand solves a lot of problems. Clarence Beverage explains: In the FM translator filing window that opened on January 29th of this year we had a couple of cases where the only […]

The change from tubes to solid state was a big jump in technology for transmitters, significantly reducing running and maintenance costs. The challenge now was to raise the bar with innovative features. Has Nautel’s newest model met this challenge? As Alex Hartman shows, the GV series is more than a very attractive upgrade. […]

There are a number of reasons for diplexing AM stations. Sometimes it can save a station which lost its site to developers when a lease ran out. Other times, companies just seek to unlock land asset value by combining sites and selling one site off. Either way, as Kurt Gorman explains, how the […]