NEW YORK — Here’s a statistic that Germany’s Rohde & Schwarz is boasting to potential consumers: Six out of seven national broadcasters have chosen to deploy its R&S®THU9evo digital transmitter for their primary broadcasts from One World Trade Center.
Two of the stations will soon share the largest solid-state digital transmitter in the world, an R&S®THU9evo that began broadcasting in June 2017.
Five additional stations will be relocating to 1WTC in the coming weeks and rely on their own Rohde & Schwarz transmitters to serve the New York market (DMA #1).
Housed in the Broadcast Center on the 90th floor, the already deployed R&S THU9evo will multicast two HD channels. While the transmitter has its own liquid cooling system, Rohde & Schwarz also helped design a custom standalone liquid cooling solution for the Broadcast Center to control the temperature of all the additional equipment in the room.
“One thing you notice in the Broadcast Center is how quiet it is,” said Cornelius Heinemann, Vice President of Transmitter and Amplifier Systems and File-based Media Solutions. “The THU9evo’s liquid cooling system eliminates noisy fans; 1WTC is a great example of quiet efficiency for broadcasters.”
Glen Hurst, Transmission Systems Engineer and Account Executive for the U.S., notes that the R&S THU9evo includes 72 PHU903 amplifiers, each with three redundant power supplies, and dual TCE901 exciters. The transmitter can produce 50kw output for vertical and 50kw output for horizontal polarization.
“Not only does it produce a signal strong enough to navigate through the concrete jungle of the largest U.S. local television market but the vertical component positions the sister stations to deliver innovative services to handheld devices when ATSC 3.0 is adopted,” Hurst said.
The R&S THU9evo delivers an efficiency of more than 41 AC to RF, including all components, and with MER (modulation error ratio) greater than 44dB and shoulder attenuation over 50dB.
The total output power of the transmitter is 106kw, and beyond the energy efficiency, the transmitter dissipates minimal heat load into the Broadcast Center because of its total liquid cooled design.
