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2006 budgets and capital expenditures: VPs/Engineering discuss, Part II

In this two-part yearly RBR/TVBR series (from our September and October RBR/TVBR Solutions Magazine), we ask top engineers at the radio groups where 2006 budgets and capital expenditures are heading. What's tops on the list for projects and new equipment? This year, we asked the following:

Glynn Walden, Infinity SVP/Engineering
Milford Smith, VP/Engineering, Greater Media
Cris Alexander, Director of Engineering/Crawford Broadcasting
Norman Philips, VP/Director of Engineering, Susquehanna Radio
Steve Davis, CC Radio SVP, Engineering & Capital Management

Are you buying direct, working through independent reps or both?

Walden: We negotiate favorable terms through preferred vendor relationships.

Smith: In our case both. Large orders of similar equipment (transmitters, automation, multiple studio equipment, etc.) are, we feel, done to our best advantage by going direct. In the case of smaller items, the normal day in day out technical procurement for routine operations, as well as a lot of IT equipment, reps really save us a lot of time, money and hassle.

Alexander: We generally purchase through trusted dealers with whom we have long-standing relationships and commitments for certain margins. Some equipment, including some transmitters and all digital media (computer automation) systems, is purchased direct. We generally do not bypass dealers and go direct where a dealer network is in place.

Philips: Transmitter purchases are direct and we have some other direct agreements in place with major equipment manufacturers. We always get price quotes from dealers on that equipment as well. Due to major purchases by the dealers their pricing may be better than our direct cost. I feel it's important to use broadcast equipment vendors as many of them have a lot of stock ready to deliver and can help offer advice on new equipment as well as demo's.

Davis: As we've done in the past, we'll utilize a combination of direct purchases from some manufacturers, and reps/resellers where appropriate. We feel that the resellers often add value such as help with configuration, assisting the local markets with installation, logistics, etc. We go with direct purchases where we're purchasing a significant volume, or where significant savings can be realized by doing that.

What's on the HD Radio implementation frontier at your company for next year?

Walden: Infinity will continue with an aggressive rollout strategy that is similar to what we did this year.

Smith: Greater Media was an early adopter of HD and has all of its major makret stations on air and will have all of the others complete right around year's end. We are experimenting with multichannel at several locations and will continue to embrace this likely "killer app." for HD in the year ahead.

Alexander: Crawford has entered into a license commitment agreement to convert 80% of our stations to HD Radio by the end of 2008. In reality, we will have all our FM stations and three of our AMs transmitting HD Radio signals by the end of 2005. It is likely that we will have all but one or two stations done by the end of 2006.

Philips: Complete the remaining stations. This will be interesting as we have held off on the AM's until now. There will be several with directional improvement work that will need to be coordinated with the HD radio implementation.

Davis: We continue to aggressively roll out HD radio, focusing primarily on our stations in the top 100 Arbitron markets. We're seeking to get all of our stations in a market on HD where possible, so the listeners have choices in HD.

Tell us about HD Radio reception at stations you've already converted.

Walden: Our engineers and managers are generally quite happy with the quality and coverage of our HD Radio systems installed to date.

Smith: Our Boston director of technical operations, Paul Shulins, delivered a paper on HD coverage at this year's NAB Engineering Conference and his more

rigorous observations mirror my own more anecdotal experiences. In general. HD provides good coverage on both FM and AM. The FM coverage, depending on facility class, HAAT and terrain, can be somewhat abbreviated as compared to analog coverage. In our experience AM coverage is just about a good as analog and, wow, does it sound a whole lot better!

Alexander: Our early experience with FM HD Radio is that the digital coverage exceeds the analog coverage by some margin, at least out in class B country. In

one particular case (Chicago), we have a second-adjacent short-spacing issue that limits FM coverage in some directions because of interference. The HD radio signal, which has digital carriers on both sides of the analog carrier, can maintain an interference-free lock well beyond the point at which the analog FM signal becomes unlistenable. I think we'll have differing experiences in different allocation situations. Where there are short- or close-spaced adjacencies on both sides, for example, I think our experiences will be considerably different.

Philips: The driving tests we conducted comparing analog and HD in San Francisco and Cincinnati were very impressive. When the HD Radio signal dropped to analog the analog was not very good either. Building penetration on HD does not seem to be as good as analog. Over all we are encouraged and therefore moving forward with implementation.

Davis: Generally the FM HD coverage has paralleled the analog coverage unless we're using separate antennas, in which case of course this depends on the radiation pattern of the HD antenna vs. the analog antenna. In some cases we've used the separate antenna approach as an interim solution, and as we evaluate coverage we may move to a dual input antenna (which would require a new antenna) or a combined approach. Except for issues traceable to differences

in antenna patterns, where we've had coverage issues it's generally been traced to an equipment setup problem. The digital signal is much better than the analog in high multipath areas. We're waiting until nighttime operation is allowed on AM before we can really evaluate AM performance. We are obtaining some measurement equipment we can use to analyze the HD and analog signals in the field and map the comparative signal quality/strength, to help us to gather more data and get a better handle on this issue.




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