LITTLETON, Mass.—Burk Technology has launched its ARC NOW customization service, designed to deliver remote control systems ready to plug in and turn on.

ARC NOW simplifies the process of remote control setup and optimization by offering advanced capabilities that can help broadcast engineers manage an ever-increasing workload and "achieve the benefits and efficiencies of a well-designed site management system," the company said.

Burk ships ARC NOW systems ready to run with controls, alarms, logging, reports, Jet Active Flowcharts and AutoPilot custom views. Calculated functions and alarm relationships are matched to the unique requirements of each station. Engineers and managers get easy access to the data they need to keep operations running smoothly, according to the company.

“ARC NOW brings out the full potential of your new ARC system, delivering amazing insight into your on-air performance,” said Matt Leland, Burk Director of Sales. “The experts at Burk will customize your system to meet your unique requirements, saving you time and money,” added Leland.

ARC NOW can be ordered for new or existing ARC Plus Touch, ARC Plus SL or ARC Solo remote control systems.

Burk will highlight ARC NOW along with other remote control demonstrations including the new ARC API application programming interface and the Arcadia remote management system at its NAB Show booth (W6014) in Las Vegas, April 23-27.

LITTLETON, MA—Burk Technology has launched its “Arcadia24 Hosted Subscription Service,” making secure web-based remote control accessible to small groups and individual stations. 

Based on Burk’s Arcadia system, Arcadia24 delivers remote facility control to station engineers and managers via their mobile devices. Hosted by Burk Technology on AWS, each customer’s Arcadia24 service is installed, configured, managed and maintained by Burk remote control experts.  

Web links from mobile devices to the Arcadia24 server are locked down and encrypted using the latest generation of Transport Layer Security (TLS), ensuring that only authorized users can access and control each remote facility, the company said. Encrypted VPN tunnels and firewall protection guard communications between Arcadia24 and each remote site.

As a cloud-based service, Arcadia24 communicates with each remote site at its optimum rate, accommodating variations in communications speed and performance. The most current data from all sites is then made available for instant display on authorized mobile devices.

Arcadia24 users are authenticated via Microsoft AD LDS, with each user’s access restricted to specified channels, sites, and station groups. Control of critical site functions can be strictly limited to key personnel while overall site performance may be made visible to a wider group of authorized users.

Burk provides customized graphical control screens for each site connected to Arcadia24, giving station personnel instant access to critical site information. Sites can be grouped based on regional hierarchy, engineering responsibility or other criteria, with easy drill-down to display performance summaries. The Arcadia24 user interface seamlessly supports smartphones, tablets and PCs, the company said.

“Burk’s original Arcadia remote access system brings flexible, secure mobile site control to large radio and television groups operating tens to hundreds of stations,” said Matt Leland, Burk Director of Sales. “The new Arcadia24 is hosted and managed by Burk, making it easy for smaller organizations and even individual stations to realize this same level of secure mobile remote access,” added Leland.

Arcadia24 manages remote sites equipped with Burk Technology v5 ARC Plus or ARC Solo remote control systems.

SALT LAKE CITY— In March 2017, DTV Utah began plans on repacking six of its eight DTV Utah Stations that were required to change frequencies as a result of the spectrum auction. DTV Utah, LLC is a television transmitter site located in the Oquirrh Mountains above Salt Lake City, Utah, and was the location of a complex, channel repack project involving nine UHF television stations, with eight of the transmitters combined into a community antenna.

DTV Utah, LLC was formed in 1998 as a nonprofit corporation that owns and operates the community television facility. Greg James of Bonneville International originated the concept of a community site for the new digital service.

“The discussion revolved around the problem created for viewers, if stations were dispersed over a wide geographic area,” James said. “As I thought about multipath in the mountainous area we live in, it made a lot of sense to broadcast from a single location.”

[Read: Eight TV Stations On One Stick Ponder Repack]

Other benefits of co-locating the markets transmitters include economies of scale and reduction of intermodulation interference.

The television stations currently in the DTV Utah group include:

• KSL (Bonneville International)
• KUTV and KJZZ (Sinclair Broadcasting)
• KTVX and KUCW (Nexstar)
• KUED and KUEN (University of Utah)
• KBYU (Brigham Young University)

The DTV Utah site is located 9,000 feet above sea level, with limited access via a 10-mile single-lane dirt road, limited space for construction and a limited seasonal construction window of four months due to weather conditions and road access.

The original DTV Utah site consisted of two four-channel Dielectric combiners, connected to either the main Kathrein antenna, or to an auxiliary antenna through a complex waveguide switching network with five modes of operation. In addition, all eight stations could be combined together and routed to any of the three antennas.

COMPLICATIONS ARISE

It was soon discovered that the original WR 1500 waveguide was not going to pass the new frequencies. The existing Kathrein community antenna also required evaluation to determine if it would perform under the new parameters. The repack design was also complicated by the frequencies that were assigned. Channel 34 (KUTV) and Channel 36 (KUEN) did not require change, but as fate would have it, Channel 35 was assigned to KUCW, creating three adjacent channels and potential intermodulation issues.

Other challenges included transmitter cooling at the thin air of 9,000 feet, transmission line performance, and the requirement to stay on the air while creating a seamless transition to the new channels.

The repack design included a patch panel that provided a path for the N+1 transmitter to replace any of the eight transmitters at the input of the combiner.

Marsand Inc.'s Matthew A. Sanderford, Jr. PE and David Sanderford installed the transmitters while Legacy Electric of Salt Lake City did the electrical work. Tower and antenna work was performed by GTI, America and Burk Technology designed the control system. Climate Control (CCI) handled HVAC.

TRANSMITTERS AND COMBINER

Each station decided on the make and model of the eight new transmitters; Five Rohde and Schwarz THU9evo transmitters and three Gates Air Maxiva UXLT transmitters, including the N+1 transmitter were installed along with one Dielectric combiner and six Dielectric WR1800 waveguide switches for nine different combiner/antenna/test load modes.

Each station purchased their own transmitters based on their own evaluations. “Given the complexity of the project, I suggested one installer for all of the transmitters,” James said. “It would have been a nightmare to schedule different crews on each transmitter. The same was true for electrical, HVAC, and so on.”

The new Dielectric, dual four-port combiner was installed in a very tight 20 x 17 x 9-foot space.

How do you keep your station on the air, while removing your old transmitter and installing the new one? All eight stations were operated at lower power into the auxiliary community antenna through the period of construction and transition. The GatesAir N+1 transmitter was delivered with broadband power amplifiers. As the N+1 was placed on the air, the old transmitter was decommissioned and the new transmitter installed, tuned to the original frequency and tested through the combiner/mask filter to a load.

SEVEN-DAY PROCESS

Each transmitter switch-out took about seven days and the process of bringing each transmitter on line was complex. First, engineers had to run transmitter power at the level that delivered the power calculated to meet ERP requirements of the station, when measured at the dummy load at the output of the combiner. They then had to measure the input power to the combiner hybrid; measure transmitter power out, and calibrate that as 100 percent power. This had to be repeated for each of the four profiles in each transmitter.

A spectrum analyzer was used to perform a power-band measurement on the four combined channels to verify spectrum compliance. As a final step, each station’s reflected power spectrum was recorded to determine a baseline for monthly performance tests.

COMMUNITY ANTENNA REBUILD

The original Kathrein antenna (two Kathrein eight tier by three bay antenna systems—48 panels total), was selected because of the extensive use of the antenna in the Swiss Alps. The temperature extremes at the DTV Utah site are very similar to the Alps, with a thermal swing of over 100 degrees winter to summer (-18F to +85F) Grundy Telecommunications Inc., America, was asked to review the existing Kathrein community antenna system and Kathrein Antenna Works sent an engineer who helped in the evaluation. After band sweeping and physical inspection, engineers determined that the existing antenna system would not perform well for the repack system.

The original tower was custom-built to support the Kathrein 70 x 6-foot radome cylinder. DTV Utah considered replacing the antenna with a different make and model, but structural modifications to the tower would have made replacement cost prohibitive. Kathrein was asked to develop a replacement antenna system … since the radome cylinder supported the antenna, it seemed possible to remove the old antenna system and replace it with a new one.

The next step was demolition and rebuild of the antenna system. Grundy removed main power dividers, cabling harnesses, tier power dividers and panel mounts—some three tons of it—in less than a week. The crew then began installing the new antenna, and six weeks later the rebuilt antenna system was ready for testing.

Katherine field engineers did a proof-of-performance; results were good with the lower antenna showing 28 dB return loss on the lower antenna and 30 dB return loss on the upper; this equates to a VSWR on the upper in the 1.08:1 and the lower antenna at 1.1:1.

OTHER SYSTEMS

For the Burk remote control system, equipment was specified and truth tables developed for interlocking. In some of the modes, reduced power is required. The Burk unit can talk to the transmitters based on the selected mode and ensure that their power levels are correct. If not, the it will shut the offending transmitter down and alert the operator.

Transmission line arc protection was provided by South-Tek Systems, N2-GEN, nitrogen generators.

RESULTS

After a month and a half of construction, all transmitters were installed and operating on the old frequencies. Once all transmitters were installed, commissioned and tested, the new transmitters were retuned to the new frequencies and switched into the refurbished community antenna.

Mario Hieb is a professional broadcast engineer based in the Salt Lake City area.

For all the latest news and insight on the repack, visit our repack silo.

LAS VEGAS—At the 2018 NAB Show, Burk Technology will be presenting the Arcturus RF Site Monitoring System, a turnkey solution providing protection and safety for multiplexed antenna sites. Key parameters are monitored and immediate action is taken when necessary to minimize the risk of costly damage to combiners, transmission lines or antennas. Transmitter interlocks are controlled by Burk’s new high-speed VSWR protection.

Arcturus allows engineers and site managers to precisely monitor their facilities remotely or in person. Its built-in trend analysis uses proprietary algorithms to predict out of tolerance conditions for VSWR, line pressure and room temperatures, allowing operators to take corrective action before safe operating levels are exceeded. Arcturus is compatible with ARC Plus and AutoPilot for integrated NOC views.

The 2018 NAB Show takes place in Las Vegas, April 9-12. Burk Technology will be in booth N5131. For more information, visit www.nabshow.com.

Read up on all of TVT's NAB Show Sneak Peeks and other 2018 NAB Show news here.

LITTLETON, MASS.—Burk Technology has announced that is has updated its AutoPilot 2.10.41 system to a new version, 2.10.44. The new version of the management system is now available for download.

Among the new features for the updated version of AutoPilot is the system’s ability to now separately identify the logged and reported data from each connected ARC Solo system. In addition, AutoPilot’s weather map interface now complies with the updated National Weather Service data format and weather maps for Hawaii and Alaska link to the correct National Weather Service URLs.

Users can download the updated AutoPilot system through www.burk.com/downloads and selecting the AutoPilot support page. It is not necessary to uninstall previous versions of AutoPilot before updating.

CINCINNATI—Wireless, over-the-air content delivery provider GatesAir is teaming with Burk Technology to help with IP connectivity for remote control and monitoring of transmitters and RF systems. The collaboration simplifies the interface and installation of the companies’ systems, allowing Burk’s SNMP Plus to control the transmitter, monitoring signals and log performance data.

ARC Plus Touch

The SNMP Plus enables ARC Plus Touch users to monitor and control local or remote site equipment through SNMP over IP. Users can then assign specific outputs and alarms from GatesAirFlexiva radio transmitters and map them to channels in the Burk system. The AutoPilot PC-based graphical management tool features transmitter parameters as part of an integrated control interface for the remote facility.

The integration also helps provide control and visibility into GatesAir Intraplex STL systems and transport architectures—legacy and IP—as well as environmental systems, generators, main and backup power, RF and antenna systems and signal path devices. Automated repair functions are also available to address fault conditions.

GatesAir and Burk Technology will showcase their new partnership, as well as the SNMP Plus system, at the 2016 NAB Show.