BALTIMORE—Sinclair’s multicast TV network Charge! has announced a series of new distribution agreements effective July 1, resulting in significant upgrades to the network’s coverage in the New York DMA, especially in Manhattan.

Charge!’s new carriage includes an agreement with RNN Media Group, owners of New York’s WRNN, resulting in new distribution in Manhattan on Spectrum channel 92. 

Charge! has also reached a distribution agreement with WJLP, over-the-air channel 33.6, transmitting from One World Trade Center and allowing for greater reach across the New York DMA.

Charge! continues to be available elsewhere in the New York DMA on Altice and Verizon FiOS. 

As previously announced, Charge! will add the Dick Wolf series, "Law & Order: Criminal Intent" to anchor its primetime lineup. The long-running primetime hit, starring Vincent D’Onofrio and Kathryn Erbe, joins "CSI: Miami" and "CSI: NY" this fall.

“With its lineup of the most prominent police franchises in TV history including `Law & Order: Criminal Intent' and `CSI: New York' , Charge! is primed for growth in the #1 DMA in the country,” said Adam Ware, senior vice president, Growth Networks Group. “No matter how viewers in the Tri-State area watch network TV, Charge! has them covered.”

Additionally, the network can be watched nationally on Dish Network, Sling TV, and YouTubeTV, where Charge! launched earlier this month. Charge! also streams live on the network’s connected TV app and at www.watchcharge.com.

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla.—PlayBox Neo was the multichannel playout system of choice for PMCM-TV stations WNWT in New Jersey and WJLP in New York City when it was time to upgrade their playout and channel branding capabilities, PlayBox shared.

WJLP and WNWT share transmitter facilities in midtown Manhattan. WNWT is currently online with PlayBox Neo, WJLP is set to be after its site at Freedom Tower comes online later this year.

The setup at WNWT features PlayBox Neo AirBox Channel-in-a-Box servers in content ingest, master playout and backup configurations. Each is configured with AirBox Neo-19 playout software. The AirBox Neo servers are being used with TitleBox Neo character generators for fully interactive 4K UHD/HD/SD channel branding at each station. This gives each station the capacity for file-based video playback, live pass through streaming and graphic overlays, PlayBox says.

According to Jim McGowan, TV/IT engineer at PMCM-TV, the PlayBox Neo server allows for flexibility to run multiple type of signal formats, mix codecs, schedule content for automated playout and switch between programmed and live broadcasts.

Part of the stations’ choice of PlayBox Neo was its compatibility with Dual Tone Modulated Frequency triggers and the stations’ existing traffic and billing platform.

For more information, visit www.playboxneo.com.  

NEW YORK—While most TV transmission coverage today is about the repack, sometimes a station just needs a new system. Such is the case with WJLP-DT, a low-band VHF broadcaster serving the New York City region on Channel 3 since 2014.

The FCC recently granted an STA for a power increase at WJLP, raising the Me-TV affiliate’s ERP from 7 kW to 15 kW from its current 4 Times Square location, which will become WJLP’s auxiliary site upon moving to One World Trade Center later this year. While the power increase will surely improve low-band VHF reception throughout the region, a thorough evaluation of the existing transmission system was required.

DOUBLE THE POWER, REDUCED COST

Low-band VHF transmitter purchase options are limited, and while the station’s GatesAir Platinum transmitters had served the station well, these are older, less efficient systems. It quickly became clear that WJLP could not achieve the proper balance of power and efficiency using the Platinum series transmitters at the higher ERP. Following an evaluation of two leading vendors, the GatesAir Maxiva VAXTE transmitter emerged as the clear winner.

The Maxiva VAXTE now in service at 4 Times Square is a 10 kW air-cooled model that feeds two redundant three-bay antennas. The VAXTE 10 kW has multiplied efficiency by nearly two-and-a-half times, allowing the station to double the RF power out without raising utility costs. This offers an enormous long-term ROI considering New York’s City’s ever-escalating electricity rates.

Cooling costs will also be reduced—the previous transmitter generated more than twice the heat load of the VAXTE. The Maxiva VAXTE also offers reduced site rental costs due to each transmitter’s much smaller, single rack footprint.

MEETING EXPECTATIONS

Preparing the transmitter for air was a simple process. As a shared transmission space, the grounding, electric infrastructure and air conditioning systems were ready to go. Working with WJLP’s contract engineer, Bill Kirkpatrick, the installation was completed in about two weeks.

Once the lightweight transmitter was in place, Kirkpatrick quickly connected the signal, control, RF and power, and began tests. This included confirming proper voltage and running a dummy load at 150W that was gradually increased to full power over approximately one hour.

The VAXTE is equipped with dual exciters, each with built-in adaptive correction software. Early returns show that a 3.5dB improvement in Modulation Error Ratio (MER), extends the station’s “cliff effect” point to several miles beyond the delivery ring, ensuring that the signal reaches a much broader audience with improved building penetration. This excellent performance means the station could potentially reduce the MER and further increase the transmitter efficiency rating—an option we are exploring. In either situation, WJLP expects the VAXTE to greatly reduce issues with momentary signal loss and pixelization.

The VAXTE design is lean, with minimal, hot-swappable parts that are easy to manage while on air. We have also purchased two additional VAXTE 7.5 kW transmitters, and spares can easily be shared among the three transmitters. The WJLP team looks forward to taking the 7.5 kW models out of storage and putting them on the air at One World Trade Center, where they will serve over-the-air viewers for many years to come.

Robert McAllan is CEO of PMCM TV, which owns WJLP-DT along with other TV and radio stations. He can be reached atbob@pmcmtv.com.

For more information on GatesAir, visit the company’s website atgatesair.com.

WASHINGTON—CBS is urging federal regulators to make sure TV manufacturers are following the rules with regard to broadcast tuners.

“The FCC should take appropriate enforcement action against such equipment manufacturers,” CBS said in a filing with the Federal Communications Commission. “The need for FCC action is particularly important given that the impact of such equipment performance problems is likely to be exacerbated once broadcast television stations are operating on fewer RF channel following the upcoming incentive auction.”

Specifically, a situation on the East Coast has revealed that TV receivers may not be decoding the Program and System Information Protocol, or PSIP, which enables a TV to display and tune in virtual channels, such as dot-twos, or channel numbers that are different from the actual channel assignment of a station, but perhaps the same as its brand identity.

These virtual channels appear in electronic program guides rather than the actual channel assignment of the station. In some cases, they are one and the same, but many are not. (Notwithstanding accuracy,Wikipedia has a pretty good illustration of actual versus PSIP assignments.) PSIP was instituted in the ’09 digital transition to help minimize viewer disruption, is part of the current broadcast transmission standard and includes components required by the FCC.

The decoding anomaly was revealed in a proceeding involving PMCM, licensee of WJLP-TV in Middletown Township, N.J. PMCM previously owned KVNV-TV of Ely, Nev., and won approval to move the station’s community of license to Middletown Township after the 2009 digital transition left the state with no full-power VHF TV station. Federal law calls for each state to have at least one.

Thus, when KVNV, which occupied analog Ch. 3 in Ely, moved to Middletown Township, PMCM wanted to use Ch. 3 there. The commission first denied the request but was overruled by a federal court. PMCM was allowed to move its license to Ch. 3 in Middletown Township, and also wanted to use virtual Ch. 3.

While that may have worked in the Southwest backcountry, the Eastern Seaboard is a different animal, one crowded with TV stations. CBS, licensee of KYW-TV in Philadelphia, and Meredith, licensee of WFSB-TV in Hartford, Conn., raised red flags over PMCM’s request to use virtual Ch. 3 because both were already using it in adjacent markets with “significant” overlap of signal contours. This overlap would confuse receivers within those areas about which signal to decode and display.

After about six months of regulatory volleyball, the commission ruled in June that Meredith and CBS had dibs on virtual Ch. 3, and that the WJLP folks would have to make do with virtual Ch. 33.

And so they did, while their attorneys at Fletcher, Heald & Hildreth, a D.C. law firm with a well-known broadcast practice, filed an Application for Review in July that challenged the FCC’s application of rules in the case.

By September, however, according to PMCM, it received “numerous reports” from viewers seeking WJLP but finding yet another station—WCBS-TV out of New York—which is transmitted on Ch. 33 and virtually identified on Ch. 2. (WJLP tramsmits from the Conde Naste building in Manhattan; while WCBS is on Empire State, less than a mile away.)

“According to PMCM's engineer, Jim McGowan, who conducted the testing, the majority of receivers tested produced the complained-of results,” PMCM said in an Emergency Request for Relief. “That is, when Ch. 33 was selected through the receiver’s remote, the receiver tuned to WCBS-TV—which broadcasts on RF Ch. 33. When Ch. 3 was selected through the remote, the receiver tuned to station WJLP. When Ch. 2 was selected, some sets received no signal, while others tuned to WCBS-TV.”

According to PMCM, the TVs tested were all supposed to decode PSIP. Manufacturers included Panasonic, JVC, Phillips, Sony, LG, Hisense and Samsung, ranging in size from 19 to 60 inches, including SDTVs, newer smart TVs and two digital converters.

CBS informally confirmed WJLP’s results, PMCM said, but the network did not say as much in its filing. It did, however, get behind PMCM’s assertion that receivers were not performing according to FCC rules.

“… It appears that such equipment fails to ‘be capable of adequately receiving all channels allocated by the commission to the television broadcast service,’ as required by the FCC’s rules,” CBS said in its filing.

CBS further said that while the FCC ought to enforce its on rules on receivers, that it should not allow WJLP to use virtual Ch. 3.