CHAMPAIGN, Ill.—When it comes to meeting its requirements for Emergency Alert System and CALM compliance for its terrestrial stations, Chicago-based Weigel Broadcasting has chosen to go with Cobalt Digital’s 9922-FS-DSP openGear cards, including the purchase of five cards this past March for KTLN, and a Heroes & Icons and MeTV affiliates in San Francisco.
The 9922-FS-DSP is a software-defined platform that supports multiple microservices. These include automatic audio leveling, upmixing, Dolby encoding and decoding, automatic SAP generation, EAS insertion, logo insertion, text-to-speech and more. The base product includes advanced frame sync features with per-channel audio delay and routing, as well as audio/video offset adjustment. There are presets for custom card setup as well as layered presets for changes to just a specific function. Full control and monitoring can be accessed through Cobalt’s DashBoard software or remote control panels.
Weigel has reportedly deployed dozens of the 9922-FS-DSP cards across its stations already. The cards features a +EAS option that enables Weigel to key EAS text crawls into active video and insert station logos. Some stations also have the +TTS option, providing text-to-speech conversion of EAS text.
To meet the CALM Act, which requires commercials to be broadcast at the same volume as programming, the 9922-FS-DSP can add a microservice to meet those needs for digital subchannels and other broadcast properties.
At Weigel’s remote locations, where an entire openGear frame is not needed, the broadcaster uses Cobalt’s BBG-1022-FS-DSP, a standalone version of the 9922-FS-DSP.
