(Continued) The technological starting point of broadcasting is analog. Digital isn’t an orphan; its predecessor analog is still alive and necessary. Being a computer expert does not make you a broadcast engineer, but many broadcast engineers are also computer experts. The most versatile broadcast engineers have skills with analog as well as in digital mediums. The elders in the field, however, are better versed in the uses of analog electronics. Over 60% of current broadcast engineers are aged 36 to 55, over 7% are above age 65. It looks like the replacement rate for new broadcast engineers is not going to be sufficient despite the reducing number required in the field due to technological advancements and regulation changes. The broadcast engineering field needs fresh blood (not everyone in the field plans to retain this job till they are 100 even if I do).
Not all the problems and issues we deal with can be solved at the keyboard. I talked with several veteran broadcast engineers about some of their adventures in the field. I wanted to focus a bit less on the computer side of our work and a bit more on the mechanical for this article. Here’s a brief peek at the kind of things we encountered once upon a time…
“I recall a trip to Germany once when I worked for Thames Television, with a VPR20 portable one inch VT machine,” recounted Mike Hastings, a retired Senior Operator at BBC. “One morning I was greeted with a puff of smoke and a smell of burning. After dismantling the VT I found that a small nut had fallen into the power supply and blown a regulator device. I had located a local component shop and went there clutching the device. ‘Vas is das?’ exclaimed the vendor. ‘It is a Signetix regulator transistor,’ I said. ‘Ve only haf german transistors here,’ he stated (forgive my recreating his accent). So, for a while, I waded through the equivalents guide. No luck. So, took a stab at it and bought a device that should work in the same package. Bingo! We completed the shoot. This device worked for exactly a year before it blew. I Suspect voltage spikes from the switch mode power supply did for it eventually.”
John Mills the Business Development Manager at Bexel Engineered Systems & Solutions graciously replied offering a wide range of service work anecdotes. He also used to work at Sony for 10 years, this was back in the day when component level troubleshooting and repair. That was real service work, chasing your way through a schematic to find clues on what elements in the machines were misbehaving and find that one bad capacitor or transistor. This is truly a lost art these days, on thru his work with single tube up thru 3-chip cameras, UMatic, Betacam, Betacam SX and so on.
“This was back in 1991. I was a camera engineer for Sony, based in the Itasca, Illinois office. The Sony BVP-360 studio camera was the cream of the crop at the time, a three tube 2/3” Saticon camera. There were several mobile trucks that used the BVP360 camera, one of these mobile units was located in Youngstown, Ohio. They had a camera go down, so off I got to Youngstown. Turns out there truck facility was an old barn, dirt floors, hay bales the whole nine yards. I am trouble shooting the camera at 1:00AM in a barn, I find out the red tube is bad so I am now changing a tube out and aligning the camera. This takes literally until daylight, when I finally get a chance to look up out the barn doors in the daylight there are cows staring at me. Now, I have used a lot of different items to test camera images over the years, but never a herd of cows; as they say, ‘When in Rome…’ Needless to say, the camera was fixed and the truck pulled out for a show that night. A unique experience, to say the least.”
John Maizels (Engineer/Technologist/Broadcaster/Producer/Director at Entropy Enterprises, Member, Board of Governors, SMPTE as well as some other positions) offered a highly detailed account of his work constructing a studio, along with the fabricating a studio mixer from the ground up in Melbourne Australia in 1979, his team also ended up building the stereo generator, exciter, PA and antenna. John also mentioned a six-year four-studio project that stood out in his memory due to three things: use of compressed video at a time when nobody knew what that was, the main studios were talent self-operate, John developed a complete virtual-routing infrastructure to manage the core, and he had a budget which could be managed to allow him to go to core-principles and dispense with a lot of traditional wisdom in favor of operator ergonomics and therefore design to eliminate potential crew errors.
(This will be a continuing series, detailing the lives and experiences of the analog engineer of old.)
20
Broadcast Beat Magazine / Sep-Dec, 2014