Terry Green Blogs About KUSP

This is likely to be the last post in this blog for the year (unless something especially interesting happens in the next week) — and I wanted to finish by showing you how our Upgrade 2011 studio renovation is coming along.

There are three studios at KUSP. Renovations in one are essentially complete, and another studio is nearly finished. Here’s a look at how they turned out!

Production Studio 2 was the first to get overhauled, starting in September. You can see its skin and bones back at this blog post.

This picture shows J.D. Hillard at work this afternoon. To his left is the “control surface,” which is where studio users mix the different audio sources and send them to the right destinations. This was always called “the board” (or by some of my British friends, “the desk”). Up to now at KUSP, a wire with the audio running down it would connect each source of audio to the board, and mixing and switching would happen inside the board itself. Now, what we have (in combination with the computer screen behind it) is more of a virtual device that sends instructions to wherever the audio is coming from (or going to) — anywhere in the station. Gigabit Ethernet switches connect everything together.

In front of J.D. is another computer screen on which we record and edit digital audio files; typically, the audio sources for that editing (such as the microphone in the picture) are what we have assigned to the volume controls, on-off switches, and other knobs (real or virtual) on the control surface.

I’ve written about the “blades” that are at the heart of the system before. These are the devices that take analog or digital audio signals into the system (converting the signals to packets that can move around on the audio Ethernet environment), or convert an output stream to a standard digital or analog audio signal so it can leave the studio (or be fed to speakers or headphones). This pair of blades has been rolling along nicely in our audio server rack for about two months now!

Once we had Production Studio 2 up and running, we started in on our main recording studio, Production Studio 1. Here, Bruce Larsen is carving the right-sized hole in the countertop for this studio’s control surface.

And here’s how the room looks today, back in operation. There is still a little bit of finish work to do but we’ve been using the room most of December. The first KUSP show to be produced here, by the way, was Bonnie Jean’s fine late-night program, “The Playlist.” Blades and source equipment (CD players, tape decks, and so on) are installed in the upright racks to the right and left of the control surface, which is a bigger, more versatile version of the one in Production Studio 2. People we interview sit on the opposite side of the counter, and the window looks into the Peter Troxell Performance Studio (also known as “Studio T”), which will finally get permanent equipment about ten years after my predecessor, Peter, started that project.

This close-up gives you an idea how much control we have of each audio source now. Any audio signal at KUSP can be assigned to any control channel in any studio; the display in the middle of the channel strip tells you what’s assigned right now. The blue and white buttons at the bottom turn the audio on and off; the vertical slide fader adjusts the sound level; and the buttons above the display let you select different destinations for the audio.

What’s left to do? We’ve been sidetracked somewhat by delays in getting carpet installed in the last studio to upgrade, which is our main on-air studio, but today we got word that the carpet should finally get to Santa Cruz the middle of next week. We will speedily move our on-air operations into Production Room 1 (so if you hear some unusual flubs on the air right around New Year’s, don’t blame overindulgence by the hosts!) and get the last renovations done. Then it’s on to 2012!

Once again, I want to express my gratitude to the hundreds of KUSP supporters who made special gifts in the first half of 2011 to match our federal grant and make Upgrade 2011 a reality. It’s a joy to produce radio in such a flexible and up-to-date facility, and we owe it all to you. See you next year!

Last Saturday Congress concluded its budget work for the fiscal year that started on October 1 by passing an appropriations bill covering ten different branches of government, plus the military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Funding for public broadcasting was swept along in the section of the bill that dealt with labor, education, health and human services. As had been true in the previous year, federal support for public media eroded around the edges, but the vehicle that provides most of the federal support for public broadcasting was protected.

The general appropriation for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting stays at the same level for the third consecutive year — $445 million. By statute, most of this money goes directly to local stations, with a 75/25 split in favor of public TV. KUSP has received a small share of this appropriation since the mid 1980’s. In recent years it has amounted to a little over $100,000 – about 10% of our operating budget.

A program in the Department of Education, “Ready to Learn,” that is very significant to public TV’s service to children, also survived, receiving $27.2 million – fairly consistent with previous budgets.

Not funded, unfortunately, were other public broadcasting programs that greatly benefited KUSP in past years. No CPB funds earmarked for digital services were appropriated, and the Public Telecommunications Facilities Program, which in its last year of existence provided the major funding for our “Upgrade 2011” project, was not resurrected.

All that said, the public media community generally regarded the final budget bill as good news. Considerable credit was given to citizens who were mobilized by the 170 Million Americans for Public Broadcasting group; members of Congress in both parties heard a lot of feedback from their constituents – especially when factoring in the size of public broadcasting expenditures relative to the overall federal budget.

About two months will go by before the process starts all over again for the fiscal year beginning October 1, 2012 – right in the heart of the upcoming presidential and congressional political campaigns.

I apologize to kusp.org users who were unable to access our web services (including streaming and on-demand audio) last night. We experienced a so-far unexplained failure in our servers at Cruzio, our Internet provider. We were back on line by about 5:30 AM local time. Our staff, and Cruzio’s, are investigating what happened and we’ll do our best to prevent a recurrence.

This coming Wednesday, the FCC-regulated media in the United States will all take part in the first-ever test of the nation’s emergency warning capability.

The jet bombers in the background make the point

National warning systems have been around for about sixty years. Once the Soviet Union acquired both nuclear weapons and long-range bombers, defense planners began to worry about large scale surprise attacks. They knew that bombers could navigate to their targets by homing in on radio stations located in the cities that were targeted. Thus was born Conelrad (CONtrol of ELectromagnetic RADiation) — a scheme to, in the event of an imminent attack, order the shutdown of some stations and shift all the remaining stations, all on AM, to either 640 or 1240 kHz. With only two frequencies in use over and over across the country, this would supposedly foil any attempt by the USSR to navigate bombers by AM radio, and make it possible to communicate warning information to the public over the stations that stayed on the air. This scheme was never tested.

By 1963 it was obvious that the Conelrad approach was unworkable (for one thing, intercontinental ballistic missiles did not navigate by AM radio). The FCC created the “Emergency Broadcast System,” which went through several versions of technology over the next thirty-some years. EBS introduced the idea of the government sending warning information to selected stations, which would then be rebroadcast by other stations that had radios in their control rooms tuned to the “primary” stations. Periodic tests of these station-to-station connections were the main reason radio listeners and TV viewers experienced the oh-so-serious “This is only a test” scripts that soon became part of pop culture.

EBS evolved into the “Emergency Alert System” in the mid 1990′s. The fundamental idea of government-to-station, and station-to-station, connections stayed around, but EAS provided better geographical coordination and introduced some degree of redundancy (in EBS, stations monitored only one source of incoming information, while in EAS you monitor multiple stations). But neither EBS nor EAS was ever tested on a large scale — the periodic tests have been limited to local areas, and in some places whole states (though not California).

With the advent of a new approach to dissemination of emergency information (something I blogged about here), the FCC and FEMA have decided that this is the right time to do a full-scale national test of the first-generation Emergency Alert System. The hope is to uncover any unforeseen limitations or weaknesses in the old network of communication, before finalizing plans for the new systems that will be rolling out in 2012. The FCC Chairman and the Administrator of FEMA have released a letter describing the plan for the national test, which I’ve linked here.

If everything works as planned, at 11:00 AM Pacific Standard Time (2:00 PM EST) some federal official will push a button and initiate the test. In short order every FCC-licensed radio and TV station, every video channel on every cable system, and every satellite TV and radio provider will switch away from regular programming for about half a minute (and no, they haven’t told us what will be in the test message). After the test message finishes, we all go back to regular programming and stations will file reports with the FCC about how the test went.

With the test duration being only about 30 seconds, it won’t be much more of an intrusion for KUSP listeners than our regular local area EAS tests (which take about 20 to 30 seconds to do). But it will be interesting to see how the overall alerting network behaves.

Our Director of Foundation and Business Support dared me to put this graphic in the blog someplace. So here it is.

Fans of KUSP’s Saturday night lineup know all about Sweet Power, our 10:00 PM soul show hosted by Seth and Alex. We’re really thrilled that this week, Sweet Power is the new featured program on “The Mix” at npr.org.

“The Mix” selects the most original station-produced music shows from NPR stations across the country, and taps the hosts for a representative selection of tracks you’d hear on their show. Visitors to npr.org then can start the live stream of the mix when they visit, and read a little about the show too.

It’s great to see KUSP recognized on NPR’s home page (which may be a first) — and it’s even better that we can share Seth and Alex’s wonderful work with a whole new audience.

Of course, you can hear the latest edition of Sweet Power anytime you want through The KUSP Music Show Player at kusp.org. And catch the show live, using that time-honored technology called FM radio, every Saturday night at ten!

I’m sorry to report that Sean Rameswaram, KUSP’s host of Marketplace, All Things Considered, and Fresh Air, has left our staff to return to the east coast. In addition to hosting the afternoon news line-up Sean was our “go-to” reporter, especially on environmental stories, and in recent months he has been the producer and host of Talk of the Bay. He leaves really large shoes to fill, and all of us at KUSP wish him well.

For now, the afternoon host on KUSP will be Wes Sims, and we’re happy to have him back. Wes was the regular Friday host of Talk of the Bay for a period of time, before leaving our area a few years ago to serve as News Director of BYU Broadcasting, which includes public broadcasting stations KBYU FM and TV, in Provo, Utah. Wes recently retired from that position and returned home to the Monterey Bay area. We’re very happy he’s able to step in for a few weeks while we organize a open hiring process for Sean’s successor.

KUSP’s Fall Pledge Drive finished at 1:00 PM on Saturday 10/15. When all on-line and over-the-phone pledges were tallied and checked, the total came to a little over $103,800. This tops our Spring 2011 and Fall 2010 drives, both of which finished at just over $100,000. In fact, the $103,800 total is the most raised on a KUSP pledge drive since the spring of 2005 — when the state of the area’s economy, and the profile of public radio listening on the Central Coast, were both very different than they are today.

Our drive total did come up short of our $118,000 goal. We knew, going in, that this goal would be a stretch to reach. We were spurred along by our success in making all of last year’s pledge drive goals early, and we felt, given the growth in our audience lately and the positive feedback about our recent programming efforts, that this was a good time to aim high and see what would happen.

Topping our results for any drive in the past six years, at a time when the economy is as shaky as it is, has to be considered a success.

We’re deeply grateful for all the gifts we received — over 1,000 donors called in or pledged on-line — and for the hard work of the scores of community volunteers, KUSP programmers, and staff folks that made it possible for the station to realize your support. Thank you all!

This afternoon All Things Considered reported the hiring of Gary Knell, who has been the President and CEO of Sesame Workshop (as you’d guess, they are the production company for Sesame Street) as the radio network’s new CEO.

Click here to get to the NPR News blog, “The Two-Way,” which has a pretty complete breakdown and lots of interesting links.

I’m sure we member station folks will be hearing more from Gary in the next few days. I’ll pass along any especially interesting insights.

Update 10/3/2011 4:15 PM: here is another post from “The Two-Way” that includes an interview with Gary Knell airing on All Things Considered this afternoon.

Today, the long-awaited (and somewhat delayed) shipment of digital audio routing and control equipment arrived from Wheatstone Corporation in New Bern, North Carolina. As luck would have it, I was having lunch across town when the truck arrived, so there is no photo record of how the KUSP staff broke things down when the shipping container proved to be too big to get though the station’s front door.

Duncan Lively, our Director of Foundation and Business Support, took this picture after everything got inside:

You see Chief Engineer Brant Herrett holding the “control surface” for Production Studio 2 in his hands; this is the panel with all the knobs and switches on it that the people in the studio touch. It’s all wrapped up in plastic in this shot.

To the right of Brant is what looks like a stack of industrial-strength pizza boxes. Inside those are all the audio “blades” I wrote about and showed you in a previous post. Each blade supports eight audio sources and destinations, so multiplying that all out gives you a sense of how much audio this system will ultimately be controlling at once.

The shadowy figure in the background is Steve Laufer, KUSP’s head of digital media and chief photographer. We’ll get some more pictures of the new stuff together for you in the days ahead.

Thanks again to the hundreds of KUSP donors who made this project possible. The stuff is almost all in the building now! Woo-hoo!

Today we passed a minor milestone in the Upgrade 2011 project. The biggest part of the investment is a digital audio network within the station that connects all the studios together. Audio moves from place to place under the control of the on-air hosts and recording engineers in each studio. All the audio moves as packets of addressable digital data on a really really fast Ethernet network.

Audio gets in and out of the network through boxes called “blades.” When the audio starts as a digital signal (our satellite feeds from NPR or BBC, for example) the blades convert the digital signal to a format compatible with everything else, wraps it up in the packets, puts an address on it, and sends it off to its destination. All these same steps happen to our analog signals too (from the studio microphones or turntables, for example) — with the additional step of an analog-to-digital conversion in the blade.

We got our first two blades to experiment with a couple of days ago, and today we propped them up in one of our equipment rooms and connected them to our network to see if we could make them work. Here’s a look at one of the blades:

And this is a close-up of part of the front panel. I haven’t worked with equipment that has a “snake mode” before!

While we’ve been familiarizing ourselves with some of the new equipment we’ve been working on renovating the physical studios too. First to get overhauled is Production Studio 2, primarily used by KUSP news reporters and our program operations staff (people who check to see that the right show is on at the right time, that kind of thing). In this first shot Bruce Larsen, co-host of “It Takes All Kinds” on Sunday afternoon, is peeling off the old wall covering and trim:

Once we got the old gray carpet off the walls, we discovered that when the room was built, the drywall had just been nailed in place (kind of randomly) and there were huge gaps and uneven seams (like 1/2″ of difference in height from one piece to the next). This wasn’t going to work with what we had in mind for the room. Consequently, we had to bring in someone who knew about hanging drywall to nail things properly, then patch the gaps and tape the seams.

Once we got the drywall cleaned up the room looked like this:

Then we brought in more folks to hang our new sisal wall covering, furnished by Greenspace in Santa Cruz. Much more attractive than the old gray carpet, and the lighter color makes the room much less cave-like.

Next we will put the countertops back in, followed by the equipment — and then we can get back to work in here! (and move on to Production Room 1)…