ACCESS "rubber" meets the BRIC road in Chicago

Chicago, IL -- ACCESS has certainly been thrown into a lot of situations lately where unexpected ISDN difficulties put BRIC Technology in the "go to" position to get the remote on the air. Chicago's legendary WGN recently found itself with no ISDN lines installed on the day of broadcast. Luckily, afternoon personality Steve Cochran was able to broadcast his show with the help of an ACCESS portable and a DSL line.

WGN's Steve Cochran

WGN's DOE, Jim Carollo, explains:

"When I bought the Access system it was partly because I knew in the future it might be harder to get ISDN and I was looking for alternate technology for our remotes. I did not think that would happen for a while but I got a surprise taste of it this past weekend.

Chevrolet's Camaro BumbleBee concept car

For the past 20 years we have had live broadcasts at the Chicago Auto Show. Some years it is only an occasional drop in but for the last three years we have been doing 9 consecutive days and two shows per day, including our entire afternoon drive show from 4PM until 7PM followed by a two hour sports talk show. For this show the client, Chevrolet, provides a space within their display area for our shows to originate from and they order the ISDN and POTS lines through the McCormack Place audio/visual group. For some reason the person ordering the lines ordered 4 POTS lines and an internet access line instead of an ISDN line. The display and lines are put in place the day before the first broadcast so we did not know until we went there to set up on that day before that there was no ISDN line. The A/V people could not get it changed before our first show so we were going to have to use our POTS Matrix unit for this show. I decided to give the BRIC a shot at this with the Matrix as a backup. It worked great. The delay was almost as short as ISDN and it was definitely less than the Matrix. We did all of our shows on Friday and Saturday on the BRIC. By Sunday we had the ISDN in place so we switched over to our Nexus with the BRIC being used as backup. It sounded great though. I used the AAC-LD algorithm. The most important thing is that the delay stayed constant and there were no interruptions or glitches during a 5 hour broadcast Friday and two additional hours on Saturday.

The attached audio cut demonstrates how it sounds. All of the voices you will hear are originating at the remote except for the traffic reporter at the end of the cut. I hope the audio is useful to you in evaluating the actual performance of the product. Needless to say, I was quite pleased to have the BRIC available."

Listen to file by clicking here:
WGN ACCESS Audio

Jim

James J. Carollo

Director of Engineering

WGN Radio
Chicago, IL

ACCESS....First in the Nation!!!

Dixville Notch, New Hampshire -- The last time we saw WOKQ's Mark Ericson, he had just commandeered a SnowCat and was broadcasting live from the top of ice-covered Mt. Washington. This time he's moved the show indoors to report live from the nation's first polling place in the U.S. Presidential Primaries. Even though there are only about 75 residents in this small (but lovely) town, all of the registered voters (which this year numbered 17) gather at midnight to cast their votes. The polls then close at 12:01 a.m. and Dixville Notch's election results are broadcast throughout the world. For this year's primary, WOKQ listeners were getting a live, firsthand account thanks to their new ACCESS Portable codec. Hey Mark, where's your cool hat?

Live from New Hampshire! ACCESS makes it possible.

BBC's Technical Manager Graham McHutchon with ACCESS
Manchester, NH -- Comrex recently made the quick trek up to the 2008 New Hampshire Presidential primaries and we were delighted to see several of our customers broadcasting live coverage via ACCESS. This article appears in the current issue of the BBC's in-house magazine, Ariel, submitted by Radio 4 correspondent Lee Chaundry:

"Just like Hillary Clinton, The World This Weekend came good in New Hampshire, thanks to a new piece of kit

Lee Chaundry:
Just when you think you know the routine for a radio OB, something can come along and catch you out. Most of the time we broadcast using ISDN lines installed by telecoms companies. Or we can use a satellite if it’s somewhere more remote. The costs are around £300 per ISDN line and an expensive £3 per minute for a satellite.

The technique is reliable and works well. So, imagine when BT announced that within the none too distant future it would be suspending its ISDN service in the UK. The only other data service that is available universally is the internet. But it’s not designed to carry high quality audio for live broadcasts. You can do your shopping from your armchair, but you’d be hard pushed to get Today on the air. Anyone who has ever used Skype or other voice over internet protocol (VoIP) services will know there can be delays of seconds, or the person you’re talking to suddenly sounds as though they’re speaking through a vocoder on a 90s Cher record.

Radio news operations has been trailing different technologies to overcome this for some years – with limited success. Whenever we’ve used VoIP equipment the same problems with delay and ‘glitching’ have prevented us using the internet as a means of transmission.

That is until recently when a small US company called Comrex released its Access VoIP equipment. According to production types the unit looks as though it should dispense bus tickets, but it works for live broadcasting over the internet, which is a huge breakthrough in our search for a replacement for ISDN. However, I had never used it as the main broadcast line – until the New Hampshire primaries, that is.

On arrival, with a metre of snow, I pushed past the hundreds of US TV networks camped out in minus 10 degrees and checked into my hotel. I scanned the floor for the ISDN lines I had requested. Nothing. No lines – no programme. It looked as though the Comrex was about to have a baptism of fire.

We did have a stable, pretty fast hotel WiFi connection so I unpacked and booted up the unit, which provided a high quality, low delay line back to TVC. Only this time I wasn’t testing or playing around. This time the unit was going to get The World This Weekend on air in just two days time.

The Comrex remained stable without glitching or ‘dropping out’. It actually provided a better quality line than those over ISDN. And it cost us absolutely nothing. If we’d used a satellite for the equivalent time – ie two days – it would have cost around £13,000. ISDN installations would have been around £500. Quite a saving.

So on January 6 at 1300 the pips came and The World This Weekend presenter Shaun Ley picked up without delay. More importantly he did not turn into Cher. The Comrex had proved itself. No one would have known that for Radio 4, The World This Weekend had pioneered a new way of broadcasting.

So it seems I can now do my shopping over the internet while also broadcasting Today. Who said you can’t kill two birds with one stone?"

Other ACCESS users that were on hand and transmitting to the masses included XM Satellite Radio's P.O.T.U.S. 2008 channel and KTAR-FM/Phoenix. Boston station WTTK-FM (pictured at the bottom) had ACCESS standing by for backup duties. Several other Comrex users were broadcasting from "Radio Row" sponsored by Talk Radio News Network and TALKERS Magazine.

ACCESS - Inside the Iowa Caucus with KTAR

KTAR Goes Inside An Iowa Caucus: The Phoenix News/Talker pulled off a first by broadcasting live from inside one of Iowa's caucus meetings last night. KTAR PD Russ Hill states today that a team of producers and engineers, using the Comrex ACCESS BRIC IP codec on a wireless 3G data card, provided the first opportunity for a radio station to do a live Talk show from within an actual election-night caucus.
KTAR-FM talk show host Darrell Ankarlo provided play-by-play coverage for more than two hours as delegates negotiated support for Presidential candidates. "What we did was unbelievable," says Ankarlo. "No one has ever been able to hear one of these caucus meetings unfold live on the radio. It gave our listeners a front seat to the very raw political process so they could see how bizarre this thing really is."