Bringing Logic to Ramar

ramarWhen Chris Fleming at Ramar Communications in Lubbock, Texas, told us about an intermittent contact closure issue that plagued his 16-station hybrid routing system, we hoped it wasn't something too out of the ordinary.

 

The group's two proprietary routing systems for nine television stations and a WheatNet-IP audio system for seven radio stations seemed to talk to one another okay, but there was definitely something missing. When piping certain outside sports programs into the two AM control studios, our trusty E-1 consoles received the feeds just fine, but talent had to fire commercial and ID breaks manually. Which meant someone had to be in the studio to monitor closures throughout the day, therefore defeating the purpose of automating the feeds through a network system.

The good news was that all the routing was sound. Any console position in the building could take a feed from any other console position in the building, which was a mastermind of network interchanges between a proprietary main and sub routing system feeding the television stations and the WheatNet-IP system feeding the seven radio stations.

Fleming and his group engineer Chris Sisemore attempted several workarounds to fix the problem before they happened to mention it to our Jay Tyler at the recent TAB conference in Austin.

"The completely bizarre thing about it was you could look in the system and see the trigger for the contact closure, but of course nothing would happen," said Fleming, who at first suspected a bypass on the proprietary side of the system.

As it turns out, there was a logical solution to the problem.

Found lacking was the logic necessary to handle the volume of control needed for the seven radio stations, most of which are automated through the network and fed by a maze of program feeds coming in from football and baseball games and external shows.

The solution: our new LIO-48 high-density logic BLADE, which became a sort of junction box for outside feeds entering the radio studios. The LIO-48 BLADE can be added onto any WheatNet-IP system for 48 logic ports capable of triggering more events and turning on/off more devices in the network.

Our systems engineer Kelly Parker replicated the fix at our factory, and an LIO-48 unit was subsequently sent to Ramar Communications with instructions.

All 48 logic ports are now handling the large volume of external feeds coming into the stations without incident, relieving station staff of console duty during certain sports events.

 

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