NAB HAS COME AND GONE…

Once again, we've beaten the odds and survived that annual bacchanalia of broadcast equipment and salespeople: the NAB exposition. Every year, the show gets bigger, and every year I wonder how that can be. It's a time of sore feet and backs, and of watching some very smart people attempt that elusive alchemy: of transforming the products they have into what the customer thinks he wants, at least for as long as it takes to get the purchase orders signed.

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If last year was the year of IBOC transmitters, this was the year of waiting for those receivers to turn up at your corner store. The throng still seems very confident that will happen "in just a few months." Sorry, but this refrain sounds an awful lot like what we heard when everyone was installing AM stereo, and later, Eureka DAB. And, in both those cases, the receivers never really did show up. Oh well, maybe third time's the charm??

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The IBOC transmitter race in the U.S. has led to some interesting new applications of technology, that we may see used north of the border very soon, whether or not IBOC makes it through Customs. I'm talking about FM cavity filters, very sharply tuned and very small, used stateside for combining external IBOC sideband signals with an analog FM transmitter output for the main channel. I'm talking about circulators that are designed for FM frequencies and can handle powers of 10 kW and beyond. And who says you can't teach an old dog new tricks: I saw a couple of new FM antenna designs, very omnidirectional and very broadband, intended primarily for backup sites with multiple, perhaps agile, frequency inputs. While they've been developed for IBOC, some of these new products and ideas will have application to traditional means of broadcasting as well.

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MERGERS (AND ACQUISITIONS??). The first day of the show, Nautel and Continental Electronics announced that they have agreed to trade and market each other's transmitters, after quickly stamping their own name on the front. They'll each service and support the transmitters, too. There was even a Nautel FM transmitter, stamped "Continental," on the floor at the Continental booth. Some wags have been wondering if this is the first step toward one of these big fish eventually swallowing the other; opinion seems to be evenly split at this point over who would be more likely to swallow whom… will that be a Nautelental or a Continautel? Sounds catchy either way!

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I've had only a few minutes to peruse the Proceedings, but my eye stopped at an interesting paper that further discusses the problem of effective audio level control for television, especially digital television: as you may have noticed, a topic near and dear to my heart. It touches some of the same material we've been chattering about here, but with some interesting statistics and further data.

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And finally, I got a quick note from the very distinguished John S. (Jack) Belrose, Radioscientist Emeritus Researcher of the Communications Research Centre, Ottawa, to mention that Canada finally has a Telecommunications Hall of Fame, with Reginald Fessenden and Alexander Graham Bell as the first two members on the list. Belrose is a renowned Fessenden expert, and has recreated some of Fessenden's experiments, with audio samples available on the web demonstrating what Reg's transmitter sounded like (the words are Fessenden's; the voice, actually, is Belrose's). He also wrote a chapter in John Wiley and Sons History of Wireless, which is an excellent place to read more about RF's remarkable life and accomplishments. My little writeup a few months ago barely scratches the surface.

The 100^th anniversary of Fessenden's invention of broadcasting is coming up this December … where will YOU be on Christmas Eve??