At NAB 2007, from left: Kevin Campbell (APT’s VP of North American operation), George Bisso (director of engineering, Sandusky Broadcasting) and Jon McClintock (APT’s commercial director).
Sandusky Broadcasting, the owner of 10 radio stations in the Seattle and Phoenix markets, has installed APT’s Worldnet Oslo codecs on its Seattle studio-to-transmitter and transmitter-to-studio link in order to improve robustness, audio quality and versatility.
Sandusky Broadcasting owns three Seattle-based FM radio stations (KRWM-FM, KQMV-FM and KWJZ-FM), all of which have been offering an HD service since 2006. It also has two AM stations operating from Seattle: KIXI-AM and KKNW-AM. The broadcaster’s Seattle studio is based in Bellevue, Wash., while the transmitters are located 17 miles away on West Tiger Mountain.
“In 2006, we moved our transmitter to its current home on West Tiger Mountain, but as the site had no telephone line capability, we installed a digital microwave system to give us a wireless transport medium between the studio and the transmitter,” says George Bisso, director of engineering for the Seattle group. “At around the same time we began making the switch from analog to HD on our FM stations, which allowed us to bring improved audio quality to our listeners.
“However, the codecs we were initially using were not particularly robust so we began investigating an alternative. I heard about APT through the press and met them at NAB. They arranged to lend us a pair of WorldNet Oslo units through Bob Trimble at RF Specialities in Washington, and we duly tested them. We really liked the operation of these units and felt that they produced much better quality audio than the existing codecs. Another important factor was that the APT units offered a dual system. With WorldNet Oslo, we only need two codecs—one at each end of the link—our existing solution required four codecs to provide a similar feature set.”
For more information, visit www.aptx.com and www.rfspec.com.
