If you carefully disconnected and taped off the control lines to the SSR, and clipped a 9V battery across the control input of the SSR, that should operate the SSR. Might be worth a try.

From the HT35CD manual: "A request for FILAMENT ON produces the following events: if the Three-phase Line Monitor is satisfied with the condition of the power delivered to the Main Cabinet, the DIGIT™Exciter is turned on and the Blower is started; when the Air Switch closes, the Filament solid state...

The Namedropper supports a local temperature probe as an alternate to using a METAR server. We do this at WRC / NBC Washington. Evertz sells the probes. They are a serial port device. They can easily be extended a long ways (> 100 meters) with simple RS 422 wiring. The problem with using a local pr...

Yeah, that's got us beat.

You don't want to spend much time under that dish in the winter when snowmelt from the deicers have created the perfect killer icicle.

For those of you who have been missing the temperature on the Today Show graphics since last week: the current known working METAR IP address is now 140.90.101.79 . It's changed several times over the last few months, and Evertz got me this latest address this morning -- and both of our Namedropper...

The standard NBC installation was a Harris turn-key install. Primary 7.3 meter dish, with a secondary 5 or 6 meter dish. Larger affiliates had the PUP installed in them. At some point NBC added a site controller that had a Fluke Infotouch screen as the interface. In my office sits my old stations I...

I have never been told why NBC still uses Ku Band for the Primary feeds... I'm probably wrong, but I always figured the Ku space was cheaper, which is why they started Ku and stuck with it. Another reason for choosing Ku in the beginning could have been TI. C-band TI was still a thing in the mid-80...

It is very possible, in anal-retentive IT security environments, to find connections restricted by MAC. Someone with the school's IT geeks will have to be brought in to get this to work. Don't forget opening the appropriate TCP and UDP ports, as many campus installations block most ports. We have tr...

We did something very similar to this in Providence, and it can be done. But the trick is with the IF level. It tends to come out very hot, and needs to be badly padded down. I think I had something on order of a 30db pad on the IF input of the Twinstream. The details of it are hazy to me, as it wa...

I've seen the brochure on the MVS stuff before. If I can't get the QM2's to work, that should work, but I have a $0 budget amount for this project. :wink: Our Stratas (portables) and MTX5000's (in the trucks) have digital modulators but the station didn't buy the HD-SDI option. We use Sony camera-ba...

I've been staring at the MRC QM2 mod and demod that was used with the old Twinstream system, and wondering if they could somehow be used to push a SMPTE310 signal through a 2GHz ENG radio as an emergency STL? I just started playing with this on the bench using a spare MRC Strata TX transmitter and M...

Might I suggest another reason for WFAN to turn off IBOC during home games...for the benefit of fans at the stadium who might be listening on portable radios...a quaint idea, I know. :D Last fall, I was hearing similar drop-outs on Learfield's Iowa State football games, and I'm pretty sure I heard t...

Yeppers. And it's NOT a vanity call...lol. Yeah, we lost the Super Bowl that year, along with dozens of other stations. Westwood claimed an instrument from a nearby marching band generated a sub-audible note of the right frequency that tripped their decoder. I guess they never heard of a high-pass ...

We had a Flexicoder and used the built-in switcher and keyer for the HD side of master control, driven by GPI commands from the MCAS automation. I recall a Ultech (?) 708 encoder that decoded CC in the plant and spit out RS232 to feed the Flexicoder. Dang, that's been a while ago.

Glad you were able to figure it out.

How do you not have a Skypath rack? You must be a new affiliate. Most of us are lucky enough to have 30-year-old dishes with a rack of 1290 receivers protected by a UPS that takes a month or more for NBC's contractor to ship a replacement when they die.