I did not know that planes also did the Carolina Squat!

 

If you're talking about the green paint on the exposed ribs, that's a zinc primer that's applied at the factory.
If you mean those shiney sections around the door, that's some protective plastic applied to prevent scratches while in maintenance.

 

I've seen the green in all the Boeing factories. I've dealt with zinc chromate for fasteners, but mostly silver or gold. The green finish much be specifically for aluminum.

 

TIA-568B:

 

Clever visual aid for termination.
Not real PC. I wouldn't let the cable folks see that. HR will be notified. Goats not being involved will provide some relief for poor Juana...
And there are no redheads.
You're slipping Joe...

 

For serious STOL capabilities, you need to look at Alaskan bush planes.

 

I'm an amateur: I used to create rhymes or short ditties in my head to remember stuff.

Joe thinks at a MUCH higher level than I can ever aspire to.
Joe also appears to "have a type" (and it doesn't include blondes or redheads).

 

They're not really my type. A friend sent me that, and I thought it was clever.

 

@kenzo42 , a large number of factors.

The intersection of Cost and Technology was one. TV transmitters used to need to be manned all the time when operating. And they burned up big, high-power vacuum tubes whose lifespans were measured in hundreds of hours.

Likewise, back at the studio end, it took at least half a dozen people, in skeleton-crew overnight mode in the 70s, to keep program content going out to the transmitter. And videotape wasn't always a thing, so there was a time when 100% of content had to be live, and then another time when some content was pre-produced on film, which wasn't significantly cheaper after you factored in the cost of duplicating and shipping several miles of film each day.

Tradition is a another. Going back to the days when AM radio was the king of broadcasting, a *lot* of AM stations had to either shut down or reduce power when the sun was down, due to a weird confluence of atmospheric effects on medium-wave RF propagation and the way that the FCC licensed the early stations. Simplistic version: the stations which were licensed first had dibs to their coverage areas. When smart people figured out that all of the other stations subsequently licensed on the same frequencies went a *lot* further at night than they did during the day (because solar radiation either does or does not do **** to the atmosphere, depending on whether it's day or night), the commission did some huge rule changes in a hurry.

So "shutting down at night" was ingrained into the mindset of many broadcasters long before TV was invented, purely because the earth rotates as it orbits a star. This still happens today, in fact. Especially in the higher end of the AM band, where they're packed together like Sardinians at the Unipol Domus.

And, of course, viewership. The numbers drop off sharply after 9-10pm, and don't pick up again in significant numbers until the wives of white-collar folks start getting up. (SJWs: I am making a historical observation here.)


Put these all together. Up until the late 1980s, there just weren't enough people available to watch TV to make it profitable to make TV happen, given the cost structure of TV at the time.


Then, we suddenly had the confluence of (relatively) cheap videotape machines, transmitters which were reliable enough to be left running unattended overnight and could run for a whole year on a single tube, and a few smart people who put two and two together and realized that it made five, when you accounted for the fact that it was now cheap enough to make TV happen that marketing late-night reruns to third-shift workers and people with chronic insomnia could actually turn a very small profit.

Nowadays, most TV stations have solid-state transmitters, and computer-based master control systems which are capable of operating unattended. The cost to keep the TV transmitter up 24 hours a day is close to zero as compared to shutting it down overnight.

And, of course, the advent of the infomercial. In 1984, the FCC lifted regulations which had previously restricted program-length adverts on television. Suddenly, Kevin Harrington and Ron Popeil had a whole new market open to them, and thanks to the technological advancements in local TV operations, they could afford to throw huge amounts of advertising into the void, in the hope of catching a few eyeballs.

That was really what normalized 24/7 operation. If your competitor was on the air at 3am, even if they were just hawking steak knives and hair treatment, then suddenly it looked bad (in the marketing literature distributed to prime-time ad buyers) if you were listed as a "part-time" station.


So... yeah. The short answer is money. Which is also the short answer to damn near every question about radio & TV.

 

 

 

Seen yesterday at Home Depot:




I guess now that it's no longer politically correct to say "The Ukraine," Thailand stepped up to pick up the slack?

 

 

 

 

 

I'd forgotten before coming across this old post that I'd made a copy of the RFID tag which let me into that garage.



Today, we had the mother of all news emergencies.

As soon as [AM ops mgr] told me what was planned for tonight (at around 10am) I decided that I wasn't going to allow them to **** it up, called [NY chief engineer] immediately, and started writing a Special Operating Procedure.

The chief engineer isn't supposed to be telling News what to do, but it seemed like the right thing.

Anyway... Wrote a very concise, step-by-step checklist of "The TD in NY routes A to B, and then the TD in Chicago CR3 routes X to Y, and then the A1 in Chicago pulls Y into the board and assigns it to this specific mix bus, and then dials that bus to this specific IFB, and the CR3 TD routes this source into Prompter 42, (and so on...)" And made sure that [names] were doing the same for their end, and we coordinated on every last single detail, such as "this port of this RPS is going to carry this video, and we're going to embed such-and-such audio into this specific channel of it, and then you're going to return prompter to us on this port of this this device, this this other port of this other device as backup, and (...)"

Then I published the SOP to all involved parties and scheduled a 2pm all-hands tech rehearsal with NY. And I had [name] call [name] in early so he could be part of it.

During the rehearsal, we identified and fixed one glitch (NY producer couldn't talk into the original IFB return channel we selected), so I revised the SOP (and added the cell numbers for [many names]) and re-distributed it, and made sure that everyone who had any involvement at all in the process had verified being in possession of the updated procedure. And also printed copies of it and brought them to CR3.

It was like a [name of TV station] show. No shouting, no panicking, no confusion. Just people efficiently communicating with one another, calmly solving what few issues arose, and working towards a common goal.


I did get to hear [name] say to his prompter operator (after being asked for like the third time to just keep the thing scrolling at a constant rate while we verified the video feed) "You need to keep the prompter running forward slowly at a constant rate until I tell you otherwise, or else you're going to be looking for a new job tomorrow." [name] knows how to motivate people. 😁


Along the way, I also taught [name] and [name] that when you ask a stagehand who is filling in for talent, and wearing the talent's mic and IFB, if he hears himself in the IFB, you need to take into account that he's a stagehand, not an A1/A2. Unless you specify "... on a delay" as part of the question, he doesn't know that you're asking if he's hearing himself coming back on a remote-loop. And since we normally mix talent mic into talent IFB locally (it makes the mix seem more natural to them), he's going to say "yes." Because the system is working exactly as designed, and since you asked him the wrong question, you're going to waste half an hour on both NY and CHI time chasing a non-existent ghost, until I finally notice what's going on, and lean over and ask into the intercom panel "Specifically, are you hearing yourself in the IFB AS A DELAYED ECHO?" and he says "No, it sounds normal."

And then they both have that look on their faces, as though you just translated the Rosetta Stone.

Because some folks who have always worked on the studio side don't have the mental capacity to envision such a test being participated in by someone who isn't an audio engineer.

Which... is literally something which happens every day.

 

 

 

One for Joe: