[SBE] transmitter customer service failures

[Rolin Lintag]

Henry,

Your situation may be more prevalent in most stations than we want to
believe. I'm afraid that station management nowadays think (or forced to
think because of business constraints) of back-up equipment not as an
investment or insurance but as a non-performing asset (or sleeping
inventory). This means that whatever large investment is spent, as in a
transmitter, it better be reliable in operation and maintainable should
problems occur. This is one reason, I have taken the pains of calling
users of different transmitter makes for the last two years now before
we decided to go Axcera this year. I vetted for the customer service and
acceptable reliability at a reasonable price. I am not selling the
equipment, nor do I have any vested interest in this - I am just sharing
the results of my studies. I won't be stingy with praising those that
deserve it. Axcera is one company that goes out of its way to help the
station stay on the air (and me to keep my job!).

Another observation that I hope the manufacturers of equipment should
take notice is that they should not only be after the sale of equipment.
Their dedication to customer service is their signature in the industry.
If they can not help the engineers keep the stations on the air, then
they are not in this business for the long run. Instead of spending
millions on marketing and advertising, they should beef up their service
departments or better yet, improve the reliability of their products.
They may be able to sweet talk the non-technical people to buy their
products but it is the engineers who will make them look good or bad in
the long run. Word of mouth marketing is still the best form of building
product image.

I am grateful to the many engineers I have talked to who have been
unselfish in sharing their experiences and straightforward enough to
call a spade a spade. The broadcast engineering community is a small
family so the manufacturing industry better treat us all right if they
want to stay in business. 

This is why every engineer should treat our profession not just an
individual career but as a brotherhood as well.

Rolin Lintag, CSTE
Little Rock, AR


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Message: 1
Date: Mon, 9 Jul 2007 11:46:51 EDT
From: A9xw at cs.com
Subject: [SBE] transmitter customer service failures
To: sbe at sbe.org, fred.krampits at us.thales-bm.com,
	Michael.Roosa at us.thales-bm.com, Rodney.Cole at thomson.net,
	MDrazin at tribune.com
Message-ID: <c32.1400b326.33c3b26b at cs.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII"

We had massive damage at our transmitter site on June 18th from
lightning taking out the 12.5Kv to 480/1200A 3 phase transformer. The
utility replaced the power vault 30 hrs later and we found everything
had gone crispy from the over voltage. HVAC, strobes, Staco regulators,
Isolatrons OVP, both transmitters and just about everything else not on
the full isolation UPS. We only lost the exciter PS and a metering fuse
in the Thales IOT analog, and using a 30 yr. 
old ITS exciter and some ingenuity got the analog back on air in mono,
using a Sencore 3384 to demod the 310M stream to baseband A/V.  But the
solid state DTV transmitter lost every fuse, power supply, several RF
amps, and more. But the bad news was Thales had nothing in stock to fix
it. We finally got them to send 4 power supplies from a demo unit and a
few more trickled in. We managed to get back on with 20% power, then
50%, but still no control systems, no power monitoring, no replacement
RF amps. The latest E-mail says their power supply repair tech is out
for a few weeks and apparently they have no one else to fix them. So far
no effort to get the RF amps fixed/swapped, and the computer boards are
all on back order from their vendor. [according to a e-mail of last
week].  When I called today, I was told no one was in the office, except
a low level customer service person. If Digital is the future of TV, we
all better have an extra box on hand for parts or near on line standby
(make sure the mains are off) 

Anyone else having support problems from TX manufacturers?  

Anyone besides me remember when RCA would have a whole transmitter on
site in an emergency in a matter of hours or a couple days and actually
stocked parts for just about everything ever made?  

Have the manufacturers forgotten this is a TIME=CASH business? Or has
broadcasting become unimportant with mobile technology transmitters
going in by the dozens per week? 

Henry Ruhwiedel
WYIN