[SBE] Broadcast Degree program

Tue Jun 24 14:51:24 EDT 2014

Henry,
I agree with you 100%. Someone once wrote that if a broadcast engineer 
had degrees in every field of endeavor that their job entails, they 
would have so many degrees they would be unemployable.
Rod
On 6/19/2014 10:46 AM, a9xw at cs.com wrote:
> I agree mostly with Mike's comments.  I have often written, the best 
> education is one you provide to yourself. I started out making simple 
> radios (oatmeal box coils with razor blade safety pin, Galena crystal, 
> etc) around age 5 from library books and later all kinds of stuff from 
> Geiger counters to receiver and transmitter projects in Electronics 
> Illustrated and other magazines (Pop Tronics WPE9JEW was  my SWL 
> call).  I spent nearly all of my hard earned money on parts, test 
> equipment and other stuff, later worked at Olson Electronics where 
> most of my paycheck (about $100 a week with minimum wage at $1.10 plus 
> commissions) and Allied Radio and Heath Kit. I went to DeVry and 
> graduated from their 2 yr course completed in about 4 months. It took 
> me a year to pay the tuition and actually graduate. I had been run 
> over by a car in my senior year of HS, graduated in the hospital, and 
> did DeVry at home with a ankle to hip cast. One of the first practical 
> lessons was to solder a number of wires. I needed no help with that 
> having done thousands prior. Course material included building a FET 
> VOM, a scope and other items useful after graduation. With my 1966 
> minted FCC license I began repairing 2-way radios, and other stuff 
> before heading off to college. In January 1967 I got vaccinated by 
> WSUW FM Whitewater and soon got a job at WFAW AM-FM in Ft Atkinson. 
> The rest as they say, is history. These opportunities do not exist 
> today. I started early with SMD's (screw mounted devices) tubes, 1N34, 
> CK721 CK722, 2N34 etc. When Germanium was replaced by silicon, there 
> was a build it yourself article for an audio console in a magazine, so 
> I built one. When done the modules worked fine and I added a 2N3055 
> regulated supply. I knew to drop the trap door to get the Mercury 
> vapor rectifiers to start on the 50 KW Westinghouse FM transmitter. 
> Got my ham license in 1969, worked my way to Extra.
> Today its a different world. IC's programs with no info, reboot, 
> figure out what is in the black box (remember that in Pop Tronics?) 
> from what it was supposed to do and figure out from there what was 
> wrong or not and how to make it work.
> While some aspects remain, engineering today is often directed from 
> group HQ and I read an ad for a job for CE that included welding 
> broken chairs. Well I can solder coax and cooling pipe and figure out 
> water chemistry but welding is not in my resume. I had to learn 
> computer languages, networking, DOS, Windows, and other geeky stuff to 
> deal with the unreliable stuff built on PC based boxes with buggy 
> programs and parts that crapped out in a few months or a couple years 
> vs the 1966 GVG 900 series hardware that still works in my garage that 
> has never failed.  Often today its replace the box or board, not a 
> wire wound resistor I made at Lectrohm in 1963 shipped from RCA Camden 
> to fix an old CCA.  I still know how to load and lube a broadcast Cart 
> from McCurdy or BE, straighten the capstan shaft on a multi deck 
> machine and replace the bearings and razor blade splice 1/4" to 2" 
> tape audio or video. Today that is nothing more than an edit program 
> for $99 or less and a home PC, laptop or cloud.
> Yep, we still replace parts if it has any, find distortion from a 
> linear IC chip that still works but has gone nuts inside itself, but 
> we also do budgets, planning, work on contracts, climb towers, hold 
> the Jock's hand when he screws up the electronic play list, replace 
> the batteries in the self flushing toilet, change the air filters, and 
> cuss at the utility company every time the power goes out, with or 
> without a generator backup. We are the guys that climb up a mountain 
> in a 4x4, or VW bug, Skidoo, or chopper in to replace that darn fuse, 
> reset a mechanical breaker, replace a power tube, or tower light. 
> We'll thump a guy wire to see if we get the right oscillation rate, 
> mow the weeds, and with no bathroom at the transmitter site, make do 
> with a plastic bag or corn field. As the T shirt reads, "Do you really 
> want to know what was wrong with it or do you just want me to fix it?"
> Then again the AM tower was taken down by vandals, rust or a storm, 
> and we retune for emergency Omni with our trusty AM 1 bridge and base 
> current meter, figure out how to broadband the phasor to pass AM 
> stereo without getting nothing but distortion in the nulls, run a 
> radial to check propagation, and run a POP to make sure it all works 
> according to FCC regs, gets the EAS EBS Conelrad signals logged, The 
> FM antenna blew off the tower and landed on the roof and park, or the 
> pan shaped power divider on the Jampro had an N connector rip off and 
> let water into the coax for years because the former chief never check 
> the line and when the VSWR kep tripping, drained out gallons of water 
> from the horizontal run that only didn't get into the transmitter 
> because of the gas barrier at the LPF.
> We made jock's sound "good" by making a tape loop reverb, or a spring 
> or plate reverb, now replaced by some digital effects box with 9000 
> electronic handles and a program that will make anything sound like 
> anything else. We did tape delay with a loop between two machines, 
> even Quad's for video; kept the tractors and Ferris wheels from 
> spitting out little boxes of tape, and sat in the middle of a self 
> supporting 1000' tower in a thunderstorm as lightning hit the tower 
> making the hair on our arms bristle feeling the tower sway as the 
> little "give" in the bolts reached the end of travel then went back 
> the other way.
> Yup, I think we need a Masters of Broadcast Engineering degree 
> program, but I am not sure anyone would want to take a 10 year course 
> for a job that today often pays little, has lots of hazards, get 
> abused, unappreciated, and treated like the local backyard mechanic. 
> But I'm willing to be a Professor again.
> Henry   SBE Older than Dirt but still cracking rocks
>
>
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