tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-129749672025-06-15T10:00:36.073-05:00A public radio engineering blogJohn McMellenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07646434903168071106noreply@blogger.comBlogger46125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12974967.post-15663731474263917252010-03-11T09:21:00.001-06:002010-03-11T09:22:35.803-06:00

I just got a Jira project enabled from Computer Services. I wanted to try the XMLRPC interface for this software, which is much like it is for Confluence. After a little experimentation, I was successful creating an issue from a Python script. The trickiness comes from the fact that CS requires some extra fields to be filled in, and figuring out the format was a pain. But the code is prety

John McMellenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15065223059436916448noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12974967.post-52743074980123196982010-02-04T17:10:00.003-06:002010-02-04T17:14:38.044-06:00

I was successful in creating a new page and in posting to the blog in my personal space thanks to some info here. Python comes with everything needed to use the interface. An example script consists of these parts: from xmlrpclib import Server s = Server("https://server/rpc/xmlrpc") token = s.confluence1.login("user", "password") Now you can use many of the API functions. For instance you can

John McMellenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15065223059436916448noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12974967.post-38805120836536455612010-01-15T14:32:00.001-06:002010-01-15T14:32:08.554-06:00

I fixed some broken download links in the blog posts for SPLAT Win32 and some other software. I had retired a server that the files were hosted on and forgot to migrate them until someone pointed out the links didn't work.

John McMellenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15065223059436916448noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12974967.post-6225205737763144282010-01-14T17:10:00.000-06:002010-01-14T17:10:14.255-06:00

Austin Wright (VE3NCQ) has been working on a new graphical interface for the Windows port of SPLAT v1.3. The new interface lets you specify the command line parameters in a more friendly way for those of you who don't like typing. You can check it out on his site. You can find the creator of SPLAT, John Magliacane,  here.

John McMellenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15065223059436916448noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12974967.post-6148818654001436152009-07-22T16:39:00.002-05:002009-07-22T16:47:55.133-05:00

I haven't been able to keep up with the SPLAT development for a while now. Fortunately, another ham (VE3NCQ) has been working on it too. I would like to thank Austin Wright for helping to keep this valuable tool available for as many as possible. Ain't Open Source great!

John McMellenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15065223059436916448noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12974967.post-38529364872551458902008-08-26T10:20:00.002-05:002010-06-14T16:44:10.058-05:00

Sorry I haven't gotten this out the door sooner. SPLAT! 1.2.3 from John Magliacane has some bug fixes and accuracy improvements. More info is in the documentation. One feature that someone on the blog requested was the ability to save the GnuPlot temp files for post processing (re-scaling, etc.). This is the new -gpsav option. Please let me know if you have any problems. If you are wondering

John McMellenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15065223059436916448noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12974967.post-25970226503510622662008-06-05T14:48:00.002-05:002010-06-14T16:44:55.596-05:00

I ran into some problems caused by the compiler trying to "optimize" some of the math routines, so after a lot of troubleshooting, I lowered the optimization level to -O1. Version 1.2.2 for Windows is ready to use. Please let me know if you have any problems. If you are wondering what SPLAT! is, see this previous post. http://people.missouristate.edu/jmcmellen/software/splat-1.2.2-win32.zip

John McMellenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15065223059436916448noreply@blogger.com17tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12974967.post-29905486905175929752008-04-11T11:45:00.001-05:002008-04-11T11:56:31.522-05:00

Orban announced today a public beta of a software Loudness Meter for Windows. The free download can be found here.Here is an excerpt from the press release:ORBAN INTRODUCES FREE LOUDNESS/LEVEL METERING SOFTWARESan Leandro, CA, April 10, 2008 Orban todayannounced that the first public beta of OrbanLoudness Meter software for Windows XP and Vistais now available for free download from www.orban.com

John McMellenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15065223059436916448noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12974967.post-189827827960685412008-03-28T16:06:00.005-05:002010-06-14T16:45:28.346-05:00

We had been using a Sine Systems CTI-2 temperature interface to get the outdoor temperature into our automation system. We recently developed a cable problem between the probe and the interface which prevented accurate readings. After some thought, I wrote this little program to simulate the response of the unit while getting temperature data from the National Weather Service. We have been using

John McMellenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15065223059436916448noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12974967.post-5980959187327916792008-02-07T09:52:00.000-06:002008-02-07T10:03:29.977-06:00

Doug Lung, a columnist for TV Technology magazine, recently featured the Windows version of Splat! in his RF Technology column. The article provides a good overview of how to use Splat! in Windows for generating Longley-Rice coverage data and maps.

John McMellenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15065223059436916448noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12974967.post-76854225290852332172008-01-12T09:57:00.000-06:002008-01-12T10:12:31.221-06:00

An engineer at public radio station KPLU, Lowell Kiesow, has shared a modification to the Comstream ABR700 demods that are now in use for the Squawk channel. This mod implements an EbNo Threshold Alarm contact that is listed in the manual, but was not installed by the PRSS. It is useful to set this as a way of getting notified of satellite system problems, most often as a "snow in the dish" alarm

John McMellenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15065223059436916448noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12974967.post-27933020010347172972007-11-15T11:21:00.000-06:002007-11-15T16:16:37.050-06:00

The analog FM program audio and the main digital audio are supposed to be synchronized very closely to produce a clean blend between analog and digital when necessary at the receiver. With some work, you can synchronize these down to within a few samples. The problem now, depending on your installation, is keeping it synchronized. A lot of stations are finding that their digital signal drifts in

John McMellenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15065223059436916448noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12974967.post-59853933652734093802007-11-05T13:33:00.000-06:002007-11-13T11:02:13.013-06:00

A thread on Pubtech about SNMP management prompted me to do a little searching on IT infrastructure monitoring and notification. Intermapper has been around for a while, but I didn't feel like hassling with trial serial numbers to try it out since it is commercial software. I did find a great project called OpenNMS. This is open source, free software, and it does a lot. It has been under

John McMellenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15065223059436916448noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12974967.post-17436190576641159462007-09-13T16:05:00.006-05:002010-06-14T16:46:26.597-05:00

Many are probably familiar with John Magliacane's RF Signal Propagation, Loss, And Terrain analysis software (SPLAT!). This software is useful for visualizing terrain and performing Longley-Rice path loss and coverage prediction using the Irregular Terrain Model. It had been only available for the Linux OS. I was able to compile it for Windows with a few minor modifications. This is a command

John McMellenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15065223059436916448noreply@blogger.com79tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12974967.post-21770600942397074762007-06-30T11:13:00.000-05:002007-06-30T11:18:31.557-05:00

Moseley has released a tech bulletin about a problem with a batch of their Starlink RF STL's. The modem cards develop a significant jitter problem in the oscillators made by Greenray, which causes high BER and audio problems. More information is in the tech bulletin.http://www.moseleysb.com/mb/service_bulletin/starlink_9003q_service_bulletin_ocxo.pdf

John McMellenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15065223059436916448noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12974967.post-23611410199381771472007-05-23T09:02:00.000-05:002007-11-06T11:09:26.950-06:00

One of the big obstacles to me of getting an idea off the ground is being able to try it out, prototype it, play around with it, before you try to explain the idea to others. I have read about all the great things people are doing with web 2.0 technologies like blogs and wiki's, but it is not always easy to get some space on the web server to try these kinds of things out, nor do you always want

John McMellenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15065223059436916448noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12974967.post-61928250880565800622007-04-19T09:52:00.000-05:002007-05-23T09:02:16.362-05:00

What a great conference this year! I attended the PREC in 2005, and I feel like this year was even better than the first. As soon as I get some time, I want to try to summarize some of the things I learned here and at the NAB Broadcast Engineering Conference. Also, keep watching the APRE site as they will be posting many of the presentations and other material from the conference (I think even

John McMellenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15065223059436916448noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12974967.post-29002002738602584872007-03-22T11:38:00.000-05:002007-10-08T17:59:40.914-05:00

http://www.nprlabs.org/apre/

John McMellenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15065223059436916448noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12974967.post-82714808854522263492007-02-20T15:38:00.002-06:002010-06-14T16:47:06.177-05:00

As I mentioned in part 1, the WSH and some VBScript can be used to do more than move files around. Another use is in parsing the data in files. Parsing text files is very easy to do, but there are no built-in functions for accessing binary data. You will find, however, that others have made up for this shortcoming by implementing their own classes for manipulating binary files. See for example

John McMellenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15065223059436916448noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12974967.post-64332813991577349082007-01-30T14:01:00.002-06:002010-06-14T16:47:32.970-05:00

Several recent projects converged on a single need to automate basic server tasks, such as synchronizing folder contents, media conversion, etc. My first priority was to pull special "promo" audio files off of our Content Depot storage receiver and put them in another safe location so that our staff could edit them or otherwise use them in their spot production without having to navigate the

John McMellenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07646434903168071106noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12974967.post-1165949573555358572006-12-12T12:52:00.000-06:002006-12-12T16:34:11.643-06:00

Here are some resources on syncing computers to Content Depot with NTP.Microsoft pages showing how to configure Windows Time service to use the Content Depot receiver as an NTP source.Windows XPhttp://support.microsoft.com/kb/314054/Windows 2000http://support.microsoft.com/kb/216734/I posted previously about using the Meinberg NTP software to monitor the Content Depot devices NTP servers to

John McMellenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07646434903168071106noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12974967.post-1156387090192688362006-08-23T21:27:00.000-05:002006-09-08T10:33:29.616-05:00

I wrote this in an email to a colleague who asked how I tested our network connection over our Starlink STL. I wanted to save it for future reference.----------------------------------------------------------Ah, I have not tried using NetCat on Win98. Thanks for the tip. I just pinged myself over UDP on my XP box. On one command prompt, I ran the program like this:nc.exe -u -L -p 5002On a second

John McMellenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07646434903168071106noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12974967.post-1155931874060262432006-08-18T14:55:00.000-05:002006-08-18T15:14:39.783-05:00

Start here and work backwards.A lot of really good points are made. What I benefitted from is a reminder that the real thing thing that listeners are interested in is content. The project really has just begun when the digital transmitter is installed. The biggest investment of effort will inevitably be in developing more content or perhaps new features that will make consumption easier. Also,

John McMellenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07646434903168071106noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12974967.post-1155759704079530982006-08-16T15:15:00.000-05:002006-08-16T15:30:43.903-05:00

I read this article in the Wall Street Journal (mentioned here) about a potential financial crisis facing satellite radio companies. It seemed to highlight to me that terrestrial broadcasting's strength continues to be that it is free and hopefully stations will use their HD Radio multicast capability to offer interesting new content instead of more of what is already available in their

John McMellenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07646434903168071106noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12974967.post-1155071339879803002006-08-08T15:48:00.000-05:002006-08-08T16:15:49.830-05:00

I had a very interesting meeting today about how we would plan to use the new technologies that are emerging to offer new services. I have been thinking a lot lately about what radio can do well in this new world we live in. Google and other search engines have dramatically changed how we are informed. In the old days, if you wanted to know about something, you would tune in and find out. Or if

John McMellenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07646434903168071106noreply@blogger.com0