Why any of this? Why am I pulling months old vending machine honey buns from under a newsroom desk?
Oh wait.
I’m a broadcast engineer.
Le sigh…
A sad state.
I never liked how Pandora sounds. Their audio compression is pretty lossy; some quality was sacrificed to ensure smooth streaming on lousy mobile data connections.
The ad insertions aren’t coordinated with the programming either, but this isn’t such a big deal as most of them are just dry reads; it’s not like booming tones and overprocessed voice comes yelling out of there. It’s just a little odd to have everything come to a sudden pause of just some lady reading a spot over silence in between power metal ballads. Granted this also means your classical stream won’t launch you through the roof when a spot plays…
But yeah, terrestrial radio is dead and burned thanks to the new Neilsen PPM encoding systems that cause audio defects to the point of stripping guitar chords out of some songs, eight minute stop sets of ads that come across with great… Mountains of acoustic fnords… before you are returned to a six song music library that you can’t hear properly anyway.
Not that I’m bitter. Just a little bit. Okay, I am.
Hark! It’s the Turd Alert!!
One of those things that I’m glad isn’t part of my job…. Apparently the pump at foreground cooked. This is a sewage lift pump. Yeah uh, I did controls for these things but the parts thereof that move the brown trout were someone else’s department.
Also there was a really really obnoxiously slippery Tentacool nearby.
When your BrightLine isn’t
Oops! Never trust a semiconductor fart.
Looks like the IRF840 MOSFET lost its Magic Smoke and shorted (Magic Smoke is both an insulator and conductor) and unwarranted voltage got back and explosively decapsulated the controller IC.
I bet this one went Snap Crackle Pop.
This was from an older BrightLine florescent stage light. Newer versions just use a couple of little Advance ballasts instead of a big arse custom PCB. I’m upgrading it to the new hardware.
Test post lacking TFCW
Image post test
Testing to see if uploading images full size works again….
Please disregard, no actual information is contained in this post. It’s not signed The Management, is it? Yep. It’s not official.
Fnooooorrrd.
Oh look, it’s a SHFCBEAD
Super High Frequency Composite Broadcast Engineer Annoyance Device
Right to left: 2 GHz baseband Modulator, amplifier and multiplier, solid state PA.
Foxtrot Mike Lima
That kind of afternoon where you started out with half your receivers inaccessible because you got trolled by the Troll and you have to share one between two units that have their packages up close together in the lineup
The patina
There’s something oddly beautiful about worn, scuffed, well used old tools… this multimeter is a little modern to illustrate it well, but it’s getting there.
Wait, I can do better
Uh yeah sure we improved it
Months ago, this road that serves as the only access to a large gas station and a warehouse park was inexplicably unpaved.
This is it in rare form: not flooded. There are drains in the middle of it but they stand six inches above the road surface. Sorry, you didn’t need that oil pan, did you?
I’m blaming this one on the Bermuda Triangle.