John has been with KCAL for about one and a half years, before that he was with KLCS and has been a chief engineer for about 25 years.

In the case where they can't reach any of those sites they have three other options.

SMP trucks, satellite uplink trucks that can be anywhere since it goes directly to a satellite so it doesn't matter where the location is as long as it has a view of the satellite in the sky they can go up that way.

Helicopters can be used as microwave repeaters. If they were in a spot where they couldn't hit any of their sites and the satellite truck is assigned somewhere else or back at the station, they can have the helicopter fly over, turn that into a repeater, have it hover above link up to it on one channel and then to one of the sites on another channel.

KCAL is one of the few stations that has a hop truck, which is similar to the live trunk only it has two masts, one to transmit and one to receive. So they can park the hop truck on a pretty good-sized hill somewhere. An example is the floods in Malibu. Since there are no sites out in Malibu, Oat Mountain being the closest, and Oat Mountain isn't reachable from Malibu, so they take the hop truck up to Saddle Peak, shoot the repeat dish down into Malibu so the hop truck acts like a mobile repeater. So with those three combinations they can get out of just about any place they need to. Since KCAL is one of the few stations that has a hop truck that can transmit and receive at the same time on 2 GHz they frequently get requests to loan the truck out for interference testing.

There is a group that coordinates broadcast frequencies in Los Angeles, John happens to be the chairman of that group. There are a number of microwave channels available for ENG (Electronic News Gathering) use. As you know, these are 2 - 2.4 GHz. There are ten 2 GHz band frequencies used in Los Angeles. Since there are more than ten news gathering organizations in Los Angeles some of these channels are shared but everyone has a home channel. If another television station wants to use KCAL's channel they can call KCAL and KCAL is obligated to release the channel if they are not using it. John went on to explain that this system actually works quite well. So if you have something special going on, you pick up the phone and you call ABC you call CBS and you say "Hey, I need a channel for the next half hour." If they aren't using the channel then they by law have to let you use it and, by gentleman's agreement, they should, and they usually do.

When KCAL did the LA Marathon John picked up the phone and they used everybody’s channel. That was four helicopters, three motorcycles (Three of the helicopters were used as repeaters for the motorcycles) so they used everyone's channel that Sunday morning with the understanding that if breaking news came up and they needed their channel back they would give it up. John said jokingly, "Luckily we called off all the pursuits for that morning".

2/2.4 GHz channel plan in Los Angeles

KCAL does some things to make the trucks useful for them. They have been in the news business since 1990 so they have some special things that they do to make the truck safe for them to use and some tricks to make it easier to use and more viable. The controls to raise the mast are located on the side of the truck directly below the mast so the person raising the mast has a clear view of it. There are also lights on the dash that tell the driver is all the doors are closed and the mast is down. They mount a camera up on the mast. John then demonstrated the camera by bringing it up on one of the monitors and by remote control pointing it down at us.

Someone asked the question "How many miles are put on these trucks in a year?" Some of the trucks are bureau trucks, for example; Instead of driving a truck down to Orange County every day they keep a truck in Orange County. They also keep a truck in the San Gabriel Valley. They have select photographers, good guys that they know they can trust, take a truck home with them so they can go out to the field without having to come to the station to pick a truck up. So to answer the question, John explained, it depends on the assignment of the truck how many miles are put on it in a year. Some trucks, like a bureau truck, might only do 5,000 miles a year while a truck that is used on both morning and afternoon shifts might get 40,000 or 50,000 miles a year on it. They try to rotate the trucks around but some guys have particular trucks that they like to use.

These trucks have two transmitters in them so they each have a main and a back up transmitter just in case one goes bad. They will run from 1 watt to 10 watts on the 2 GHz band. They've used these trucks up to about 50 miles away from a receive site and in some cases even farther than that with an example of shooting a signal from a helicopter in San Diego up to Mount Wilson.

Someone asked the Question, "Are there any independent guys who have vans and do this?" Stringers. Yes there are. Stringers is a tough way to go. Actually now there are a few stringers that have microwave trucks and what they will do is they will phone up the news desk and say 'hey, I got a shot of that pursuit you did this afternoon, can I feed it to you on your channel'. This is very controversial because when they transmit on the station channel are doing it under the license of the stations they're feeding it to. The stringers don't have a license themselves, they don't qualify to have a license because you have to be a FCC Part 73/Part 74, what they call BAS (Broadcast Auxiliary Service) licensee and stringers don't qualify. There's one stringer in town that has 6 GHz system on the common carrier band that he has gotten a license for and he's legal to do that, but he can only go to people that have 6 GHz common carriers. What he does is shoots it to somebody to have it put it up on a telco hub for fiber feed, so you can punch up your telco hub and order a switch and come back right away that way. Fiber has taken over, where they used to use microwave all the time now if they do a game down at the Forum or they do a game at Staples it's back to the station on fiber, they hardly ever do that on microwave. The only intensive use they have for microwave is they have some fixed bands from the mountain tops back to the station, and of course the news trucks.

KCAL is currently owned by Young Broadcasting, which operates ten stations in the United States. Now the station is in the process of being sold again and it's being sold to a 'little' company called Viacom.

The truck has a duel battery system, which will run the truck for about 1 1/2 hours and a 6.5-kilowatt generator, which they can run for about 10 1/2 hours. The generator runs on the main gas tanks of the truck. KCAL modifies the trucks by relocating the fuel feed on the gas tank to the generator so that the generator will stop when the fuel gets down below 1/4 of a tank full. The truck can also run off shore power, which is what they did during the demonstration so we wouldn't have to deal with the noise from the generator.

The question came up about feeding HDTV from remote sites. Here's the feeling on HDTV as far as mobile use .. "Nice but not necessary". There's not enough bandwidth on the 2 GHz signals to get HDTV back to the station besides that they would have to replace most of the equipment including the microwave, cameras, switchers and machines. News unparticular generally has a different requirement for the quality of the video that you'll put up with, for example; look at how many times you see home camera stuff up on the news. Generally they feel there's a different requirement, as long as you can see what's going on no body's going to say, "You know that video's not quite that 60db signal to noise that I like to see". They do like to have the pictures be as good as they can. The cameras they use are digital cameras and digital tape for the news. Bottom line, it will be awhile before you see HDTV out on the trucks.

It's also controversial about doing HDTV production since they are generally about three times the cost. Now that's pretty expensive considering that normal productions are pretty expensive. KCAL has done some Lakers games in HDTV and it was cool but do sponsors want to pay three times as much to sponsor that? No, not really, they think it's plenty expensive as it is. So HDTV is still in the transition phase.

KCAL does digital transmission on channel 43. What they do is take their normal video and they up convert that to digital. They are doing 1080i right now, they also have carved out a second channel, which they are not sure what to do with and that's about 480i, which looks like about standard definition, and they've been playing with that. So it looks like they could do a standard channel and a HD channel at the same time, but nobody's decided exactly what they are going to do with that yet. So, while they are transmitting, it usually has nothings on the second channel. For the LA Marathon they used the second channel framed up on the lead runner only all the time so no matter what everything else showed, that camera always showed that runner. They did get a few phone calls and e-mails commenting on that.

Other links of interest:

Media frequencies in the Los Angeles area
http://www.freqofnature.com/frequencies/common/media.html

http://100kwatts.tmi.net
Accurate place for radio and TV information in the US. Over 18,420 stations are tracked and listed.

http://www.sbe.org
Society of Broadcast Engineers

http://www.broadcast.net/~sbe47
Society of Broadcast Engineers - Chapter 47 - Los Angeles

http://www.nab.org
National Association of Broadcasters