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Andrew Yeager
Dave Shy
Mary Hendley
Ernest Williams
Michael Krall
Mike Morgan
Patrick Dorriety
Philip Habeeb
Steven Sanders
Tanya Ott
Theresa Kidd
Yin Ingram
Leslie Hoggatt

Patrick Dorriety

So, you may ask, what does an 'Operations Manager' do? Well...

December 18, 2008: Most of my time in recent days has been spent getting the special holiday program ready. The first special airs Saturday, and then continues through New Year's Day. Unfortunately, another little problem came up today. The contractor preparing the site for the new UAB Recycling Center, accidentally dug up the satellite cable. That's what I said. Dug up the satellite cable, and broke it! Of course, we lost the entire satellite feed. That happened around 8:55 am. First, we've arranged to get NPR via ISDN. NPR was very cooperative with us on that. Next, we're making a temporary repair by splicing the broken cable. Success! From break to repair took about two hours. Now, it's time to talk about a permanent repair. And, there's a backlog of holiday related work.

December 15, 2008: The audio on the 91.5 signal eventually degraded to the point where it is un-listenable. We took the 91.5 transmitter off air, pulled the T1 CSU and brought it back to Birmingham for a bench test. That test indicates no problems with either CSU, or any of the encoder and decoder cards. It sounds GREAT on the bench. So, while the engineer returns the CSU to Gadsden, I'm contacting ATT again. Their tech guy shows up, checks the circuit, and declares it seems to be working. But it's not. ATT was preparing to send another tech to the Birmingham end of the circuit to check it out there. The ATT tech installed a new super jack on the T1 circuit at the Gadsden end, and while doing so, noticed the LBO was set at -13. It should have been 0. When he set the LBO on zero, the signal sounded great. WSGN is back on-air.

LBO is a Telco adjustment for the Line build out. You see, by the time a pulse reaches a t1 repeater, some attenuation will have occured. The LBO allows for the adjustment of the outgoing transmitted pulses, so that they will be attenuated to the normal amount by the time the pulses arrive at the next repeater. Naturally, the LBO depends on the distance from the first repeater to the next. It's too bad the CSU doesn't have an automatic LBO mode so that the attenuation of the received pulses can adjust automatically.

December 10, 2008: The audio on the 91.5 WSGN signal has degraded again. This time a little worse. So far, we haven't found exactly what the problem is. The T1 circuit shows no errors, but I'm still suspcious. The engineer will check out the audio chain between the T1 and the the WSGN transmitter.

November 26, 2008: We're noticing a transient and occasional signal distortion on 91.5 WSGN, Gadsden. Could be a problem with the T1 circuit, although it's only on the receive end at Gadsden. Excercising some of the switches seemed to make it better. ATT says the T1 circuit checks out. I was about to dispatch an engineer when the problem corrected itself. It always happens just before a holiday.

November 9, 2008: We had to perform an unscheduled reset of the audio system. Late Friday, two of the four decks in AVAir stopped working. We fiddled with it Friday, Saturday, and now today. Finally, a reset of the whole system fixed the problem. It was a windows/networking thing. I hope we don't see that again anytime soon.

November 7, 2008: We start with the broadcast. The WBHM and WSGN transmitters are on and operating at 99.7 and 100.1 % respectively. Signals sound ok. Satellite ok. At some point today, someone wants to check out an ISDN link up. One staff member is having an issue with outgoing email.

UPDATE: The email problem was an Outlook problem. And the other end of the ISDN loop called to say they're having a problem with their ISDN unit. The 'check-out' was a good idea.

I've subscribed to BBC World Service special for the 1400 broadcast, which will include a live segment from Highlands United Methodist Church today. Also edited the webplaylist.

The weather may play a role today. Thunderstorms are forecast.

A staff member reports the UPS battery for his pc is beeping. Must be time for a new battery. That can be replaced when he's ready to shut down the pc while we change it out.

I've made several edits on the web site so far today. Seems like I spend a good bit of time here.

Patrick Dorriety joined the WBHM staff in August, 1984, as a News Reporter. He had been on the air in Birmingham radio for many years, reporting the news on stations WYDE and WAPI, among others. He's been a broadcaster since the age of 16, when he answered telephone requests for the all nite rock-n-roll request show on WYDE 85.

In 1989, he became the WBHM Operations Manager. It was a natural move for this dedicated radio professional. As the Operations Manager, the main job is to execute the broadcast.

You can contact Patrick by email at patrick@wbhm.org or you can give him a call at 205-934-2606.