But I guess I have a good reason. I have been involved in heart surgery. (HEART SURGERY!! Are you OK! What happened?!) No, no, not me. I am fine. Well as fine as I could be and still be classified “alive.” Just transplanting a heart at work. (A heart at work? You work for a TV station, not a hospital) True. But the patient in this case IS the TV station and I, along with Ross the Boss and my other fellow doctors, eh engineers, have been in the process of changing out the heart and nervous system of the station. The routing switcher. With out this behemoth of modern electronic wizardry, the TV station would be like a body with no heart or nervous system. It would just lay there and do nothing. This device takes signals from satellite receiver 7 and routes it to the news department and takes signals from a microwave truck and routes it to Production Control for air in the newscast or routes graphics from the Art Department to Master Control. All at the same time.
I call it a behemoth for what it does, but in size it really isn't. Not compared to the routing switcher that it is replacing.
Look closely and you can see Ross The Boss IN the audio side of the router switcher This new one takes up one half of a 7 foot high rack. The old router takes up one whole 7 foot rack and doesn't have as much horsepower. The old router was installed in 1994 and the manufacturer went out of business about 5 years later. So we have been keeping this thing working with chewing gum and string for the last 7 years. It has served us well though but it is time to upgrade. The old router is what is called a 128 by 160 frame meaning it can take 128 sources and route them to 160 different places. The new one is a 128 by 128 and even though it routes to fewer places, because of computer networking, many of the places that we used to route video and audio to, we do it over Cat 5 networking cable using IP now so we don't need or use all 128 outputs on this one, but that is the smallest size they make for the number of inputs and outputs we need.
It is really a pretty neat system. It is of course all computerized where the old route router, which was computerized as well, was only as powerful as most mini calculators. This one is so smart, just a reload of a file, it can completely reconfigure itself. And the learning curve is pretty steep. As far as usability goes, it can take analog inputs and route them to digital outputs and vise versa. The biggest problem with it though is that it is so small; it has to be mounted in such a way so the monstrous amount of wire has to have room more than it does.
It has taken about 4 months to get it installed and up and running. I went straight from the DTV project into the router project. Luckily, all I have had to do was provide labor. Others are doing the heavy lifting of making the “life or death” decisions. But the last few weeks, it has gotten pretty intense as we get to the point of cutover to be sure all is done to make it a smooth cutover. That point has been mentally taxing. To look at it from the outside though, it looks like for the last few months we haven’t done a thing. All of the work is in the system configuration and the wire under the floor and in the ceiling. There are miles of cable we have put in over the last few months and then the changeover from the old router to the new one. A full day just to get the major systems connected and another day to finish. Now we are in the clean up work of documentation and labeling. Then a short break and on to the next project. Wish I could talk about that one. But maybe later!
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