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Wednesday, January 22, 2003
02:38 p.m.
So that none of you fellow truck operators don't have the same problem as I did last week, I wanted to remind anyone like us driving a diesel truck to keep some anti-gel treatment onboard, and definitely in the tanks.
I sat on the side of the road for a while before the stuff took effect, and while I was lucky I caught it when I did, it still put me an hour behind schedule. The pumps were clearly labeled as "treated diesel" but it apparently wasn't enough treatment.
According to the instructions on the anti-gel bottles, you can put as much of that stuff in as you want, but at the cost of 10 bucks a bottle, I wouldn't suggest puting in more than 3 or 4 times the suggested amount. That's about what it took to get my cat motor running again.
Happy trucking everyone!
SamSinke@hotmail.com
Wednesday, January 22, 2003
02:31 p.m.
So that none of you fellow truck operators don't have the same problem as I did last week, I wanted to remind anyone like us driving a diesel truck to keep some anti-gel treatment onboard, and definitely in the tanks.
I sat on the side of the road for a while before the stuff took effect, and while I was lucky I caught it when I did, it still put me an hour behind schedule. The pumps were clearly labeled as "treated diesel" but it apparently wasn't enough treatment.
According to the instructions on the anti-gel bottles, you can put as much of that stuff in as you want, but at the cost of 10 bucks a bottle, I wouldn't suggest puting in more than 3 or 4 times the suggested amount. That's about what it took to get my cat motor running again.
Happy trucking everyone!
Thursday, December 19, 2002
11:29 p.m.
In case I don't get a chance to tell any of you in person or over the phone in the next few weeks, I hope you all have happy holidays and a great new year!
Sam Sinke
Relay House Kansas
Wednesday, December 4, 2002
10:45 p.m.
I've heard of at least one job that's open, but I'm not sure where it is, and if it's been filled already. I think it was at an affiliate, so you could certainly try sending your resume to each of them. I have not heard of any freelance companies with openings.
If you're willing to leave Chicago, I can tell you of several POSSIBLE opportunities (no promises).
SamSinke@hotmail.com
any chicago jobs open?
Monday, November 18, 2002
02:48 a.m.
Looking for a Chicago based job, SNG or otherwise.
Sunday, November 3, 2002
12:03 p.m.
In case you haven't heard by now, Conus Communications is "scaling down." It's shutting down, and about 160+ people are hitting the bricks. The announcement was made back about September 20th, and they've been letting people go one at a time, until there will be one or two left, by the end of this month, or by the end of the year.
I left there over a year and a half ago, and know a lot of the people who were still working there. Despite what you think of the company and its history, they are a lot of good people who are hitting the bricks. And I'm sure they would appreciate any leads on jobs in the television industry. Minneapolis is already a saturated market, and the chances of remaining there, in the TV business is pretty slim for a lot of people.
It will be interesting to see if the satellite business will change now that the "ma and pa shop" of the sat business has gone out of business.
Tuesday, August 27, 2002
05:51 p.m.
This has been an ongoing discussion among SNG and teleport operators.
The first question I would ask, to elminate anything we've already dealt with, is: Does this happen with every transmission, or only with one brand of encoder?
If this is the case, then you may be able to order a software upgrade for either the receiver or the encoder that compensates for the incompatability issues.
A few of us operators are trying to come up with a list of what receivers work and don't work with other kinds of encoders.
The problem often is that the operators with the encoders blame the receivers. And the ops with the receivers blame the encoders.
If none of this is the case, and you have a Tandberg encoder that's causing this problem with your Alteias (brought to you by Tandberg) Then either your internal settings are way off, or Tandberg needs to update their own gear. Double check to make sure any Data rx channels are turned off, unless you need them.
I got a couple of Alteias a few months ago, and I haven't had any problems - knock on wood.
I used to have a lot of problems with Wegener, and a few problems with Tadiran (which I was able to fix without software upgrades). So don't feel alone, we're slowly figuring this out.
Radar blockers? What the heck?
Try this, too. Put your dish up and tune in on some 24-7 signals. Let those receivers run for a while. Chips were meant to compute, not sit in the rack. Get them running and keep them running!
Alteia Problems
Sunday, August 25, 2002
11:33 p.m.
Anyone else having problems with the Alteia receivers? On occasion I loose lock. I have a full 10-4 and yet like clockwork both receivers drop. Am I the only one having this problem? Someone had told me that it was from the "New" radar blockers? Any help, Ideas
Paul@Metrovision-NYC.com
Thursday, August 22, 2002
12:35 a.m.
I've been talking to several truck ops about the problems with Andrews antenna controllers. If you have an Andrews controller in your truck, you'll know what I'm talking about.
The first problem is that the remote panel (the one in the rack, not the remote box) does not give you the same numbers as the actual controller. The numbers start out the same, but they eventually drift much higher than the actual position of the dish.
Eventually, this problem leads to another problem. And that is that your dish reaches the limit, even though your dish is nowhere near the limit. You can't get the dish to reach backward far enough, or up far enough, or crosspol to the correct position without reaching a limit
alarm.
The easy fix is to reboot the system by punching in the default settings. Andrews should have these settings available for your particular dish, and if you've had your truck for at least a year, you've already called them about this problem. If you haven't, you've probably been doing what I've been doing, and you use the manual remote box rather than using the automatic search brought to you by your remote panel.
For some reason, if you have to reboot your default settings you have to do this by entering in all of your default settings manually. If someone should have a better or faster way of entering the default settings, I'd love to hear about it. A default reset button and an enter button would be nice. It would be a little like a CTL-ALT-DEL for your antenna controller.
I haven't had to reset my controller for some time now. For one reason, I never use it. I tell it to deploy, and I tell it to stow, but when I'm looking for the satellite I do it manually. I do it all manual, mostly because it is faster for me. Sometimes when I park the truck towards the southern sky, I put the dish up and come right up on the satellite I'm looking for. Or I'll put the dish up right into the arc. I can usually find the satellite minutes before the auto functions kick in on the controller.
The other reason I find the sat myself is that I don't ever want to lose the ability to do it myself. The more practice you get, the better off you'll be if your controller stops working.
The remote box is often it's own problem. Sometimes it stops working. I've found, if you have time, you can shut down the whole system and hope that when you turn it back on in a few minutes it will start working again. But you might also have to unplug the remote by unscrewing the back of the remote (I leave mine undone because I'm always often having to reset it) unplug the little plug, give it a few seconds, and plug it back in. Sometimes I've done this four or five times before it would work. Once or twice I've had to go back to using the remote controller in the rack because the remote box wasn't working at all.
Murphy's law: NOTHING WORKS AT ALL WHEN YOU ARE IN A HURRY
If I had it my way, I'd ask Andrews to set up our controllers with Playstation controllers. You've got an up, down, you could crosspol with a couple of the other buttons. You could put a "reset defaults" button on there, and an enter button. And you'd have six buttons left for speed controls or whatever else you wanted. And if your controller breaks or gets doused by cola, you could go to a local store and pick up another one for twenty bucks. But, I guess that makes too much sense.
Instead, if everything else were to shut down, our only real way to move the dish or get it stowed is to take the cover off on the outside and bring the dish down with a drill or cordless screwdriver. So let me get this straight. You pay fourty thousand dollars for a fully automatic dish, and you just might have to bring it down in -30 degree weather with a SCREWDRIVER? This takes a long time, too. Be sure to dress warm!
Andrews knows about the problem, and they say they are working on it. But maybe they need some suggestions from us, the people who use their equipment 24-7 and 365 days a year.
Either that, or at some point we are going to have to find a better way to fix the problem on our own. If we should hack the controller, we would probably be breaking the law. Ooooh, I'm so scared... But before we go that far, I wonder if there's an easier way to fix the problem.
One idea is to fix the number-jumping problem with a good UPS. The reason the numbers are jumping is allegedly because of power spikes coming from your generator. From what I've been told, the same antenna controllers placed in a teleport mysteriously work just fine. The numbers don't jump around. The controllers don't stop working when you need them most.
Will an uninterruptable power supply fix this problem? Maybe. If so, can you get away with a 50-dollar Belkin UPS, or do you have to buy a more expensive 200-dollar UPS? Should our trucks all come standard with a more expensive UPS to take away a lot of our problems?
More importantly, are we getting to the point where we should dump the extra technology and get back to a more reliable manual position controller? If you add up all of the extra man hours spent trying to fix or reboot the controllers, couldn't we spend it in teaching or retraining everyone on how to find a satellite?
Finally, are there problems like these with other antenna control systems?
Tuesday, August 6, 2002
08:19 p.m.
While talking to Dusty and Tom Ewing, (they run the Fox News Satellite Truck out of Chicago) we got to talking about fixing stuff. It just occured to me how much I need to brush up on fixing some of our equipment. So this week I cracked into some sony monitors we had that were turning black and white. I figured it had something to do with a bad cap, but it was much simpler than that. It just had to do with the monitors getting dirty inside and it probably also had something to do with the fact that the monitors have been bouncing down the road for the past six years or so.
I was able to come up with a fairly simple solution, and since there is very little free material written about fixing this stuff (higher end equipment), it occured to me that I should probably start writing this stuff down and publishing it on our website. So once I can get it written as completely and accurately as possible, I will have to start putting it on our site. Of course, after completing some of the fixes, we don't really know how well they will work until they've bounced down the road again for a few weeks. You've got to have a road test.
I can see by our hidden website counter that our company site is becoming more popular. One day we had upwards of a hundred hits. Of course, that means people are doing a little bit of reading. And I realize that the more popular the site gets the more I really need to keep on top of creating some original content.
Hopefully I can convince a few more people to come onto this site or snguplink.com and at least leave some feedback or material.
Saturday, July 20, 2002
01:07 p.m.
Bugs, bugs, bugs! It's the season for bugs, and every time I finish a drive, I'm spending an hour washing bugs off the truck. Aaaarrrggghhh!
Maybe I can somehow wrap the truck in plastic while I drive.
I recently did some live shots at a golf course in Hutchinson, Kansas. I was actually surprised at the size of Hutchinson. The golf course is insane. I guess when they built it, they must have bought a little too much land, so they filled up the whole thing and still had space to put up a few thousand houses.
The people in charge of the tournament are just like everyone else who puts on large events. They've never pulled cable before, and therefore know nothing about logistics. Between the camera guy and I, we were able to pull out all of my cable on the truck. That got us to the practice green and the first tee. Good thing that's all they needed. We would have been out of luck.
About a week later, I guess I got my payback. My cable run was less than 250 feet. I think it took me a total of five minutes to run.
When I was at Cape Canaveral covering the John Glenn launch (not the first, the last launch) I parked down near the end of the row of satellite trucks, scaffolding, bleachers and buildings housing network crews. The cable pull there was only about 500 feet. So that wasn't a problem. But there was already enough cable on the ground to create a carpet of wire leading down the whole run. So immediately I know that the wire will stay there until I pull it out at the end of all this. And pulling it out took a few hours, with some help.
There's nothing as amazing as a shuttle launch. By now, you may be thinking that a rocket launch isn't a big deal. They've been shooting things into space for decades. But you stand there and watch the launch, and all you can say is, "Lookey there! A bunch of mathematicians got together and they're shooting people into space!" If you should ever do an event there at the Cape, you should find cable boxes within easy reach at almost every point. The people of NASA Select, the TV service, are extremely helpful.
But if you should ever work at a very large event on the compound, bring a lot of cable, DA's, and be ready to share or trade a few resources with your fellow truck ops.
If it's possible try to see a landing too. It's almost as cool as the launch.
Family friendly SNG gig or is it a pipe dream?
Wednesday, June 19, 2002
06:41 p.m.
Having settled all my personal and family issues for the past almost 2 years, I am looking to get back into an uplink truck. I have over 10 years experience in the field, including some time with the Sure Shot concern as well as network work with Fox (News and Sports). I'm looking for something that won't keep me out for 6-8 weeks at a time or driving overnight in gross violation of DOT rules. If anyone has any leads, please send them forth my way either by replying here or mailing me at pdf1073@hotmail.com
My resume is fired up and ready. I want to stay in the Chicago area.
Peter Ferro
truckless operator
Tuesday, June 18, 2002
04:11 p.m.
Looking for a truck in the midwest, preferrably Chicago. I applied to Fox News for my old job and I was not selected.
Tuesday, June 18, 2002
11:38 a.m.
In one of my "formative" years in television, I was working as a photographer, weekend producer and fill-in producer at WDIO in Duluth, Minnesota.
One morning, I received a call from the Assistant News Director at KSTP in the Twin Cities. He wondered how long it would take to get to Cook. So I asked if that was the city of Cook, or Cook County since I'd been to both quite a few times, I told him it would be no more and no less than two hours. But we would need to find out which one, because they are in different directions and seperated by another two hour drive. I made a couple of quick calls and indeed we would need to drive to Grand Marais, the county seat of Cook County.
He wondered if I was available to drive up there, and he said he would pay me an extra 200 dollars for the effort. He then said that we could use the story for our air.
So I thought about it for a milli-second. I was in college and needed the money. I was producing a show and I needed to fill the time. So I called my News Director, Steve Goodspeed, and he granted permission to drive up there. It turned out the story was a piece about a guy who was coaching hockey in a Twin Cities suburb. Even though years before, the man had been arrested and charged for allegedly molesting kids at a summer camp near Grand Marais. Now, he was back working with kids again.
Basically, all I had to do was drive up to Grand Marais, take a picture of his mug shot at the county jail, and then come back to Duluth to feed the story to KSTP.
When I pulled into Grand Marais, I had to ask a local at a gas station how to find the jail. He told me to go down past Sven & Ole's Pizza (honest to god that's what it's called - it's a world-famous pizza joint in Grand Marais) and take a right at the end of the road.
Sure enough, when I got to the end of the road, I took a right and pulled up to a story-book jail. It looked just like a jail would look if you were to need a picture for a Louis L'Amour story. It's a square building with a door in the middle. Two small windows are off to the sides. They have bars. Out front a woman was leaning against the building, smoking a cigarette.
I pulled out my camera and my tripod from the back seat. I walked up and told the woman that I was sent by so&so at KSTP-TV in the Twin Cities and that we had called ahead about getting an old mug shot of this guy so&so.
The lady told me to just go through this front door, and then go through the second door and wait there. I walked in the front door, and stopped at the second door. There were signs telling me not to come through the door, and to ring the bell first. But since the lady up front told me to come through the second door, I tried the handle, and the door opened freely. I stepped inside with my gear and waited patiently.
A few minutes later, a lady walked around the corner.
"What are you doing in here?" She demanded.
I responded, "I'm from WDIO-TV in Duluth. I'm here for KSTP-TV and we had called earlier about getting a mug shot from you."
"I know all about that, but you're not supposed to be in HERE! You're supposed to wait outside in the lobby. Can't you read the signs!?" she stated.
"Yeah, I saw the signs, and I'm sorry about that, but the lady out front told me to come through these two doors." I said, apologetically.
"That woman out front?" she asked. "That woman out front is a prisoner!"
I was halfway out the door when I heard this. I stopped for a second and turned halfway around.
"What is this, Mayberry?"
Friday, June 14, 2002
06:47 p.m.
Truck three (the one I operate) got a paintjob, and I'm just finishing up a digital upgrade.
Wiring and rewiring could certainly be the most tedious job in a Satellite Truck Operator's job description. But I find it pretty rewarding in that if you spend some extra time now you will shave off seconds, minutes and eventually even hours of work later.
And now that everything has analog and digital ins, outs, and four, eight, sixteen channels of audio, it will be interesting to see how people will be able to pack four pecks of apples into one basket without making applesauce.
I know that little-by-little I will need to replace thicker wiring with thinner wiring.
Most likely, we will get some space back and lighten our load as equipment gets smaller and as companies start to agree on some standards.
Until that time, many of us will have several pieces of gear that essentially do the same thing. Or, we will have gear to "adapt" current technology with new pieces of equipment. And usually this will not be an acceptable alternative, or will create complaints.
In one example, I've been reading articles and talking to a lot of people about how Apple Power Macs and Final Cut Pro are making their way into the field, and how more people are even shooting some of their stuff on small digital cameras. It's leading to a shake-up of the industry, and NABET camera people are pretty unhappy about the situation.
Cameras like the XL-1 and the PD-150 are great little cameras, but only if you send the video via firewire straight to your computer. From what I can tell, the digital to analog converters on the cameras are junk and are not of a high enough quality to be used for live shots or multi-camera shoots. This is due to the lack of space to put a decent digital to analog converter inside the camera.
Maybe at some point someone will create a better converter to be used with these cameras. Quite possibly it will be a converter you can plug into the camera's firewire port. But typically necessity mothers invention, and maybe we as intelligent television people need to make more calls for such pieces of gear to get it in the field.
As far as the competition for legit network-quality photographers, most of them are being told they will have to "buck up" and buy their own tiny cameras and work for half the price. They are told not to use a tripod or lights and turn in what they consider home video-quality work. Many are leaving the business or cutting back. Others keep doing what they've been doing, and are hoping that the slow times will pass.
This evolution in the television business has an effect on everybody, and just like Darwin's theory, it appears that those who are not willing to change will not exist in the future.
And I'm not saying that I believe good photographers should leave the business. And I'm certainly not saying that the legit photographers should sell their good gear.
But I would say that if you want your clients to use HMI lights and tripods and an audio person, then you need to work hard to convince people that the gear is necessary. Write convincing articles for the many places on the web, or the many magazines that our clients pick up to read while waiting for performance reviews in their boss's waiting room.
When you work with clients in the field, instead of complaining or fighting about whether or not to use a piece of gear (because they don't want to pay for it) throw them a freebee once in a while so they can see the difference. Realize that everyone has a budget to meet, and it's not always about how much blood you can suck from your victim's bloodstream.
That being said, it's also important to remember that you can't work for free and you deserve to be paid well for the quality work you produce.
Sam Sinke
Relay House Kansas
Thursday, May 30, 2002
07:33 p.m.
Chris Williams at WSVN in Miami is one of the funniest truck operators I've ever met.
And if I were a betting man, I'd put money on the fact that any time you enter his truck, you would find a KFC bucket, or a pizza box somewhere. There's no telling whether it would be full or empty, but I'll tell you that if you can't find one in his truck, that means that the delivery guy is on his way.
Chris told me he once tried to have a pizza delivered to his satellite truck, parked at the Washington Monument.
I will have to paraphrase what he told me, since my long-term memory is shady.
When Chris called to have pizza delivered to his truck in Washington, DC, the Domino's delivery guy told him, "Ha ha, I'm not delivering a pizza to the Washington Monument!"
'Click' He hung up.
Chris called him back to explain that he was working in a satellite truck and was covering the Presidential Inauguration. He said he couldn't leave the truck, and had to have food delivered since there was no one available to pick it up.
The guy told him again, "I'm NOT delivering a pizza to the Washington Monument!"
'Click' He hung up again.
This is ridiculous, he thought. He called again.
"Listen, man. I'll give you fifty bucks in cash if you just deliver a pizza to the Washington Monument. My satellite truck is nearby and it has the letters WSVN on it. It's some easy money for you! Fifty bucks!" he told the delivery boy.
"Forget it! I'm not delivering to the Washington Monument!" the delivery boy yelled back at him.
Chris interrupted, "Don't hang up on me! It's too hard to get a cell phone out right now!"
'Click'
I never did hear if Chris had anything to eat that night.
Sam Sinke
sam@relayhouse.com
Wednesday, May 29, 2002
12:38 p.m.
What would make a good first entry?
Well, let's start with an old trick I learned from OZ at WBBH.
To get rid of some hum in a video line, he used a bnc "t" connector with three female ends.
He used the "t" like a barrel connector, except on the third end where he put a purple 75 ohm terminator.
On a bad hum, he put one on the source end (a mult box) and put one on his receive end (the sat truck).
The trick works sometimes. I don't have a reason why yet, but I'd love to hear some theories!
Sam Sinke
SamSinke@hotmail.com
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