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Mar. 24th: Yesterday, we applied the work-around, in the hope of eliminating our signal “drop-outs’.
Unfortunately, no matter how we tried to balance the load, we could not get our Transcoder’s CPUs below 70% (where they must be, to be reliable) with every network covered. So, we had to leave 4 networks (YTV, CMT,
OLN and WGN) on the old system, which means these four stations may still drop out, periodically, for 2 to 4 minutes. Our other networks should now be free of dropouts.

However, we also had an expert come and “tweak” our antenna, which improved things greatly. Thus, our rate
of CC errors is way down, and we think the on those four networks, the dropouts will be far less frequent. Certainly, I watched OLN last night and experienced just one drop-out in the 90 minutes I was watching. (Much better than the 2 to 4 dropouts per hour that we were getting before!)

As we’ve said, this is a “work-around”, not the permanent solution. But, while we wait for improved firmware
for the transcoders, it greatly improves things. And that software may be some weeks off, as error-tolerant
code is not written overnight.

Our expert also brought an FM Analyzer (something we don’t own) and was able to make the volume levels
much more consistent, across all our FM stations.

The system is not yet operating as we would like, but it’s much, much better, and should prove quite
satisfactory until our updated firmware is received. And that may be several weeks off, as error-tolerant
code is not written overnight.

As always, we thank you for your patience, and understanding.


Mar. 22nd. We do not yet have a cure for the drop-outs occurring on our system. But, we DO now
have a work-around.We applied this workaround to several channels on Thursday and it seems to
work perfectly. However, to apply it to all our networks we need to install another transcoder. We will install
it and make the necessary software changes tomorrow morning (Saturday, March 23rd). However,
this will entail interrupting almost every channel, at one point or another. These interruptions should be
short... on the order of a minute or two each. But, there will be a number of them.

We also have an expert coming in, to “tweak” the alignment of our antenna. However, as we switch from
the old to the new antenna, there may be another interruption of up to 15 minutes.Everything should be
complete by noon, and we anticipate that the dropouts you have been experiencing will then be a thing
of the past. As always, we thank you for your patience and understanding.


Thanks for reading.

l