KENW Relies on Gateways

KENW in New Mexico Relies on Gateways for STLs

I graduated from Eastern New Mexico University (ENMU) in 1979 with a degree in Communications with an emphasis in Radio and Television and started working at KENW-FM as the Director of Production until 1985, when I pursued a fulltime career in live sound and relocated my sound and lighting company to the San Francisco Bay area. I sold the business in 2003. I moved back to retire. I soon became bored, so in 2006 the Director of Broadcasting, Duane Ryan, called me and offered an audio position at the brand new KENW TV/FM digital facility that had just been built. I jumped at the chance to get back in audio.  The other engineers were not interested in dealing with the audio side of broadcasting, so I started working part-time, focused primarily on the audio and radio side of things where I still work to this day.

KENW-FM is an NPR station on the university campus that covers a vast area. We currently have 11 call letter and 4 translator stations that cover from the Mexican border all the way north to the southern Colorado border on the eastern side of New Mexico. We also broadcast into west Texas as well.

About 7 years ago we migrated to Tieline Bridge-IT XTRA IP codecs that multi-unicast signals to all sites over a private WAN. Prior to that, transmission paths utilized satellite links. The new IP transmission paths worked extremely well as the networking to all sites is provided through an agreement with the New Mexico Department of IT known as DOIT. We share many sites with them. Some of the sites are theirs and some being ours as well. This is a State run private IP network and is a perfect partnership. We share tower infrastructure across the different sites and it is very reliable network, with many layers of backup to ensure reliable connections for our State police, Sheriff’s department, weather and EAS alerts.

Gateway Codec Upgrade

Recently we upgraded our studio equipment to consolidate our units and installed a Tieline Gateway 16 and Gateway 8 at our studio to provide 12 individual stereo feeds with return confidence monitoring audio sent back to the studio. Another thing that attracted us to the Gateway was the ability to upgrade the 8 channel unit with a software license to support additional channels if we need them in the future.

KENW Relies on Gateways
The Gateway 16 and Gateway 8 codecs at KENW

Our studios have Wheatstone infrastructure throughout with around 300 sources coming into the system. All inputs to both Gateways are received via our AES/EBU DAs. They are then encoded using Opus at 128kbps and sent to

each transmitter site. At each site we have an Inovonics 673 FM broadcast monitor that listens to our off air signal. We then take the AES digital output of this FM receiver and feed it to the Bridge-IT XTRA AES input for a confidence monitor feed back to the studio.

Monitoring Feeds and Backups

Tieline Gateways with the monitoring switcher and Toolbox Web-GUI for monitoring connections

At the studio we have a switcher which is fed with each of the return feeds from the Gateway codec outputs. This makes it simple to listen to confidence monitoring feeds from each site. We also use Tieline’s HTML5 Toolbox web-GUI to monitor the connections and PPMs. We also plan to implement SNMP monitoring in the future which is supported in the Gateways.

The IP network is very reliable, but as it is the only network available at each site, we don’t use redundant streaming. If the network goes down, which is very rare, we have an Inovonics AARON 650 backup rebroadcast receiver at each site, which is tuned to one of our off-air stations in the area and switches online automatically via the transmitter’s silence detection.

As we broadcast over such vast distances, EAS alerts are often relevant for specific areas and not everyone. Therefore we will have 12 EAS receivers at the broadcast center in the future to feed the 12 remote Tielines, so we can tailor messaging regionally as required.

Bridge-IT XTRA codecs and other equipment at a transmitter site

The Tieline Gateways allowed us to consolidate our studio codec equipment and they reliably distribute IP audio to all our STL site feeds with return monitoring paths.  They deliver the high quality audio and flexibility we require, plus a simple upgrade path to expand our network as we grow.

Want to know more about Tieline products and software?

For more information on Gateway and other Tieline codecs visit www.tieline.com/products or contact Tieline sales:

The Tieline Gateways allowed us to consolidate our studio codec equipment and they reliably distribute IP audio to all our STL site feeds with return monitoring paths. They deliver the high quality audio and flexibility we require, plus a simple upgrade path to expand our network as we grow.
Mickey Morgan
Audio Director KENW-TV/FM (a PBS/NPR station)
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