I have been with New West Broadcasting since 1992 and have served as President and General Manager since 1996. We operate 6 signals on Hawaiʻi Island. We have 3 primary station brands serving a population base of approximately 200,000 people. These include KWXX Hilo and Kona, B97 Hilo, B93 Kona and KPUA AM & FM. We rely on Tieline extensively to get our signal to transmitters around our geographically diverse island.
One of my first Tieline codecs was a Genie STL we won from Tieline in a competition at the NAB show a few years back and I subsequently purchased a ViA remote codec to ramp up our remote broadcast capabilities. Nowadays we also use Tieline Bridge-ITs, Gateways and the Report-IT app, and recently also set up an MPX STL link.
We are renowned for our ‘live and local’ focus. We do 100+ off premise events per year and our Tieline ViA is the backbone for most of those events. We have used it for sports play x play, however these days we mostly use it for retail and community events or live radio shows on the road. The ViA can connect to all our stations and any studio we want for maximum flexibility.
We installed a dual SIM internal module in the ViA which has Verizon and AT&T LTE SIM cards installed for redundancy. Most of the time this works fine with Tieline’s SmartStream PLUS redundant streaming software and provides hitless packet switching which is very reliable.
In some areas there are dead spots and LTE signals can be poor, so we use a Starlink Mini and have had great results. The ViA is super flexible and supports bonding as well. Recently, we were at a huge event with lots of people, so we bonded a WiFi and cellular signal together as the cellular data bandwidth capability was very low. Tielineʻs flexibility has proven to be very valuable to us as it allows us to adapt to the challenges of delivering live audio with varying levels of bandwidth availability.
Our Gateway 8 in Hilo and Gateway 4 in Kona replaced very old T1/ISDN codecs to connect our Hilo and Kona stations over IP. These feeds are 24/7 and need rock-solid reliability and audio quality. The various compression options were great when we had limited bandwidth and now give us the flexibility to run linear uncompressed audio as our bandwidth access has improved with fiber connectivity.
We have connected through public internet but are upgrading to fiber over these links with Starlink for backup. The previous T1 links were expensive and had limited bandwidth so shifting to IP has saved us a lot and helped us improve our audio quality with higher bitrate connections.
MPX Codecs Provide Practical STL Solution
Tieline’s MPX I codecs helped us to deliver a practical solution for transmitting a composite signal to an under serviced area of Hawaii.
The studio MPX is installed in Hilo and it transmits a MicroMPX (µMPX) signal over IP to another MPX I installed in the remote Kaʻū district on the southern tip of our island. In fact, it is the southernmost commercial broadcast signal in the United States. The transmitter site codec uses Starlink as it is a very remote area with no cellular or wired IP infrastructure. Bypassing a lot of public infrastructure also builds in resilience in case we experience a hurricane or other natural disaster that adversely impacts land-based communication infrastructure. Plus, sending a composite signal simplifies our setup as we don’t need a processor or RDS data generation onsite, which reduces complexity and costs.
Real-time Remote Control
Tieline’s Cloud Codec Controller software allows us to keep an eye on our gear to ensure it’s all running smoothly. We can monitor and configure our MPX codecs, Gateways, ViA and even Report-IT users. In fact, this was very useful during Covid when we used Report-IT to do client voice over sessions remotely. It allowed me to monitor and control the client’s mic level in the app in real-time which was brilliant.
We are a relatively small company on the most remote landmass in the world, but Tieline treats us like a giant. We started with a couple of pieces of equipment and now have studios full of Tieline gear including Gateways, Bridge-ITs, MPX encoder/decoders, and a Genie. Their equipment has been very reliable, but more importantly the service and guidance that we receive from Jacob Daniluk and the Tieline team is unsurpassed. They have helped us grow and improve our operation. Quite simply, Tieline makes us better!
Want to know more about Tieline products and software?
For more information about Tieline codecs visit www.tieline.com/products or contact Tieline sales:
- For USA, Canada & Latin America contact: sales@tieline.com
- For Australia and International: info@tieline.com
