The following excerpt was taken from the September 2008 Issue of The Local Oscillator. Art Reis, Chief Engineer of Crawford Broadcasting Company's Chicago cluster, writes about his experience with the Zephyr/IP. Download the complete newsletter at http://tinyurl.com/zip-review-art-reis
Your feedback is invaluable to us. Since the publication of this article, the printed manual ships with each unit, the stored settings issue has been fixed, and the new 2RU Mixer version has been released.
August 22, 1968, forty years ago, I lost one of my best friends, Jan Bauer, to a toxic mixture of two medications. She was 21 and not in good health. Each anniversary of that date has always been a wistfully sad one for me, but this year, something happened on August 22 which was a milestone in my career in this business, and something to celebrate. For the first time, we broadcast on WPWX a fourhour program from a remote location, out in the middle of nowhere, and we did the remote site-tostudio audio link via the Internet using our new Telos Zephyr IP with a non-wired UMTS linkup, via the Sprint Network. It’s not our first remote via the Internet, but it’s the first one which really worked.
The sound? Spectacular, and in stereo. The latency? Low, under 100 milliseconds. It’s not exactly Nirvana yet, but it’s getting close.
Now the system is not without problems, and we had them with our ZIP (as we, and Telos, fondly call this box). This is because we added that Sprint UMTS box to the ZIP right from the start. We had to.
Of course, the first thing we did when the ZIP walked through the door was to set one of the boxes up in the studios and the other in the rack room, establish a connection, and put audio into it. Impressive. Cris Alexander was here at the time, and he said it was. But that’s a wired system, set up strictly in-house. We control the firewall and everything else. It’s a different story out there in remote broadcast land, where the average customer’s IP system is a nightmare of folks not knowing what they have, firewalls which I swear were set up long ago for the sole purpose for preventing our ZIP box from connecting with anything on the Internet, and with no documentation, and IT people who are on call and don’t know anything about what their customer has, even if they installed the system themselves. Oh, yeah and they charge up the wazoo to set up your customer’s system to accept your ZIP box. That’s why we had to get the UMTS box right after we got the Zephyr IP box.
The thing is, when we tried to get the UMTS box talking with our particular ZIP box , it wouldn’t. The UMTS worked well with all of our PC’s and laptops (I have the drivers installed on the very laptop with which I am writing this article) but it wouldn’t connect with our ZIP. The factory couldn’t get it to work, either, by remote control over the Internet, and finally, after two weeks of this insanity, they were the ones who actually threw in the towel and paid for shipping both ways to see what the heck was going on with this pair of boxes.
What they found was a glitch in the software. That’s right, the software was loaded wrong at the factory for some reason. So, they blasted it out of there and re-loaded the whole thing. That did it. The boxes got back on speaking terms, and the system started behaving itself. The factory boys watched it for a couple of days and then sent it back – just in time for our Friday night remote from nowhere.
And the thing worked beautifully. Almost.
It seems that there’s this little problem with setup retention. You store your parameters in the ZIP box and you use it, then unplug the ZIP box and take it home, or to the next remote. And then you have to reprogram the thing the way that you desire, again, because the box has forgotten what you taught it during the electrical downtime between sites. That’s glitch that Telos wants the units back to fix. I say that a software update would do it.
That’s about the only problem that the box has, at least that we could find in this short period of time. There are, on the other hand, a lot of good features in the ZIP. The learning curve isn’t bad, although the manual, which is on CD and requires printing, needs a little work to make it more easily understood. That’s a job I wouldn’t mind having. The front panel screen and buttons are very handy, and I particularly like the on screen map which tells you where the server is to which your Zephyr is connected for your remote. The one we found is in New England somewhere. That’s the beauty of this system. When you buy a Telos Zephyr IP, you not only get the box or boxes, you get the services of this server, which keeps your packet communication from dropping out and helps keep your latency low. I’ve run a couple of remotes in the past which used the Internet, but without these Telos ZIP boxes, and we’d have audio drop out of the system for a number of minutes at a time. This “intermediate server” system makes certain that this doesn’t happen and is the key to the acceptance of the Internet as a reliable means of broadcast remotes. I’m sure that across time, there will be many more remote servers like this one.
But think of it: After the initial cost of the ZIP, the UMTS box and its subscription (both Sprint and AT&T now have them, and I’m told that Verizon is getting ready to unveil their version as well), your line costs and the line costs to the client on the remote broadcast are zero. And for that, you get up to 20 kHz audio response, in stereo if you like, and with very low audio delay (latency). What’s not to like? As the Internet gets more robust, this is going to be the way to go.
Currently, the Zephyr IP comes in only one configuration, a 3RU rack-mount arrangement. We have two of these, of course, and one at present resides in a Pelican Transport Case when it’s not on the air. There are two new models coming out, both portable, one with a mic mixer and in roughly the same configuration and appearance as the Zephyr XStream ISDN portable unit. The other lacks the mic mixer but sports a battery pack for truly broadcasting from nowhere. Both should be out around January of 2009. We will likely be getting two of one type of those portable units. I’ll have more on this product in a future issue.