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October Last revision Oct 11, 2019

Next Meeting: We meet in Lawrence, KS at KAB Engineering Day, Monday, October 21 at 4:00 PM. The meeting site is the Double Tree by Hilton in the Regency A Hall at 4:00 PM. One item of business at the meeting will be the election of officers for the 2019-2020. The candidates offered by the nomination committee are listed in the left column of page 3. Write-ins are allowed, but those written in must be willing to serve. See the map on the last page for location information. Be there!

Last Meeting: Fifteen members and guests met in Topeka on Tuesday September 10, at 7:30 PM in the studios of WIBWTV13, hosted by Michael D Turner, Chief Engineer. Our meeting was arranged by Raun Hamilton of Southwest Audio/Video, who brought in Link Electronics who provided a program on predictive captioning, which was given by Trish McRae. A pizza supper was also provided by Link and SAV - our thanks to them both!

Vice Chair John Langer opened the meetin at 7:30 PM. On motion of Robert Nelson, seconded by Don Hogg and an affirmative vote of those present, the minutes of the past meeting were approved as published in the chapter newsletter. Robert Nelson, Chapter Secretary Treasurer gave the Treasurer's report.

Old Business: Don Hogg reported his brother, Rod, had a program on Doc Brinkley, having converted the slide program to Power Point, and had a tape of the audio for it, but was having trouble syncing the audio to the video. Robert Nelson offered to contact Rod and assist him in completing the project. Brinkley was an early radio pioneer in Kansas, and somewhat infamous for a clinic he featured on his radio programs, which promised to revitalize men with a transplant of goat glands. Though dubious in his business dealings, his expansion of the business using radio is of interest to us. It should be an interesting program when finished.

New Business: Robert Nelson noted that our Internet Domain license with Go Daddy was near expiration, and he sought permission to renew it, and moved to do so. Dick Abraham seconded the motion and it was affirmed by vote of the membership in attendance.

Our October meeting will be in Lawrence, KS at 4:00 PM in the Double Tree Hotel, during KAB's Engineering Day. We will havedoor prizes at this event, and don't forget the SBE-3 elections of officers for the coming year will take place at this meeting.

November, we will meet in Salina for a tour of QRP who has made a successful business out of the renewed interest in vinyl records. They have overhauled vintage WWII presses and are producing digitally re-mastered vinyl records and albums. December we will not have a meeting. Happy Holidays. Tracy Gibson moved, seconded by Todd Crane to adjourn the meeting to the program. We stood adjourned at 7:40 PM.

Link Electronics is now owned by the McRae family, and is headquartered near Branson, Missouri, moving there from the Kansas City area. Trish McRae has been in sales (now National Sales Mgr) with Link for about a year with this new product which is software based. She reviewed captioning in general. The Link predictive captioning storage can be cloud based, or on private server. It is versatile in the range of programs it can process, whether post production or live. If you are connected to Internet, various programs can translate to/from English to other languages, or it can be done internally. The Link Captioning can output English on one channel and Spanish on a second channel, complete with proper phrasing for that language. Link can translate many languages to languages - even regional dialects. Limitations to proper speech recognition can be caused by crowd noise, or music in the background, but if you are in post production, edits can be performed to correct errors.

Accuracy can be improved by the software learning from audio clips of your talent and guests. With voice sampling ahead of use, the captioning will even identify the speaker in parentheses. It will detect questions or pauses, and grammatical rules can be incorporated. You can exclude or substitute phrases or words, and nicknames or game-names. Link captioning has a large vocabulary and has specialty vocabularies for medical, engineering, law, etc. industries. Accuracy is 90-95% which improves with training. Latency can be up to 5 seconds depending on methods used. Our thanks to Link and SAV - a good show!

My summer has been consumed with preparing for an auction of my deceased brother-in-law's 40 acres. I was designated as Executor of the Estate. That being completed, I will be able to concentrate more fully on duties at hand. My apologies if it impacted the quality of the newsletter. It was a much larger project than either I or my wife had anticipated. How people measure things is always of interest to me. When the Prairie Pot guy came to pick up the porta-pot after the auction, he moved it back toward the truck walking it from side to side and forward. As he did so, he exclaimed: "Wow, you had a good sale!". His opinion was based on the weight of the well used structure. We did have five trailers full of wares, and many rows of items on the ground that were sold in place. It was a good sale, but I was tickled at the fellow's form of metrics. Don't forget the election at this month's SBE-3 4:00 PM Chapter meeting. It is a necessary item of business.

Nominees are:

Chair: Robert Nelson, Emporia

V. Chair John Langer, Topeka

Sec/Treasurer Bob Locke, Maize

Write-ins are accepted on the ballot, but you should ask to make certain that person is willing to serve if elected.

Also, don't forget to thank Kent Cornish when you see him. The generosity that KAB extends to us on Engineering Day of KAB in the form of free admission to Engineering sessions is much appreciated, and in large part that has been supported by Kent as a means to engage us in KAB.

Kent writes: "As you know, we break out our sessions at the convention by Engineering, News,
Sales, Programming and Management. But I wanted to let you know about a speaker I have coming on Tuesday for part of the Programming session that crosses over various jobs. Bill Countryman owns and operates radio stations in Oklahoma and will give you "a hands-on" tutorial on the equipment necessary and also the software required to distribute cutting edge video streams. He will then walk you through how to produce sports events that you can easily monetize.

He and his folks produce and air a number football and basketball games per week as well as other community events. This session will be from 10:30-11:45 on Tuesday, October 22. I know engineers typically come on Monday only and we don't generally have something aimed at sports, but I wanted to make sure you knew about this …. in case you want to come back on Tuesday. Just a reminder there is no charge to attend (unless you want breakfast or lunch which is extra), BUT WE DO NEED A REGISTRATION FROM YOU. It can be downloaded at: http://kab.net/Events/ConventionInformation/ " Definitely a generous offer. Our thanks to KAB, and to Kent Cornish.

2019 Annual Convention - October 20 - 22
DoubleTree by Hilton Lawrence, KS

(Update from Kent as of Monday 7 October:)

Good Morning Engineers
I wanted to let you know that we have updated the speakers for the engineering sessions at the convention. Our original speaker, Larry Wilkins, had surgery and is recovering well, but can't travel. However, I was able to put together some interesting topics, thanks to some of our sponsors. So here is how the day looks:

Monday, October 21

9am- 9:45 – "ATSC 3.0" from Phil Whitebloom of ENENSYS

9:45 – 10:30 – EAS Update including results of national test from Roy Baum of Alpha Media and State Emergency Communications Chair

10:45 – 11:45 – Lark Hadley, FCC Regional Director

(Lunch)

1:30 – 2:10 – "System Timing in an IP World with Bruce Lane of Tektronix

2:10 – 2:45 – "Workbench Tips" from John Bisset of Telos Alliance

3:00 – 4:00 – Visit Sponsor Tables

4:00 – 4:45 – SBE Meeting

Tuesday, October 22

10:30-11:45 "Producing Quality Video Streaming" with Bill Countryman. (I sent a note about this last week in case you want to come back on Tuesday).

Just a reminder there is no charge to attend (unless you want breakfast or lunch which is extra), BUT WE DO NEED A REGISTRATION FROM YOU. It can be downloaded at http://kab.net/Events/ConventionInformation

Fifteen members and guests gathered at WIBW-TV Studios to hear Trish McRae tell of Link's predictive captioning product. She gave a good run down on captioning in general, and the session had a good give and take to it with many questions asked and answered.

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