Re: College engineering (was WWZN)

[aread@speakeasy.net]

There used to be a requirement that a licensed "Chief Engineer" (as in, the legal term) had to be employed by the station to some degree, didn't there?  If there was a requirement, is it still in place?

BTW, most medium-sized, and some smaller, college stations DO farm out their tech support...either to a contractor or to some hapless Joe in another college department.  WGAO, WHRB, WZBC, WMLN all immediately come to mind.

A lot of smaller ones (WMFO, WZLY and WBRS come to mind) do without any real engineering service at all...and get by with the occasional techie student.  These stations are frequently in very sorry shape.

- Aaron


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Shawn Mamros [mailto:mamros@MIT.EDU]
> Sent: Thursday, June 12, 2003 09:47 PM
> To: 'Sid Schweiger'
> Cc: boston-radio-interest@bostonradio.org
> Subject: Re: Fwd: Herald: Is WWZN dragging down SNR?
> 
> [Reformatting to 80 char width lines, to avoid the wrath of Garrett...]
> 
> >[...]  Unless a college station is run by professionals, what group of
> > students is going to have time to do all that, with classes, papers,
> > projects, exams AND the FCC breathing down their necks?  Further, what
> > group of students (yes, even EE students) knows enough about AM
> > directionals to be able to properly maintain and troubleshoot the array?
> >
> >I know whereof I speak, BTW.  I went to Cornell for a brief time.  Their
> > student-run station was and still is a commercial FM operation...and was
> > known campus-wide for the flunk-out rate of its staff.
> 
> Sounds like a familiar story... (fortunately, not *that* familiar. :-)
> 
> Seriously, though, I think these days that the only college stations
> with student technical staff tend to be "techie" schools like Cornell
> and MIT.  I believe most non-technical schools contract out to consulting
> engineers for their stations.  Not that they would necessarily have the
> time to constantly babysit a directional array, either...
> 
> -Shawn Mamros
> E-mail to: mamros@mit.edu
>