If you think changing the tires on your car while driving down the freeway is impossible, try building new studios in place.

It’s never cut and dried, especially if the build is for Chicago’s 24-hour NPR news/talk station and the place happens to be on Navy Pier on what is essentially a floating barge at the edge of Chicago. 

“The biggest challenge besides getting all the equipment and construction materials into the space was ‘what must we do to stay on the air?’” said Stephen Wright, Vice President of Technology and Operations for Chicago Public Media. 

To his credit, the steady stream of live shows, news and music never stopped at Chicago Public Media’s WBEZ 91.5, not for teardown, not for new walls, not for wiring or assembling or networking, and certainly not for hoisting equipment and materials from the second-story dock off Navy Pier and into a third-story window. The staff worked through it all, as did technology partners with Inrush Broadcast Services, SCMS and our team at Wheatstone. 

Throughout the next year, the studio core footprint was stripped down to the studs and studios were right-sized for purpose and function. Better sight lines between studios, greater usability of each studio, and a standard studio footprint that flowed from one workspace to the next were the primary goals. It involved moving walls, ripping out layers of wiring infrastructure, and designing a modern WheatNet IP audio networked studio facility from the ground up—literally! 

In order to bring Wheatstone gear and construction material from the second-story dock up to the third floor, WBEZ’s general contractor Skender built a temporary platform and used a lull to hoist pallets from the dock and up through a large opening created by removing several windows. “I think it worked better than a freight elevator,” commented Wright. 

Meanwhile, staff worked out of temporary studios. Using parts and pieces, the WBEZ engineering team built a studio downstairs on the first floor where they were able to move the main talk studio. WBEZ also had edit booths on the fourth floor, one of which they rebuilt into a WheatNet IP anchor booth. “We had our entire broadcast operation separated over three floors. We had master control on the third floor, our talk studio on the first floor and our anchor studio on the fourth floor,” explained Wright, adding that without sight lines the staff used Google Meet as a temporary fix. 

 “It was challenging, but it allowed demolition and construction to begin without interference or noise affecting our ability to broadcast,” he said. 

The plan called for eight LXE console surfaces in main on-air rooms and master control; four L Series console surfaces in production rooms; 42 talent stations for talk positions throughout; and 63 I/O Blades with hundreds of channels of GPI/O and more than 1,000 crosspoints connecting all 12 studios and dozens of workflows. (We’ll tell you more about our working plan for WBEZ in the next issue of Wheat News.)

WBEZ cut over to the main WheatNet IP studio in December 2023 and went live with the remaining 11 studios over the next month, capping off almost two years of planning and preparation. 

Click here for a photo gallery.

Footnote: Behind the camera in these photos are Bob Martin, a regular WBEZ listener and a longtime friend and associate of Wheatstone, and his son Nick Gerber, a videographer who spent the day touring the new WBEZ facility.

Transmitter sites are getting smarter as IP connectivity gets better.

We know this to be true because our Blade 4 I/O units have been streaming audio from the studio to the transmitter site over the public internet for some time, thanks to the Blade 4’s built-in audio codecs and the recent addition of RIST connectivity. Connecting multiple studios and transmitter sites together in this way makes it possible for our customers to automatically failover from one transmitter to another at the first detection of silence during disasters such as hurricanes or fires, for example.

Still, to really talk transmitter, we’ll need an MPX over IP transporter to complete the FM air chain.

Enter Wheatstone SystemLink®.

SystemLink transports the FM MPX + HD/DAB signal across IP links of any capacity, whether as uncompressed or via optional audio codec such as μMPX. It passes the MPX and all subcarriers as well as HD or DAB audio aligned with stereo FM from an audio processor or from our Wheatstone Layers® FM software on a server.

Layers FM, as you will recall, is our audio processor software that can run on a cloud or be hosted on a local server. SystemLink transports FM MPX + HD/DAB out of the Layers FM audio processor from the server or cloud data center to the transmitter, which opens up a few new options for shuffling around content. Among them: being able to consolidate syndicated shows along with programming for one or more stations in a cloud as a backup or on a local server for distribution to one or more transmitter sites over IP. 

Any IP link will work. Compressed or uncompressed audio, SystemLink uses RIST for realtime error correction for the lowest latency possible across the public internet. Accessible through an HTML5 browser interface, SystemLink is available for our audio processors and compatible with existing STLs and audio processors. It supports μMPX, analog MPX, and MPX over AES.

It's a smart little addition to the broadcast chain that we think will have big implications.