The Oklahoma Educational Television Authority (OETA) has installed Utah Scientific routing equipment to anchor the infrastructure of its new Tulsa studio and office facility. OETA is the regional PBS program provider serving 1.8 million viewers a week across Oklahoma and surrounding states.
The newly built plant replaces the analog/digital-hybrid Tulsa facility and represents an upgrade to HD to match the rest of the PBS network. Construction and systems integration for the new facility was completely on time. Planning was a group effort and included systems integration by Digital Resources in Dallas.
OETA installed two UTAH-400 routing switchers — one for 3G HD video and one for audio — to replace its existing UTAH-300 analog router. The routing switchers are controlled by Utah Scientific's SC-4 control system. The installation also includes UTAH-100 Series 3 HD (3G), SD, analog video, digital audio and analog audio distribution amplifiers (DAs); and two TSG-490 sync generators with automatic changeover and GPS synchronization.
"We chose the UTAH-400 routers because our previous Utah router served us so well for so many years," said Roger Newton, OETA Tulsa chief engineer.
Utah Scientific's distribution amplifiers enabled OETA to separate master production control from the technical operations center, which occupied the same room in the old building. Now the DAs feed the video signal from the studio cameras to the video production switcher, solving noise problems that often resulted from the previous setup.
The UTAH-400 is specifically designed to address the need for large switching systems with its ability to expand from 8 x 8 to 1152 x 1152. The UTAH-400 is based on a new matrix architecture that reduces the complexity of large systems, resulting in improvements in rack space usage and power requirements.