The author is vice president of business development for Orban Labs. This article is from the ebook “STLs in the 21st Century.”
A long time ago, in a rack far far away, getting to and from a transmitter site was pretty easy. You tossed up a 950 MHz STL and fed composite (for FM) or audio (for AM), and away you went. You might have used equalized lines for an AM if you didn’t want to use an RF STL, but it wasn’t complex … certainly nothing to expend a lot of brain cells on.
Inevitably things change. One of the big drivers of that change was HD Radio. Now FM broadcasters have to figure out how to get analog FM and its corresponding HD-1/2/3 E2X data “up the hill”— and that makes the old composite STL look mighty feeble. And then there are the further complications of consolidation and studio moves and perhaps needing to feed distant transmitter sites.
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