Feed Question-Trade Jargon & Helicopter

[Pittsville]

Does anybody know what the news feed people call those things that they put on the microphone with the network logo and channel number on them?

Also how do they do the feeds from a helicopter? A station around here got a helicopter a while back and I was reading that they use a 2.4 ghz analog transmitter for their video. I was wondering if they send that directly back to the station or if they have to have a satellite truck on the ground to relay the signal back to the station?

 

[Pittsville]

It's called a mic flag.

I sent an email to the news director of one of the stations here and she wrote back right away saying they call it a "mic flag".

So now you know.

(I did not mention feed watching )

 

[techpuppy]

I was wondering if they send that directly back to the station or if they have to have a satellite truck on the ground to relay the signal back to the station?

Generally the signal is received by the station directly from the helicopter.

 

[digiblur]

I also remember reading somewhere about an HD helicopter that actually sent its video straight to the STL on the OTA tower.

 

[techno935]

Those choppers are on a microwave system in the 6 Ghz arena.

Towers throughout the metro that repeat the signal of the choppers and send them back to local TV stations. If your DMA has Metro Networks (Westwood one) as a traffic report center, they are usually the hub of all chopper feeds.

6 Ghz is the area of transmission for those local news trucks most of the time. I may be wrong, but that is what I've noticed.

Here's a little trick of finding out. A handy little site called recnet.com lets you query the FCC database for radio/TV station details. Hope that helps.

 

[GrumpyGuy]

Back in the early 80s I was on occasion able to intercept S-band video studio-transmitter links from traffic helicopters in the Cleveland Ohio market. These were analog NTSC backhauls. The LNB circuitry was mounted on the bottom of a 1 lb. Maxwell House coffee can which served as the feedhorn, and a shorth lenght of hardline coax with about an inch of center conductor exposed inside the can serving as the stub.

I suspect that the local news gathering vans with the telescoping towers operated in the same band but I never did log one of them, probably because of line-of-sight issues.

Things may have changed a lot since then.