The following interviews with Elliott Klein appeared in LARadio.com in 2006 and are reprinted here with the kind permission of Don Barrett, Publisher of LARadio.  While the efficacy of synchronizing FM stations to achieve better coverage is controversial, Elliott's beliefs come through loud and clear.


"The Move from Engineering an AM to FM Station Was Like Going from a Pickup Truck to an Aston Martin"

(July 18, 2006) There are few givens in radio, but there is one thing that all radio people can agree on - you've got to be able to hear the station. Bad signal, bad or non-existent ratings. Decades ago within the L.A. Radio Metro, most potential listeners could hear all the stations' signals with varying degrees of clarity. Each year, the influx of new residents pushed the signal boundaries to Orange County, the 909, Simi Valley and the Santa Clarita Valley. Many stations couldn't compete. We are familiar with the complaints that those who live in the far West Valley can't hear the Dodger games on KFWB. Some programming, out of necessity, has had to simulcast. In some cases, the nighttime signal of the AMers varied from the daytime signal and station potential was compromised. Recently a prominent FM station disappeared from my dial because of a tower move to improve the signal in another part of the basin. Very frustrating.

The original purpose of a Class A licensed radio station was to serve a very specific local community. Because of signal limitations, Class A stations were never intended to compete with full-power Class C FM radio stations.

Two years ago Magic Broadcasting  purchased two Class A stations at 93.5/FM - one in Ontario and the other in Redondo Beach - for well over $100 million. The stations initiated a basic simulcast of Hip-Hop music with classic call letters, KDAY and KDAI (pronounced K-DAY, the original station at 1580AM was the market's first Hip-Hop station in the 1980s). "The situation was there were two overlapping signals assigned the same frequency, broadcasting from two different antennas and two different sites. This resulted in phasing problems, static, and other issues explained using technical jargon.  But the bottom line for many Southern California listeners was that 93.5 FM was unlistenable.")


    Enter Elliott Klein, called an engineering magician by many because of how he maximizes the signals of FM properties without violating licensing restrictions. In a recent phone conversation with Elliott, a few days after converting the two KDAYs into a syncrocast, we chatted from his headquarters in Phoenix.

Elliott was interviewed on one condition - that we speak simple English with no technical vocabulary. "One of the keys to my success over the years is to take a relatively technical subject and, not talk down to anybody, but make it so that people can understand what was going on," responded Elliott. With reassurances of keeping it simple, we were off and running.

What is the TV Guide version of what you do? Elliott was asked. "That's a really good question," he started. "I have the ability to analyze existing facilities, see where their weaknesses are in terms of coverage, and equate that to weaknesses in the plant as far as transmission, types of antennas, towers, transmitter location, and things like that. A lot of times, companies will spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to make an improvement that will result in a dramatic, or at least a worthwhile change in the station's potential billing. And I've been fortunate that I've been in the right place at the right time with the right people that understood that the signal is at least 50% of the product. And if you don't have a signal where the people are, it doesn't matter what the product is, if you can't hear it. They're not going to report it in their diary or in some sort of call-out survey, and like I said, I've been fortunate that I worked for a number of people that understood that."

You would think that all stations would want to maximize their signal, but Elliott likened the situation to Indy car racing - how fast do you want to go and how much money do you have? He said what he does is well known to most engineers, but most times resources are not earmarked for signal upgrade or doing much more than keeping the signal on the air.

"There aren't too many people that get to build a plant from the ground up exactly the way that they want to do it," offered Elliott. "There aren't too many that get to rebuild existing plants, and when I say plants I'm talking about transmitter sites and studio locations. The studios are important too, but as far as the coverage is concerned that equates more to the transmitter site than anything else."

Following the purchase of the two 93.5 frequencies by Don McCoy, Magic Broadcasting's Director of Engineering, Larry Slover, sought out the services of Elliott. "We talked and I was fascinated with the idea of being able to synchronize two radio stations that were only 40 miles apart on the same frequency," said Elliott. "Larry explained to me that KDAI in Ontario and KDAY, now licensed to Redondo Beach, had a zone of about 16 miles of interference where the stations just interfered tremendously with each other and this is right through the middle of the LA basin. There were literally millions of people right in the middle of this interference zone."

It sounded like what might happen when two magnets got too close to each other. Elliott had a better analogy. "It's like two fire hoses coming together. Where, by themselves, they're high pressure and cover the ground well, but put them opposed to each other and you wind up with a bunch of water in the air and not putting out much of a fire, not covering much of an audience. This interference zone that was 16 miles wide contained about 3 or 4 million people, a pretty large population to get nothing but noise on 93.5."

There is no cookie cutter approach to each new assignment for Elliott. Once hired, he conducts the necessary research. In the case of the KDAY project he and his RF Team analyzed the terrain around and between the two stations. "Through a complicated computer program we decide which areas are receiving the most interference, and those areas are generally where we start to do the timing between those two stations once they're synchronized."

Elliott's independent RF Team is made up of three or four engineers. Their identities are a secret. Each member of the team has his own specialty, but they are free-lance people who are involved with other companies. Depending on needs, Elliott can call on the best in the business. Elliott's expertise is with antennas and propagation.

A decade ago the technology didn't exist to do what Elliott and his team are doing. "We now have the availability of this wonderful system of 30 some odd GPS satellites orbiting the earth, and they're all linked together and synchronized very well," revealed Elliott. "What we do is take each station's transmitter and we lock them to the satellite system and by doing so we can have the operating frequency of each station within 2/10ths of a cycle of each other, which puts them on virtually the same frequency. This process eliminates any beat notes or interference between the RF carriers (An RF carrier is the radio station's radiofrequency signal. The RF carrier is modulated or encoded with the radio station's audio programming). And then, through the use of this satellite technology, we're able to lock the stereo pilots together so that their frequency and phase is identical on both stations. With the digital modulation techniques that are available to us now called AES/EBU digital audio, we're able to time the audio modulation , that is the time that the audio arrives at each transmitter site down to the microsecond, which is critical in eliminating this overlapping interference. Through the use of these digital technologies, which didn't exist 10-12 years ago, we're able to synchronize the two stations, thereby fooling the vast majority of  radios into thinking that they are only receiving one signal because the two signals are so identical. That's the key to doing the synchronization."


    The technology was first used to synchronize the frequency on fm booster stations. "The FCC allowed on channel (the phrase "on-channel" and "co-channel" mean the same thing.  The two stations are transmitting on the same frequency at the same time) boosters of a lower power, up to 20% of the power of the main transmitter to do fill-in service. Most often the booster created more interference than it cured, as far as coverage area." (Photo: KDAY transmitter facility located at the KNX site in Torrance. The KDAY antenna is mounted atop the KNX tower.)

Elliott continued: "One of the members of the RF Team worked very closely with Interplex, which is now a division of Harris, and Interplex has this system now which allows us to do this timing and synchronization. We also used GPS receivers, which are very similar to the navigating receivers that are in the cars now and hand held GPS things for mapping that you use on a camping trip so that you don't get lost,. That same technology is what we use to do the synchronization with the two radio stations."

Elliott's journey started in New York City. He was born in Manhattan. His father retired at a very early age and the family moved to Phoenix in 1955, which Elliott considers his real home. "The Phoenix market grew at about the same rate as my career grew," said Elliott.  He was talent first and was on the air for a number of years and jocked his way through college (graduated in 1971). He also doubled as the chief engineer for KRIZ back in the days when there was a classic Top 40 battle between KRIZ and KRUX.

"It was a lot of fun when I got started. Radio was a lot different then. I actually was interested in being on the air and engineering at the same time but I found that I couldn't serve two masters.  I had to do a lot of show prep and really work at being a good air talent, or, do my first love, which was technical. I needed to go in the technical direction. What I found very early on in my career is that at the time very few broadcast engineers were degreed engineers, and I thought that was an opportunity too. I just felt that the technology was going to get more complicated and more complex."

Elliott described the industry when he started as dealing with relatively crude technology - commercials were played from 3" reels of tape on tape recorders and national commercials came off of 16" transcriptions. "The technology had no place to go but up and hopefully dedicated to improving fidelity and delivering more lifelike performances on the air," added Elliott. "I came from an AM facility and then made the transition to FM, which was a step forward in the quality of signals."

Elliott described his transition from AM to FM engineering as going from a pickup truck to an Aston Martin. "There are certain things you have to do to make a pickup truck work well that don't apply to the finesse of fm. I came from an era where we did a lot of asymmetrical modulation, that is, we modulated it hard and we were as loud as we could be on AM radio. And that kind of processing just doesn't work for FM. Unfortunately, a lot of people are still doing that and still believe in it."

Elliott's goal with the radio stations he consults is to be clean and have wonderful definition on the air. "By that I mean being able to hear each and every subtle instrument that is in the music or whatever the program material is, instead of just having things over compressed and fatiguing to listen to. And I think time spent listening is really an important factor. And, of course, the women go away first, because they're more sensitive to that. In some markets I hear just tremendous, well processed fm stations, and in some markets, in surprisingly large markets, I hear just garbage across the entire band."

Denver is a market that a bunch of AM engineers got together and decided to do FM, Elliott charged. "I don't want to single anybody out, and I will not do that, but for some reason Denver's in a loudness war. Various markets throughout the years have gone there and come back from the brink of over modulation. I believe in being loud and I believe in using compression and I believe in clipping, but more is not necessarily better. I think there's a fine line to walk for well processed FM radios, and that's even truer with iPods. And it's really critical with stations that are synchronized, as we did with KDAY and KDAI."

Tomorrow, Elliott talks about his move from chief engineering to a vibrant consultancy and the role that Buck Owens had in his life.


  ______



Synchrocasting at KDAY

(July 20, 2006) In part one of the story on the engineering magic performed by Elliott Klein on synchronizing KDAY (Redondo Beach) and KDAI (Ontario) to maximize the signal and format at 93.5/FM, Elliott described the challenge. This is the final chapter.


    When did you get the idea that you could be a consultant? Did you have this epiphany?  I'm always fascinated how people make a dramatic transition. Elliott (l) replied, "I owe my career to Buck Owens and his sister Dorothy Owens. "Dorothy passed away about 10 or 12 years ago, and Buck, as you know, recently passed. They hired me out of school as the chief engineer of KNIX in Phoenix, and about 8 months later, after solving some pretty dramatic problems at that station, they made me the director of engineering for the corporation, along with my chief engineer duties in Phoenix. That opportunity, the people I met along the way, the people that Buck introduced me to, it evolved into a consulting situation. Buck had some friends that were in show business that owned radio stations, and he said, 'Boy, we've got a great sounding radio station in Phoenix, you ought to have Elliot come up to one of your stations and see what he can do with it.' One thing led to another and I eventually starting consulting the Merv Griffin group on the east coast.


This shift to consulting work began in 1984. He did some work for Dick Van Dyke who had a station in Phoenix. "Little by little I started doing things on the weekends. I'd take a day off here and there to go help somebody in some other market, and I kind of turned around and looked back over my shoulder a little bit and I was making almost as much money doing consulting work on the side as I was with the full time employment as DOE for the Owens broadcasting group. So I went to them and said, 'I love you guys, you've treated me like part of the family, and they have, and still do, they're still clients of mine in Bakersfield, but I have to spread my wings and see if I can make a difference in this industry. That was most important. And, secondarily, being successful."

Elliott gave three months notice and promised to find a replacement. All the candidates were either good at engineering and bad at corporate reports or vice versa. They ended up   hiring a CE for the Phoenix stations and Elliott continued as Director of Engineering on a corporate level. Buck was Elliott's first client in his new consultancy effort. "I negotiated a deal that was 90% of what my salary was. They really did treat me like part of the family."

In 1988, Buck's family wanted to build KNIX-Phoenix into the preeminent radio facility in the country. They wanted to build a new building from the ground up with beautiful new studios. Elliott was given a unique budget. "They said, 'If you can justify it, we'll spend it.' I don't know any engineer in history that's had that kind of an edict.  Four and a half million dollars later, they had their Valhalla of broadcasting, and I described it as 'opulent but functional.' Anybody who's ever been in the facility would know what I mean. It was a wonderful company to work for. They cared about the community they were in, and made a lot of money as a result. The station in Phoenix was the number one biller in the market for many, many years and the stations in Bakersfield are still enjoying that status in that market.

When Elliott started doing his consultancy work, he worked on AM and FM facilities. "I actually really liked directional antennas, but I've always been fascinated with antenna systems, period. And I had another opportunity with the Owens family, and they allowed me to do a project where I built a 50 kilowatt 6-tower directional here in Phoenix. Interestingly enough, that's how I met Andy Laird. He was chief engineer at KDAY AM on 1580 in Santa Monica, and we were 1580 in Phoenix. Every once in awhile I get a call here from Andy saying, 'Hey, you guys forgot to switch patterns again.' We sometimes wiped him out around LAX when we didn't change the pattern at sunset. I've always been fascinated with antenna systems and transmitter plants. One thing led to another about doing weird things and starting to learn about FM antenna systems and I have to tell you that my mentor in FM is Tom Silliman. Tom is a very well known consulting engineer and is also president of ERI, the largest manufacturer of fm and television antenna systems in the world, and I think they make the preeminent product in both of those categories."

Turning to what Elliott's doing today, he faced the challenge at KDAY to synchronize the transmitting equipment. "The FCC really doesn't have jurisdiction over this type of equipment. And if it did create a problem, or an emission that was illegal, obviously we couldn't use it. But it doesn't. And the Commission encourages the use of synchronous transmissions between stations because they're eliminating interference over large portions of the population. And of course the Commission's edict is to serve the most people with a variety of programming and the best quality signals possible and create the least amount of interference."





Are you done with KDAY? "For the most part, we are about 99-1/2% complete. The product you hear on the air today is pretty close to the finished product, it's a tremendous improvement. Roy Laughlin, Magic Broadcasting market manager, is our biggest fan. As a matter of fact, Roy drove the signal for 4 hours when we had just spent several days timing the system to minimize the interference zone. I gave away a percentage of improvement, and I thought there would be a 70% improvement. I think his words to me were, 'You hit a home run but it was out of the park. He felt that the changes we made have now justified the purchase price that Magic Broadcasting paid for the two stations."

Elliott did some upgrading to the KDAI facility in Ontario first and then worked on the synchronous system. "One of the things we like to do is under promise and over perform, and that's a win-win scenario. Here's a project that other people have looked at and said, 'Pass.' But I knew we had the technology to make this work. They are really committed to making this property work. So I said, 'A test drive around the area that was affected and a cleaner signal will be the proof.' Roy has actually called me a half dozen times just ecstatic after driving around, which includes driving from Disneyland to downtown and beyond. The last time I heard from him he had just finished a four hour drive throughout the metro and he said 'You really did it. It's better than 70%, Elliott. It's got to be somewhere between 70 and 100% better.'"

Elliott's RF Team has about a dozen projects in the works right now. He's very excited about a project at WKSU-Kent State University, where he's been hired to fix some signal problems that they have in Cleveland with frequency boosters.

KDAY has put much of its programming signature into the syndicated Steve Harvey morning show. Steve is realistic about the signal. In a recent interview with Harvey, he told LARadio.com: "We'll just have to wait and see if the weaker signal affects the numbers." Elliot wasn't able to extend the signal beyond its Class A restrictions, but from all indications he worked his magic in making the existing signal clearer without interference and clashing.