Utah Scientific Outfits Oklahoma Educational Television Authority Studio

Oklahoma Educational Television Authority (OETA) has installed Utah Scientific routing equipment to anchor the infrastructure for its new Tulsa studio and office facility. OETA is the regional PBS program provider serving 1.8 million viewers a week across Oklahoma and in 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 came together fairly quickly and on time. Planning was a group effort and included systems integration by Digital Resources Inc. out of Dallas.

OETA installed two UTAH-400 routing switchers (one 3G HD video and one audio) to replace its 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. “The tight integration between the video and audio routers is also important.”

Newton also cited Utah Scientific’s sales and technical support as reasons for choosing the equipment.

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 the noise problems that often resulted from the previous setup.

The UTAH-400 is specifically designed to address the growing requirement for large switching systems with its ability to expand seamlessly from 8×8 to 1152×1152 and beyond. The UTAH-400 is based on a revolutionary new matrix architecture that greatly reduces the complexity of large systems, resulting in considerable improvements in rack space and power requirements as well as yielding significant cost reductions.

“OETA fills the need for educational and public television for all of Oklahoma and beyond, and the new Tulsa facility was long overdue for them,” said Tom Harmon, president and CEO of Utah Scientific. “Now they can more easily and effectively reach their viewers with a rich HD experience, and Utah Scientific will be there to help them do it.”