Mission Statement:
"To provide equipment, expertise, support, training, and services to the faculty, students, and staff in their pursuit of education through traditional and alternative methods of delivery."
Mission Statement:
"To provide equipment, expertise, support, training, and services to the faculty, students, and staff in their pursuit of education through traditional and alternative methods of delivery."
It was observed back in the early 90’s that generally reduced educational funding meant that BCTV had to find ways to continue operation with decreasing budgets. At least, the budget did not keep pace with ever expanding services to Distant Education.
In 1992 BCTV placed into service a really crude two-channel computer DOS-based timed switching system that provided dry contact closures to the Master Control switching equipment to run the original two broadcast stations. The idea was to release the Master Control operator from the stress and mistakes of watching two channels at the same time with different educational programming.
Frankly, we were all startled on how great it worked.
In 1993, BCTV added two new channels, and the system was expanded to handle that too. Each had different programming content, complete with different start and stop times. The introduction of this system opened new avenues for BCTV programming.
The system sat for years in the Broadcast Engineer's office, near the studios. The basic makeup consisted of a dedicated i486 computer, custom software and a strange looking collection of stacked PC boards. It was all hand built, and hand programmed. The software was written in QBasic, and contained over 1,400 lines of code. It covered every possible situation the station would need to handle.
Total cost to build ran around $60/channel, with all parts available from the local electronics vendor in town. This was originally designed as an open system due to our failure to realize early on how permanent this concept would be. Interconnect cabling ran under the floor, and the circuit boards were just wired and placed at a convenient location on a table. People who noticed the contraption always commented on it. Of course, the question; "Why isn't it in a box?" always seemed to come up.
Although this system was used for over a decade, BCTV has since gone on to use more modern products to insure seamless programming all hours of the day. In 1999, we bought and installed a Leightronixs PRO-16 real time programmable control unit, and integrated it into our existing video switching equipment. This 16 channel unit allowed more flexibility to program other video sources, and we even built custom interfaces to control our audio/video program chain.
The original BCTV automation unit remains on a table in the Engineering office, as a reminder of the old days and a much simpler lifestyle.
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