It’s quite a stretch. Mark Lee from Compass Media in the Cayman Islands explains how he extended his WheatNet IP network 85 miles via underwater fiber optic cable to create one big Cayman community.
Let’s start with the geography. The Cayman Islands is home to Compass Media’s Z99.9, a heritage CHR that was the first commercial station to go on the air there 30 years ago, and sister stations Rooster 101.9, Gold Cayman 94.9, and Island FM (the Rhythm of Cayman 98.9).
The four stations are popular with islanders on the big island, but once they leave the main island and head out to sister islands Little Cayman and Cayman Brac, it’s radio silence. Getting communications technology to the smaller islands has been an ongoing issue, which explains why islanders here could only tune into one government-run station until recently.
Fast forward to 2023, when Compass Media was given the okay from the broadcast authority there to begin broadcasting on Cayman Brac, thereby extending coverage to both smaller islands and creating what Compass Media calls ‘One Cayman. One Community.’
Compass Media brought in new Nautel VX Series 1KW transmitters to the Cayman Brac Island and bridged to the site using a fiber link under the Caribbean Sea that had just been activated by a local carrier with the ambitious goal of connecting all three islands. The small islands were far enough away from the main island so all four stations could keep the same broadcast frequencies for all three islands. The only remaining question: what form to send the four program channels from the big island to Brac Island for rebroadcast?
This is where the WheatNet IP audio network comes in.
Compass Media studios on the main island are WheatNet IP routed and controlled, and since the audio is digital and ‘fibered’ over to the transmitters on the big island, Mark and the group’s contract engineer Bob Smith (RM Smith Associates, Austin) had an idea. Why not tap already processed, pre-emphasized audio directly out of the audio processors at each transmitter site on the big island and send it via underwater fiber cable to the Cayman Brac Island?
“We thought, ‘It’s all WheatNet IP to the transmitters here on the big island and surely because they’re WheatNet, why not take the post processed, pre-reemphasized feed from the two FM55s and two MP532s [Wheatstone audio processors] and send it across?’” said Mark, who is the operations manager for Compass Media. That way, they could route and control the processed programming like any other signal on the network, plus preserve all the audio processing settings already optimized for each of the group’s four unique formats – something very appealing to Lee, who comes from the programming end of the business and is known to be very particular about sound quality!
Extending WheatNet IP from the big island to Cayman Brac on underwater fiber proved to be relatively easy. “We put an I/O Blade at the Brac site so now it looks like it’s part of the WheatNet and then we just made crosspoints,” explained Mark.
“That’s the joy of NAVIGATOR [WheatNet control software]. You can map anything to anywhere via crosspoints,” he added.
Post processed, pre-emphasized audio out of the I/O Blade via AES goes directly into the Nautel VX1 transmitters (1kW), which have stereo generators built in and HTML 5.0 web interface for routing status that shows up on the WheatNet IP network.
The Fiber Is in the (AoIP) Details
Shown, NAVIGATOR screen with signal routing for four stations and transmitters serving all three Cayman Islands. Metering in the top two rows show program out of the studio console, program received by transmitters on the big island, and auto bypass of the consoles (via WheatNet IP salvo) for shunting audio directly from the playout system to the I/O Blade utility mixers on out to the transmitters when studios are unattended. The bottom four meters show programming into the I/O Blade on Cayman Brac island for reaching listeners on the smaller islands.
As many of our readers will recall, Compass Media began its AoIP journey during Covid when Mark Lee almost single handedly installed WheatNet IP audio networked studios for all four stations in just 45 days (read Project in the Cayman Islands, at the bottom of this page). The group then went on to extend WheatNet IP to its transmitters on the big island over fiber connectivity a few years later.
On the main island, Compass Media runs straight WheatNet at 44.1 kHz into two strands of fiber from the Ethernet switch at the studio and into the main Wheatstone audio processor for final delivery into the transmitter.
A simple SFP fiber interface into the Cisco switch runs native AoIP across broadband fiber optic cable between the studio and transmitter site. The bidirectional hop carries programming across six miles, where it makes the drop at Compass Media’s transmitter site for Gold Cayman 94.9 and Island FM 98.9 and where Rooster 101.9 taps off the line for a short program run to its transmitter nearby.
Adding an I/O Blade to the Brac island transmitter site made it possible to bridge in fiber connectivity to the smaller Cayman islands for rebroadcast of all four programs on their respective frequencies. Z99.9, Rooster 101.9, Gold Cayman 94.9, and Island FM 98.9 are now picked up by islanders on all three islands.
READ: PROJECT IN THE CAYMAN ISLANDS
PROJECT IN THE CAYMAN ISLANDS
Let’s say you are alone on an island and given 45 days to install an entirely new four-station studio facility, for which you haven’t ordered new equipment or even so much as laid out the studios.
Never mind when to sleep. What would you choose for your AoIP system?
We’re happy to report that Mark Lee chose WheatNet-IP audio network for Compass Media’s new studios in the Cayman Islands. And for the record, he wasn’t completely alone, although, as the stations’ operations manager with limited engineering experience, he might as well have been.
The stations’ engineer Bob Smith (RM Smith Associates) was in Texas, where he remained for the duration of the project due to COVID-19 travel restrictions into the Cayman Islands.
That left Mark alone in a large rectangular industrial space with just weeks to plan, install and transition four very popular stations into a new studio buildout.
“It came down to me, Jay (Tyler) in North Carolina, and Bob our engineer in Texas to work out the technical aspects of how we were going to do this. It was quite daunting because although I am a radio nerd and use studio gear all the time, I’ve never installed a studio alone before,” he commented.
He had worked in broadcasting for more than two decades and for stations in the U.K. and Middle East, but always on the programming side and never in an advanced chief engineering capacity. This project was a first for him.
45 DAYS AND COUNTING
It was late November 2020 when they started the project, at the height of the pandemic and just 45 days before new renters were moving into the stations’ existing studios that had been their home for more than half a decade. The clock was ticking on a mid-January move-in date when the four would go live from the sprawling Compass Centre, home of popular island newspaper the Cayman Compass. The four stations had been purchased by Compass Media and were being moved to the Compass Centre where it made sense to consolidate all media properties.
Gold 94.9, Island FM 98.9, Rooster 101.9 and especially Z99.9 have a fiercely loyal listener base; islanders had grown up with Z99.9, a heritage CHR that was the first commercial station on the air in the Cayman Islands 28 years ago. Interrupting programming for a move was entirely out of the question.
The plan was to pre-wire four new on-air studios and an air talent suite and then to drop in the existing furniture, which had years of life still left, along with a preconfigured WheatNet-IP audio networked studio complete with AoIP consoles, talent stations, I/O units and Cisco switches. Jay Tyler and the Wheatstone support team worked online and over the phone with Mark in the Cayman Islands and Bob Smith in Texas to map out elements and routing paths for the new space. An IT company on the island prewired all the Cat6 runs from the studio walls to the rack room, while inland in New Bern, North Carolina, the Wheatstone factory began turning raw materials into a pre-configured, pre-programmed, fully functional studio system consisting of four L-16 consoles, ten talent stations, and a half-dozen I/O and mic processing Blades and Cisco switches.
A pallet containing the entire Wheatstone system arrived on the island within 30 days, an accomplishment in the best of times and even more so during a pandemic when getting cargo in and out of ports took determination and a lot of luck.
INSTALLATION DAY
“I had never even seen a Blade before,” said Mark. Fortunately, the Blades knew what to do and they were labeled for cable inputs and other details of pre-configuration that would make installation smooth sailing. “I just plugged them in and the Blades woke up as if they knew where they were.”
While Mark was plugging in Blades, Bob Smith was riding shotgun in Texas on WheatNet-IP Configurator. Mark and the head of IT Ben Taylor had set up a computer in the rack room that had dual NIC cards, one for WheatNet-IP access and another for Internet access. “That allowed Bob to access the software for WheatNet-IP remotely while I was plugging things in. That’s pretty much how we configured all four studios,” he explained.
Meanwhile, inland in New Bern, Wheatstone’s support team was standing by, although the installation went so smoothly they weren’t needed except for a few activation keys.
It took less than nine hours to move all four stations.
As for sleep? “I didn’t sleep very much leading up to the move. It all was a bit of a blur,” commented Mar
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Company
600 Industrial Dr.
New Bern, NC 28562 USA
Main office +1 (252) 638-7000
Fax main office +1 (252) 637-1285
We are open Monday through Friday,
9:00 AM to 5:30 PM EST
