Temporary Delay Center Operational

Over the past months 360 North has been preparing for 24-hour-a-day broadcast operations from the KTOO facility at 360 Egan Drive in Juneau. The ongoing scheduled facility upgrades and construction have made this a challenge.

For many years, Gavel to Gavel Alaska has originated many hundreds of hours of original programming each year. That program stream has not required the time delay of programs from other sources from outside of Alaska.

360 North programming will encompass the best of Alaskan programs and select offerings from Outside sources that are about Alaska, the North, or those that present topics of special interest to Alaska viewers. In order to have these programs ready for broadcast this fall, operations have begun to again record program feeds from national sources. These acquisitions take advantage of national memberships already in place at KTOO. In June we started recording satellite feeds from NETA, the National Educational Telecommunications Association, for later broadcast.

These series include Small Business School, The New Flyfisher, Visionaries and Songs of the Mountains. Many one-time specials like Alone in the Winderness, Rockwell Kent and compilations from the International Wildlife Film Festival are also being collected and included in the program schedule starting in November.

Although the main broadcast control room is undergoing extensive digital conversion work, a temporary delay center was designed and implemented by David Waters and Carmelo D'Amico of KTOO. They built a small recording center including a simple automation system to accommodate daily recordings. This delay center will be in service until the primary automation system is reactivated in the new digital control room.