I was dismayed that, although my system indicated 97% signal, there was nothing to be had on the screen except black with an occasional jitter. Apparently the transmitters were operating faithfully, but just didn’t have a signal to transmit! Shame.

You can put all the money into weather talent, fancy graphics systems, street-level radar products, and heavy promotion…but if you can’t even manage to feed it to your transmitter, what’s the point? If I see even a single “weather leader” promo after Friday night’s performance, I think I might just throw up a little.

Not everybody is a cable subscriber, especially out of town. If these stations are content with only distributing their signal reliably over cable TV, then why bother transmitting over the air at all? Otherwise, I implore them to please get their severe weather performance problems under control.

There are actually three weak links in a digital television transmission here in Bismarck, if you don’t count the operator:

First, if the station is on network programming, the satellite signal can be rained out. That happened to me a lot when I was a master control operator. Sometimes you can get a backup feed on a different frequency, but not always. At KFYR we could route ourselves a satellite feed from Minot, Williston, or Dickinson if needed.

Second, you have the STL, or Studio – Transmitter Link. These are microwave frequency transmissions between a dish at the TV station and one at the transmitter tower south of Mandan. These signals can be rained out too, but you have to be in a VERY heavy thunderstorm for that to happen. Yet it does happen. KFYR had two such links, and if I suspected one was about to fail I could switch to the other. If you miss your opportunity to do that, then you’re out of luck. I don’t know if they still have two such links now that they’re digital, but a rain-out appears to be what was happening in the image above. I had 97% signal from the KFYR transmitter, but I bet the transmitter was getting a very poor signal from the studio.

Third, you have to have this thing called electricity to run your transmitter. KFYR had a generator at the transmitter site capable of starting itself instantly and switching the transmitter to generator power in the event of a power failure. To my recollection, no other Bismarck TV station has this. Which means that if you don’t have cable, you ain’t seeing Too Tall if the power is out in St. Anthony. The transmitter sites are on the MorGranSioux power grid, not MDU like us city folk.

So there you have it…if you, like me, don’t have cable TV, you run the risk of having your local stations yanked out from under you by severe weather. That’s a bummer, because that’s when they’re needed most. But such are the limitations of technology. They do their best to stay on the air, obviously. KXMB has even started putting the radar on channel 12.3, which is really keen for those of us who don’t have the cable TV radar channel. I just hope they either bought a generator or don’t have a power outage!

So what’s next…digital radio?

KBMY is owned by WDAY TV in Fargo. When they went on the air in Bismarck and Minot in the 80’s, there was even a news staff in Bismarck. Sadly, the news department was short lived. While there are benefits to not having to babysit a bunch of journalism majors (that’s an inside joke aimed at a couple of friends who’ll find it funny – NOT at the KBMY news staff), I’d have to say that it’s far better for a TV station to have local news. I don’t know what those days were like for “the Beemer” because I joined just after the news staff was let go.

KBMY was located atop the Kirkwood Office Tower when I worked there. What a cool building! If you’ve never been in there, give it a try. The circular hallways are fun, especially on a minibike. Whoops…forget I said that.

Having the head honchos and bean counters of WDAY residing 200 miles away did make for a relaxed atmosphere for a control room monkey at the Beemer, but it was frustrating trying to get any upgrades (or even working equipment sometimes). Much of the control room gear was older than me, and some of it looked pretty familiar the last time I saw it in 2007.

I left KBMY to live at a ski resort in 1989 and 1990, getting paid to snowboard three days a week and, well, snowboarding on my four days off too. At that point I was already sending job applications to my future home at KFYR-TV.

A few years ago, KBMY moved in with a new roommate: KNDX, the local FOX affiliate. They were both operated out of the same building, with separate control rooms. It’s not an uncommon arrangement in television these days; KVLY runs KXJB the same way in Fargo. But the scuttlebutt among us “rehabilitated television” type fellas is that the arrangement with FOX recently changed as well. Actually, it went the way of KBMY’s news department.

I was reminded by this KXMB article that KBMY is now run out of Fargo by WDAY. It’s interesting how the arrangement developed: Prairie Public Television (KBME) was first with a digital transmitter as well as a digital microwave transmission line to deliver programming between Bismarck and Fargo. Why wouldn’t they? Our tax dollars pay for it. Just ask Conrad, Pomeroy, and Dorgan, who just brought Prairie Public another three hundred grand in pork.

KXMB combined resources with Prairie Public for digital transmission. I suppose it works out pretty well with them being across the street for each other; KXMB just has to get their DTV signal to Prairie Public, who can then send it out to the transmitter site to be broadcast. Digital transmission IS cool, you can broadcast multiple channels and multiple streams!

Anyway, that arrangement sets KXMB up to be the perfect folks to manage the Beemer. WDAY can hop onto Prairie Public’s microwave link to Bismarck, it can be handed over to KXMB by KBME, then sent by analog link out to KBMY’s old liquid-cooled UHF transmitter. All WDAY’s bean counters need is someone to sell local ads and maintain the few remaining electronic items. And that’s my theory on how it goes. At the next Friday A&B Pizza lunch where we TV guys gather, I’ll have to ask if I’m correct in my technical assumptions.

It’s too bad that KBMY never really got off the ground. I will admit that the Bismarck-Mandan of the 1980s was probably too small for three competing news departments, and TV viewers are creatures of habit anyway. But I will always cherish my fond memories of my time at the Beemer. It was my gateway into television, which led me to the career in multimedia that I enjoy now. Two of my lifelong best friends are guys I met at KBMY. They actually followed me over to KFYR before we all split off into the non-broadcast world. The Beemer, however, lives on…it just electronically commutes 200 miles to work each day.

(this post was edited to point out that my “journalism majors” comment was a specific inside joke.)

I think we take it for granted that we don’t have smut on our streets, we don’t have to be afraid to go out at night, we don’t hear gunshots all night long, and when we hear sirens we wonder who crashed their car or pulled the fire alarm this time. The pace of things in Bismarck-Mandan is slower even than Minot or Fargo, and I think that’s because they both get a steady influx of people from other parts of the country. Our city is clean; there isn’t trash piled in the gutters or alleys, we don’t have any slums, and the potholes get fixed (even on north 19th Street).

We live in one of the most “heavily churched” parts of the country too, I’d bet. I read somewhere that most North Dakotans claim church membership; while that’s not a very concrete indicator of character, it’s a far sight better than most parts of the United States.

Back when Ed Schafer was governor, it was not uncommon to see him jogging along Bismarck’s recreational paths. No entourage. No bodyguard. Just a guy out for a run. I took great comfort in that.

Speaking of recreational paths: did you know you could start at the University of Mary, get on the paved path, and continue unhindered all the way to north Washington near Highway 1804? Double back past Horizon Middle School, and you can hop on a Parks & Rec trail that parallels Valley Drive and gets you over to northwest Bismarck, where you can go down to Pioneer Park. From there you can go all the way down to Fox Island, hit the new section that goes from Tavist back to Washington, or you can hop on the Expressway Bridge, take the path into south Mandan, and find yourself at Fort Lincoln State Park. If you choose to journey northward through Mandan, you can take the path north of town for quite a ways as well. We value our recreation here in Bismarck-Mandan!

I deal with stock photography on occasion, so I caught this right away: take a look at the image the Telegraph used for this article, presumably to depict New York. The marquee is promoting the movies Hackers and Mortal Kombat, which came out in 1995. Time to update the stock photos, guys, or maybe use something with less recognizable features!

Aren’t you glad you live in the middle of one of the most friendly, healthy states in the nation? I’m sure glad my family and I are here!

This is a LONG stretch for the guys on the NBC North Dakota TV crew. The Bismarck folks start off with bowling in February, then members of the team from over the state make treks to Grand Forks, Fargo, and Minot for state hockey and the three basketball weekends. That’s a lot of nights in hotel rooms, a lot of long work days, a lot of miles traveled, a lot of cables coiled. Oh, and a lot of Applebee’s every night. I was on a different crew this weekend, which means no free food for me. Darn.

The TV crew isn’t the group most inconvenienced by this, though. Back when the switch was made, in order to avoid a lawsuit from parents of volleyball girls if I remember correctly, it put a crunch on the smaller schools. Girls’ coaches would referee boys’ games and vice versa, because their seasons were not simultaneous. All of a sudden they were playing at the same time, putting a strain on the system. That also made gymnasium space harder to come by in some places as well. All to make a few kids and their parents happy. North Dakota had watched South Dakota fight a similar lawsuit until its resources dwindled and it finally settled. Now we have two Class B tournaments and the Super A each spring.

The sudden “a-ha!” came last night when I walked past a distribution box for the Dakota Beacon magazine and noticed that my favorite father & son moment was portrayed on the cover. This photo was taken one evening when little PJ and I parked ourselves on the hill behind the University of Mary and watched the sunset unfold. I had set up the camera behind us with a timer, and was able to catch a few shots of this quality time with my boy.

Helpful guys have given me advice on fatherhood since long before I actually became a dad. I’ve filed it all upstairs, and so far I haven’t had any bad advice. All the corny things that guys have told me about “once they’re born, you’re never the same” or “they’ll change you…they’re a ton of work, but they’re worth every bit of it” have been absolutely true. Advice like this came from clients, casual acquaintances, close friends, and family. Apparently the guys I know take fatherhood seriously enough that they only dispense the best of their knowledge to a father-to-be. I’m forever grateful for their help.

The one piece of advice that touched me the most came from the Beacon’s publisher, Steve Cates. He lost a son in a car crash a while back and told me that there isn’t anything he wouldn’t give to have more time with his son. He told me to cherish every moment with my boy (I only had one at that time) and always make time for him. That really left an impression with me, and I’ve done my best to make sure that I don’t deprive my boys of time with Daddy. It’s so easy for a guy like me to work my tail off on something that “needs to get done” and let time sneak past. Thanks to Steve’s guidance, I’m on guard for that sort of thing.

So far this morning I’ve been back and forth between my two boys. I got to cuddle with Jonathan this morning while his big brother was still asleep, and then after I fed PJ his scrambled eggs I wrestled him over to the couch to watch a few minutes of cartoons. Then I showed him my aquarium screen saver and gave him my big keyring to play with, and he scampered off to explore the house with mommy. Now I’m calming down a fussy two-month-old Jonathan, and just got him relaxed in the crib. Yeah…it IS hard work, but the most rewarding job a guy could have.

PJ’s only one year old and already has his first magazine cover! I’ll have to make sure to give it to his mommy to put in his scrapbook. Cover photo or not, I’m just joyful to have a father-son moment like that eternally preserved in one of my favorite photos ever.