Winning with ‘Big Wednesday’

With FM broadcast radio licences in New Zealand due to expire in April 2011, FM radio broadcasters have begun the process of renewing licences for the next 20 years.

As part of this process, the Ministry of Economic Development (MED)—New Zealand’s radio spectrum regulator—has leveraged the opportunity to re-plan the FM radio band to retune licences to a common frequency plan. This is expected to improve coverage, reduce interference and potentially create new FM radio licences.

Contracted by the MED to undertake engineering assessment of the new frequency plan, Kordia also determined the transition plan for re-channelling the radio licences, re-channelled the Kordia FM channel combiners and the client’s FM transmitters.

While Kordia is well versed in adding one or two FM services to a chain during an overnight outage, ‘Big Wednesday’—the night of 19th May that saw frequency changes for nine services across four Northland sites on the same night—was a success worthy of celebration.

“Nine service changes in the same region for both combiners and transmitters is difficult enough,” says Aaron Olphert (Manager – Products & Strategy).

“But add to that the requirement of it having to be done on one night, as broadcasters had been advertising the changes to their listeners—and this turned what is a routine job into something exceptional. A hefty dose of praise goes to the Kordia Field Services team for getting it done so smoothly and with a 100% success rate.

“Managing risk is a key part of the project,” says Olphert. “Once a date has been set to re-channel a particular FM radio service, and a broadcaster makes this change public, there can be no delays.

“We manage this risk by undertaking detailed designs and specific implementation plans including mitigation analysis for complex sites. Temporary combiner equipment is on hand at the site being re-channelled to ensure that the re-channelling goes ahead successfully, even if there is a problem with existing combiner equipment on site.”

Approximately one third of the 760 FM radio licences in New Zealand need to be re-channelled. Almost 80 of these are spread across 29 Kordia sites and these are expected to be complete by December 2010, four months before the April 2011 deadline.

For more information, please contact aaron.olphert@kordia.co.nz.