BAS Manufacturers Ready for Gear Upgrades by Ken Freed. . What if a station wants equipment above and beyond what Sprint Nextel has approved for replacement in the 2 GHz transition?

Here's the problem: A station has invested time and energy doing a BAS relocation inventory, has identified all the equipment to be replaced, and submitted a deal to Sprint Nextel. The deal has been approved, and then the manufacturer announces a new version of the product already ordered. What's a conscientious chief engineer supposed to do?

Here's a related problem: Sprint has approved a deal for replacement digital gear that duplicates the capacities of the existing analog equipment for standard definition, but the station wants that same replacement gear to provide high definition services. What's a conscientious chief engineer supposed to do?

The good news is that Sprint and the BAS manufacturers have worked out arrangements to accommodate broadcasters wanting to upgrade beyond their approved 2 GHz equipment deal. The bad news is that stations have to pay for the upgrades themselves.

"If a broadcaster wants to improve on any of the equipment in their inventory," said Michael Degitz, VP of spectrum management at Sprint Nextel in Reston, VA, "our response varies. In one respect, it depends on the type of equipment involved, because we will not pay for HD. We'll pay for SD equipment, but past that point it's up to the broadcaster to pay for such things as a software key to unlock the HD capacity.

"In another respect," Degitz continued, "it depends on the phase of the contract we're in. If it's early enough, we might simply be able to modify the deal before its been approved. If the deal is already approved, or if the newer equipment is outside our scope, it's possible the broadcaster can negotiate a separate contract just between them and the manufacturer."

"We're just starting to encounter the situation where we've come out with improvements on our 2 GHz products," said Robert Bauer, sales and marketing director at BMS in Poway, CA, and BMS has developed a routine for handling such upgrades.

"We've previously negotiated with Sprint Nextel the pricing for our replacement products," he said, "and we are tied into their purchase order processing system. So long as the part number and price stays the same, shipping an upgraded version of a product is not an issue. If a product changes enough that the part number changes slightly, we notify them by phone or email, and Sprint updates their system. If it's a brand new product, there's a more extensive process with questions and research and a lot of paperwork."

In terms of actually upgrading the existing products, Bauer said, "We just make changes to our existing inventory before the products ship. We take what's on the shelf and upgrade the software or hardware."

If a product has already been shipped, BMS will still offer an upgrade. "In many cases we can provide software for the customers to do the upgrade themselves, even if we talk them through it. We recently installed a software upgrade on a transmission truck coder in the field," Bauer said, "but we usually have the broadcaster ship the product back to us for the upgrade."

With overnight deliveries, the upgrade turnaround can take less than a week.

"Field upgrades can usually be completed within a week to ten days," said John Payne, president of Nucomm in Hackettstown, NJ. "Whether a transmit and receive site is using COFDM or VSB, for example, or whether the upgrade involves the hardware or the software, we can get people there very quickly, depending on our load. And this applies whether Sprint is paying for a replacement or the broadcaster is paying for an upgrade."

"We can upgrade any of our equipment at an incremental price," said Daniel McIntyre, VP for BAS at MRC in Billerica, MA, "but there's not an average cost for the upgrade. For example, the cost to upgrade an encoder site depends on when it's done. Since HD is relatively new, prices will come down as products mature." He expects the cost of upgrading an encoder from SD to HD in 2008 will be about $20,000.

"We find broadcasters often are willing to pay an extra fee to make their BAS equipment HD enabled," said Julian Scott, CEO of Troll Systems in Valencia, CA. "Of course, because we have to interface with many types of equipment, as in helicopter control systems, all of our systems already are HD-capable. Our experience is that Nextel has no problem with that so long as they're only paying for the SD capabilities."

"If Nextel has approved an order, we can supply only what Nextel has approved," said Funil Naik, Director of Engineering for Moseley Associates in Santa Barbara, CA. "If the purchase order says seven SD radio links, but the customer wants seven radios with HD links, we cannot do that. There is an approval process that allows for an upgrade at the broadcaster's expense, but is can be very complicated."

Naik reported that there have been "one or two instances" where Sprint has approved the delivery of HD-capable gear, "but they said yes only if the price differential was not that great and if the customer was willing to pay the difference."

Global Microwave Systems in San Diego, CA, has seen Sprint approve upgrades, too, said GMS President Sam Nasiri, citing a case of BAS antenna diversity where a combination of digital antennas matched the capacity of a single analog antenna while allowing more flexibility. "The customer had to pay for the upgrade, but Nextel paid for the baseband portions of gear."

Nasiri added, "When our equipment has more capability than what it's replacing and the cost is the same, we've been told that we cannot advertise it, but if we're not selling it as an HD unit, which the customer can pay for separately, I don't see why Nextel would care."
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