New BYU Broadcasting Building

So, Sarah's been bugging me to make my first blog post on our family blog...so here it goes. I hope this isn't too long!

I guess the thing I spend most of my time doing is working full-time, so, here's a little background on my work.

I am a production engineer for BYU Broadcasting. This entails maintaining, configuring and fixing professional broadcast equipment. I also often do this for live events around campus, such as sporting events, music concerts, studio shows, and anything else that could appear on BYUtv or BYUtv International. When I work a live event, or as-if-live event, I'm in charge of supervising and ensuring that everything technical is setup correctly and working properly.

Many of you have probably heard that BYU's football team is going independent next year. Part of what helped push BYU into making that decision was the caliber and potential of our broadcasting department. Last March, we began using our brand-new HD TV truck and started filming many sports and other shows in high definition. We haven't been able to transmit those shows yet in HD, because all of our infrastructure was for standard definition television. However, this December our new broadcast building comes online and will allow us to transmit in HD. If all goes according to plan, we will transmit BYUtv and KBYU in HD starting December 1.

I used to be assigned to our SD TV truck, but have been temporarily reassigned to helping configure a lot of the brand-new equipment in the new building. The actual construction of the building is like 99% done, but to get all of the equipment inside of it up and running smoothly will take a couple of months--that's why it won't be completely ready until December 1. It's amazing how much equipment, cabling and stuff is going into this new building. I've heard that there is about 50 miles of cabling inside the building (but I bet that is quite an understatement). The backup generators are powerful enough to equivalently power 125 homes.

The following three sketches show the new building, with the fourth being an actual picture.

And to finish it out, here's a short video article about the new building, made last year right after the ground breaking (http://newsnet.byu.edu/story.cfm/72429).