remotes

The Smart Touch

We often hear “What's so special about the Smart Touch. All it does is DTMF decoding”

The truth is that the Smart Touch is aptly named as one of the “smartest” pieces of equipment offered by Smarts Broadcast Systems. The Smart Touch is the device to allow you to save money by automating much of your station operation, but keep your local programming vibrant with affordable remote broadcasts.

The Smart Touch lets you do everything from a 30 second man-on-the-street report to a lengthy sporting event, play intros, play commercials, and exert the control you need of the radio station from the remote site. No one need be present at the station.

The Smart Touch is entirely dependant on dial up telephone lines of sufficient quality to handle the on-air broadcast material and the DTMF signaling required to trigger various Smartcaster functions. It is designed to be used only with the Smartcaster digital audio systems.

The product works with both land line and cellular phones. Here's some examples of how it can be put to use.

Example number 1:
You have a newsman who carries a cellular phone while he is out on his beat. However, late one night he stumbles across a story he wants on the air. No one is at the station. Using the cell phone he calls the Smart Touch, plays a news sounder, gets on the air and gives the story, plays a commercial for the sponsor, and goes back to regular programming. All that is possible with just a cell phone.

Example number 2
You have a market report phoned in from a local firm every day. They need to record the feed over a dial up connection. Using the Smart Touch they call in to the station, record their broadcast, and it is automatically aired at the proper time.

Example number 3
You go to a high school football game and broadcast the game plus all spots for the sponsors. You also do an intro, close, and coaches corner program. All that is done without anyone at the studio, from the remote site.

In example 1, the news director had programmed a template in the Smartcaster for a news bulletin. The template contained the intro sounder, the close, and a spot for the sponsor who agreed to sponsor the news bulletin services. When he stumbles onto the story, he dials a dedicated number and enters a security code. He will hear in his cell phone air cue from the station. When he punches “1” on the cellphone keypad, the program is interrupted and the news bulletin sounder plays. The Smart Touch then throws the cell phone on the air. Once the newman finished the report,. He hits a “2” to play the commercial imbedded in the template back in the Smartcaster. During the commercial he commands the Smartcaster to stop at the end of that spot by entering a “3”. At the end of the spot he can either go back on the air or hit a “4” to play the news bulletin close and return to normal programming.

The second example, pre-recording via the Smart Touch for later broadcast on the air, uses a different template that allows for recording of multiple files (for example, the Monday report, the Tuesday report, etc), auditioning the files, with the files already scheduled in the Smartcaster playlist. The caller can specify which file to record, record it, audition it, and if necessary record it again. The unit also allows audio instructions to be fed to the caller to facilitate the process.

The third example, a remote sporting event, uses the live template but instead of a single spot (as we had in the example of the news bulletin above), the template has a complete list of all spots to play during the ball game. The announcer at the game controls the number of spots played by starting the spots, and waiting until the current spot on the air is the last one in the desired break before hitting the “3” key. The Smart Touch will then allow that spot to play to the end and put the phone line back on the air.

The Smart Touch automatically feeds cue audio back down the line during any live event.

The Smart Touch takes into account common problems associated with sports broadcasting. A standard DTMF decoder will often get swamped with audio during a spot break. The cue audio coming back from the studio to the game is often cranked high because of the noisy environment in the gym. The remote microphone is also picking up that noisy gym and transmitting the noise back down the same phone line. With all that audio, the DTMF decoder will often miss a command, which is catastrophic for the broadcast because it usually means you can't stop a spot break.

To eliminate this problem, the Smart Touch produces a “notch” in the cue audio coming back from the studio every few milliseconds, so that audio is not on the line during the notch. We instruct the operators to fade microphones at the remote site once they take a break and leave them down during the duration of the break. With the audio notched from the studio, and no audio entering from the gym, there is a window every few seconds that allows pure DTMF to go down the line, producing reliable tone control. This feature does mean that longer tones are needed than the 600 ms tones produces by many more expensive phone systems. Our suggestion is to purchase an inexpensive phone for use for the DTMF tones, one that continues to produce the tones for the entire time you hold down the button. Configure cell phones with “long tones” so they also produce tones for the whole time the button is depressed, rather than the fixed length default. This is vital to making the system work.

In fact, most of the problems reported with Smart Touch operations fall in 3 areas. First, a noisy phone line that will not pass reliable tones, secondly, lack of tone control which almost always is the operator not giving a long enough tone for the unit to respond, and lastly problems with accidental disconnects. Some phone services around the country do not provide the fast busy or battery reversal that is normally present when a disconnect occurs. In those cases, if the remote party hangs up without commanding the Smart Touch to hang up, and the phone system fails to notify the Smart Touch of the hangup, the Smart Touch will remain off hook until manually reset. There is an additional option that can be purchased to monitor the phone line for additional hang up detection when needed. The necessity for this option is entirely dependant on the local phone company's procedures on hangup.

The Smart Touch is exclusive to Smarts Broadcast Systems, runs only in conjunction with a Smartcaster and goes a long way toward increasing localism in your automated broadcasts.