Engineering Service Team – The People

FEBC International’s Engineering Service Team (EST) is a small and focused group of Broadcast Engineering professionals who come along side FEBC’s member fields to assist them in solving technical problems, planning for the future, preparing project plans and working hand in hand with national staff to increase their engineering capacity.  The current team members have a total of decades of engineering experience and broadcast savvy.  In this post I would like to introduce two of the team members, Vaughan and Owen.

Vaughan, in the picture at left with technical staff from FEBC Philippines has years of training and experience in the core digital infrastructure and software required to support major broadcast ministry operations.  He covers a broad area of IT expertise including switching, digital storage servers, firewalls, routers and playout automation software including all the various supporting bits and user software for recording and audio processing.  He also assists fields in analyzing their ability to recover from major disasters like fire, earthquake, volcano events and typhoons.  In this day and age, where everything about the business of broadcast is digitized, having a plan to backup and be able to restore key assets from program audio files to financial records after a disaster is important.  The need is high for FEBC compared to many of you since a lot of our stations are deployed around the “ring of fire” in the pacific where earthquakes, tsunami, and volcanic disasters are much more common.  

Owen, at left with Voice of Love Chief Engineer Pagnan, hails from New Zealand.  He is approaching 30 years of service with FEBC and brings serious expertise in broadcast structures to FEBC.  He worked many years as a rigger on our major shortwave site in Saipan and brings that experience with towers, guy systems and antennas to the team.  He is also very capable as a broadcast technician and assists our fields who have difficulty finding engineering talent by evaluating their facilities and providing advice on steps to take to repair and maintain their broadcast facilities and equipment.  He also spends a lot of time literally on the road measuring signal quality and coverage of FEBC’s many local FM stations.  The equipment needed to do drive testing is something that individual stations can’t afford, but FEBC, as a virtual network, has network level engineering and equipment resources that our fields can use.  These resources are found in and held by the Engineering Service Team so that all of our fields can take advantage of them.