Do we make anything here anymore?

Brace yourself: I'm having a mood today. Over the course of this week I have been dealing with equipment failures and new system design work that has required direct contact with various manufacturers of broadcast equipment. And not a single one is in the United States.

• Evertz: Ontario.
• Tandberg: England.
• Panasonic: Japan.
• Miranda: Quebec.
• Sony: Japan.
• Sierra Video / Kramer: Israel.
• Ross: Ontario.
• Leitch: Ontario, at least for now.

Leitch is not doing well by me this week. Within a matter of days I have had two of their digital video switchers fail. The first is WSYR's final program bypass switch, and it managed to take the station off the air for a while. It's on its way back to suburban Toronto by way of Grand Island, New York. That's inefficient, but it's how you have to deal with customs issues for equipment being shipped outside the country for repair — unless you want to become the exporter of record, which is a paperwork nightmare.

The second failure wasn't fatal: a circuit card containing a small digital switcher overheated and made the audio cut in and out intermittently. This came to light over the weekend when the temperature was in the mid 90s, and it messed up our Watertown station for a while. The overheating problem is particularly annoying since it was preventable: every card produces a certain amount of heat, and the mounting frames are capable of removing a certain amount of heat. The key is to not install more cards than the frame can cool, and I am quite careful about this. But being careful doesn't work when the printed specs for the card are wrong... a fact that only became apparent when I compared the manual that shipped with the boards, versus a current revision manual on the web site. We had eight of these cards spread among three small frames; this week I have replaced the three frames with a single larger frame with much more aggressive fan cooling, and things are working much better now.

Leitch worries me. They have been around for years, and their equipment has historically been quite well designed and unusually reliable. Look at the stations in our region, and you will find dozens of Leitch frames full of cards, plus switchers, synchronizers, clocks, video still-stores and other key pieces of infrastructure. Hundreds and hundreds of devices. I can count on two hands the number of Leitch equipment failures over the past 25 years or so — but they've been concentrated in the last five years and have affected relatively new equipment. What's more, they were recently acquired by Harris Corporation, so their customer records are somewhat screwed up. When we tried to send back WSYR's switcher for repair, it took a day for them to figure out who we were and to agree to do business with us.

Dealing with these foreign companies is especially galling when one considers the early giants of broadcast equipment: Ampex, in Redwood City California; RCA, in Camden New Jersey; General Electric, here in Syracuse New York. Nowadays there is not a single company in the United States that makes video cameras or recorders.

Apparently the drift isn't unique to this country: a new DVD recorder arrived last week, a JVC. The company is an offshoot of RCA, the letters standing for Japan Victor Company. But look closely on the box: Made in China. Sigh.

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Hannah called last night while the bus was bringing the team back from supper. Her work group has been sheetrocking and finishing houses, and she has been painting. Sounds like it's been going smoothly, and the group has been getting along well. They get back home this Sunday, and I'm looking forward to that. There's a trip to the Department of Motor Vehicles in the very near future: she turns 16 this Saturday. Sigh again.