Public Access Community Television (PACT) in Austin, Texas, has installed a Utah-400 routing switcher and a Utah-300 routing switcher along with Utah Scientific’s SC-4 control system and associated control panels for automated playback of three channels on two cable systems.
Operating on cable Channels 10, 11, and 16, PACT produces an average of 300 hours of new, original television programming every week. Much of the programming is delivered by community members on videotape and then loaded on tape machines and encoded.
Two key selling points for the Utah equipment were ease of setup and interoperability with legacy systems, according to Garry Wilkison, general manager of PACT. “I have worked with many high-end routers for which setting up the salvos, providing indexes for the playback systems, and doing the background data entry was a process I can only describe as ‘kludgey,’” he said. “In contrast, with the Utah Scientific routers, the process was a breeze, a night-and-day comparison.”
The Utah-400 handles the various signal formats in groups of eight rather than the more common larger blocks, so PACT could more easily and cost-effectively customize a design to meet its needs, the station said.
