Pictures? You want pictures?...

The convention kicked off a day early, across the border, as a dozen or so lucky WTFDA'ers took advantage of a rare opportunity to tour the broadcast facilities in the CN Tower (special thanks to Saul Chernos for arranging the tour, and to Tom Ferguson of AZCAR for welcoming us into his domain on the fifth and sixth floors of the tower!) Shown here are two of the four FM transmitters that share a big sixth-floor room with the FM combiner: CKFM 99.9 (whose Continental transmitter is at far left, with processing racks in the middle) and CHIN 100.7 at right.

Here's the control panel for the combiner, which was originally designed to handle just five stations (94.1, 98.1, 99.9, 100.7, 104.5) but has since been expanded to handle several more (91.1, 97.3, 102.1, 107.1, with a spare port that once held 90.3, CJBC-FM). Behind it, engineers from CHFI (98.1) work on their transmitter.

Joe Gragg and Marv Shults have their back to part of the combiner as they listen to Tom Ferguson explain the DAB (Digital Audio Broadcasting) system that operates from the CN Tower.

Tom (with back to camera) shows off the Itelco DAB transmitter cluster. Each transmitter operates on a specific channel in the 1400 MHz band, running about 500 watts into an antenna on the roof of the "pod" and carrying five discrete audio services. All of the audio now available on DAB in Toronto is a simulcast of analog AM or FM broadcast services; the CRTC has just licensed the first DAB-only broadcaster, which will serve Toronto's Indian community. So far, DAB in Canada has failed to take off; signals are spotty in many areas, and the radios, while available, are expensive.

One floor down from the FM facility is the CBC's big room, which takes up much of the fifth floor. Here we see George Greene photographing the CBLT (Channel 5) transmitter, a Canadian-made Larcan (we'd see a lot of these during the tour!) The CBC's plant at the CN Tower is also home to CBL-FM (94.1) and French-language CBLFT (Channel 25), with TVOntario's channel 19 transmitter housed in an adjacent room.

After visiting the CN Tower, the group (accompanied by Mike Reid and Saul Chernos, who met us downstairs) walked over to the CBC Broadcast Centre a block away, where we treated Tom to lunch at the Movenpick restaurant and then enjoyed a tour of the Broadcast Centre itself. (Alas, my flash didn't work inside the studios - I'd love to see some pictures from others on the tour!) Here our tour guide, Judy, shows us the set of the "Donut Shop" sketch from the popular comedy show Royal Canadian Air Farce. The show buys real donuts for the set (they're cheaper than fake ones and look better on camera), then lets them get stale over the course of the season until they could be used as hockey pucks! The Broadcast Centre's big TV studios are located on the top of the building; that way they don't have columns running through them, and they're isolated from vibrations below.

After participating in the public tour, which includes the first-floor radio studios, the "National" news studio on the sixth floor and the top-floor TV studios, we had arranged for a special extra visit with engineer Jeff Vella, a senior systems engineer in the CBC's broadcast engineering department. Jeff showed us the fourth-floor CBC TV master control facility, from which every local English-language CBC TV outlet, from St. John's to Vancouver, is controlled. (And special thanks to Christina in the CBC tours department for arranging the visit!)

Here's a view through the window into TV master control. It's hard to see through the glass, but the master control operators here face a bank of screens that show them each of the local CBC network feeds, both as they're sent out from Toronto and as they're received back from the satellite.

On to Friday...