CNN Headline News engineers -- wired for action.
Is there a doctor in the house?
By Anna Hovind
CNN Headline News
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CNN Headline News engineers
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(CNN) -- If you happen to be of a certain age, you may remember the days of the house call. All it took was a phone call, and the doctor rushed to your home toting his little black bag filled with pills and potions to get you back on your feet again. Well, imagine having a live-in staff of doctors who are on call 24/7, ready to drop everything to care for the patient in distress.
Our nine maintenance engineers are literally the doctors for hundreds of mechanical patients. These patients don't complain when they get ill; instead, they malfunction, with potentially disastrous consequences. "If it's critical for on-air, we have to move immediately to fix that problem," says Dennis Ott, engineering manager for CNN Headline News.
Some of that critical work involves A Control. That is our primary control room, an eye-popping facility that's a TV junkie's dream come true. It's filled with 300 monitors, not to mention audio consoles, graphics equipment, video switchers and the communications equipment that crew members use to talk to each other and to the anchors on the set.
With so many types of technology that may require some engineering TLC, Ott says everyone on his staff "has to be a bit of a jack of all trades."
But fixing things is actually just a minor part of what the engineers do. Amazingly, their biggest job involves moving stuff. As the network grows, the engineers help to create bigger and better spaces for all the equipment and anchor sets -- a task that can involve a lot of wires, wires for audio signals, video signals, and myriad other needs.
Ott estimates that in 2001 the engineers used about 100 miles of cable to hook the new, cutting-edge anchor set, H Studio, to A Control and to "terminal gear" -- a room crammed with roughly 100 computers and all the machinery and that generates the audio, video and special effects that go into a CNN Headline News broadcast.
And yes, the engineers already have another big move in the offing. Our secondary control room, B Control, is scheduled for a move and a makeover in the not-too-distant future.
Never a dull moment.
