Nautel NUG Looks Forward

Now established as an annual gathering at the NAB Show, the Nautel Users Group meeting, often just called “the NUG,” held forth Sunday morning at the Flamingo hotel. 

Not surprisingly much of the content focused on new equipment and services that Nautel is launching or expected to debute soon. Of course, new transmitters and technology updates to them was a lead topic. In fact, much of the news of new software updates on several fronts focused what what Nautel sees as radio’s priorities such as cloud operation. “Alphas” and “betas” were popular terms.

Nautel’s Chief Technology Officer Philipp Schmid said that the goal was that the entire air chain will be IP [and run through the cloud]. That’s something of a radical thought, or maybe it no longer is, and it now appears inevitable for the radio ecosystem across the globe. Relatedly, he discussed packaging the transmitter change into a single box rather than having separate peripheral serial boxes such as processors. He, along with several speakers talked of eliminating pesky digital delay soon with this march of technology.

Other speakers took a similar topic – operating all of the radio station via the cloud. Remote production for so many has become the norm. Remote operation and monitoring of transmitter facilities is also a norm, probably to an even greater degree. This is to be led by a new trend for software operation – containerization. That is similar to the virtual machine but with a lighter footprint and much less platform baggage.

For NUG@NAB, Nautel and several partners provided door prizes.