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DAQ Helps Determine Satellite Radio Up Time

Who Stopped the Music?

You hear it all the time. It's called background music, those ubiquitous melodies that soothe your subconscious as you browse your way through a department store. The store pays a service provider to transmit the music via radio link to a store-maintained receiver where it's decoded and dispersed to speakers throughout the store. But who's to blame when the music dies?

Our customer is the service provider who was constantly battling customer claims of music blackouts, and resulting demands for billing credits. But there are many places along the network that a drop out could occur, and not all were the responsibility of the service provider. How do you confirm that a dropout is the customer's or provider's responsibility? How do you document when a dropout occurred and for how long? Our customer chose DI-720 DAQ hardware and WinDaq software to solve these problems.

WinDaq software together with the DI-720 support a feature called Intelligent Oversampling. It allows you sample high frequency waveforms (such as audio) at very slow rates. Since the DI-720 supports 32 channels, up to 32 audio feeds were monitored at a time by the service provider at a one sample per second rate. Any dropouts that occurred were displayed and recorded along with time and date information by WinDaq software. This record formed all the documentation needed by the service provider to determine their liability and subsequent billing adjustments, if any.