Touring OPB

A few weeks ago, we had the privilege of touring our local PBS/NPR studios. Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB) distributes all things PBS to TVs and NPR to radios all over the state of Oregon. For comparison, OETA (Oklahoma Educational Television Authority) provides the PBS while individual partners (e.g. KGOU) provide NPR in Oklahoma. Since OPB covers the entire state, their "station identification" takes a while. For TV we see a screen with:

• Baker City: 13.1
• Bend: 11.1
• Corvallis: 7.1
• Eugene: 29.1
• La Grande: 13.1
• Portland: 10.1

But when listening to the radio we hear: "In Albany - KOAC FM 91.5, in Astoria - KOPB FM 96.3, in Baker City - KOBK FM 88.9, in Bend - KOAB FM 91.3..." Well you get the picture, this goes on for nearly 30 cities.

But back to our tour...

A nice retired couple took us around the radio and tv studios of OPB. They have been volunteers for OPB for a while and know all the ins and outs of the station. We got to see master control, behind the scenes of one of the jazz stations, the volunteer phone banks (a fund drive was on while we visited), and some of the editing rooms. Since there were no video recordings going on that weekend, we were able to walk around in the main tv studio. The room was very quite, despite being right next to a busy road. We learned that the walls are filled with sand... interesting. Local advertising companies and even CNN occasionally use the studio space for commercials or news reports. We even found out the original California Rasins commercial was filmed in this very studio.

The station receives multiple PBS feeds and records many of the shows via satellite for later broadcast. They now have a multi-terabyte supercomputer for storing shows and other videos. I believe they nick-named the computer "Barney"... 'cause it's purple. OPB has more listeners during morning and afternoon rush hour than any commercial station in Portland. Pretty crazy huh?